Today, the Lord invites us to embrace our frailty as a source of a great evangelic treasure. Only he who recognizes himself as vulnerable is capable of a solidarity action.

Compassion for ("suffering-with") who is fallen by the wayside is the attitude that can recognize in the other his own image, mix of soil and treasure: he loves this image, approaches it and discovers that the wounds he is healing in his brother are an ointment for his own.

—Neither robbers nor those who passed by the fallen one are aware of their treasure or of their mud. The first ones do not value their own lives, and therefore they do not mind leaving the poor man half dead. The priest and the Levite do value their life, but only partially; they dare looking at only that part of it which they deem to be valuable: as they believe they are chosen and loved by God, they have not the courage to identify themselves as clay, fragile mud. They fear the fallen man and they cannot recognize him; how could they distinguish mud in others if they cannot assume their own?