A Thanksgiving Story

A doctor of the Hebrew law once stood up and asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:25-37) Jesus answered with the story about a Samaritan, a social group considered heretics by doctors of the law and other pharisees, and in Jesus' story the out-cast Samaritan turned out to be a better neighbor than the holiest men of Israel.

The story of the "good Samaritan" provides a text for this, which happened on Thanksgiving Day in Arizona:

A woman and her 9-year-old son were traveling on a National Forest road in the southern Arizona desert when the woman lost control of the van and it plunged 300 feet into a canyon. The boy survived, got out of the car, but his mother was pinned alive inside. The boy started wandering for help. He found it in the person of Jesus Manuel Cordova, 26, of Magdalena de Kino in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Cordova had just crossed the Mexican-U.S. border illegally. He comforted the boy, stayed with him through a cold night in the desert, built a fire to keep them warm, and flagged down hunters to get help. In the meantime, the boy's mother had died, but the boy is alive because of Cordova. (Thanks to Nose4News for passing on the link and the suggestion that good Samaritanism is alive among us, with very similar class dynamics at work.)

Cordova was arrested by U.S. border agents. We assume he'll be deported.

He should sell his story to the movies.