Thursday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
The letter stresses that the quest to live morally is not a simple struggle with natural elements. Rather it proposes that evil angelic principalities derail moral progress. It also encourages readers to use the armaments of the Church to defeat evil powers. Some of these arms are meditation on Scripture, receiving the sacraments, prayer, and fasting.
The Feast of Saints Simon and Jude,
Apostles
(Ephesians 2:19-22; Luke 6:12-16)
Saints Simon and Jude are among the last
apostles named on lists in the new Testament.
But today’s feast may be observed by more people than perhaps any other
apostle. It is not so much an incident
of the gospel inversion of the last becoming first. Rather, the reason for the reversal is that
St. Jude is thought of as the go-to in hopeless cases.
St. Jude Research Hospital tells how Danny
Thomas as a young entertainer was foundering when he prayed to St. Jude. Thomas told his patron that if he guided him
in life, he would build a shrine to him.
Thomas kept his promise by organizing the funding for a hospital for
children with cancer.
We would be presumptuous to think of our
prayer to a saint as having power over evil.
Indeed, we would be superstitious of thinking of a saint with magical
power. When we ask God, however, or ask
a saint to intercede on our behalf before God, we should expect evil to be subverted. God loves us and always is enabling us to become
more like him. When we cooperate with
His grace with expressions of faith, our situation will surely improve.
Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
(Ephesians 5:21-33; Luke 13:18-21)
One man would do anything for his
wife. He said that he owed it to her for
raising their children while he was away in the Air Force. But the bond was greater than a tit for
tat. He loved her quite like today’s
first reading asks. Another man nursed
his wife as she was failing with Alzheimer’s.
They had exercised together, but as her conditioned worsened, he just
walked her in the wheelchair. He said
that he loved her then more then than on their wedding day.
These couples have experienced the sublime
vision of the Letter to the Ephesians. We tend to read its section on marital
relations with suspicious hearts. “Can
the writer really mean that a woman has to subordinate herself to her husband?”
we ask. “Of course, husbands should love
their wives; their wives do enough for them,” we say cynically. The author of
the letter might despair if he heard such comments. For him marriage is not a give-and-take, but
the sacrament expressing Christ’s love for his disciples. It lifts people from a state of banality into
a realm of majesty.
To reach this level requires sacrifice on
our parts. Couples have to hourly think
of and pray for their counterparts. They
have to accept Christ as both the God who empowers them and the human who shows
them how to live. As we become conscious
of his love for us, we will want to do everything for him.
Monday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
(Ephesians 4:32-5:8; Luke 13:10-17)
In Jesus “inaugural speech” in Nazareth, he said that God
sent him “’to let the oppressed go free.’”
He does exactly this in today’s gospel.
The woman has been oppressed by an evil spirit for eighteen years when
Jesus heals her. And she is not the only one Jesus is liberating here.
The leader of the synagogue criticizes Jesus for working a
cure on the Sabbath. When Jesus hears of
the complaint, he takes the official to task.
He calls him a hypocrite for untying his farm animal on the Sabbath but disapproving
of the woman being then unbound. The
people approve both Jesus’ work and his wisdom.
They are being liberated from the rigorism of the religious leader.
At times religious leaders act more as overlords than as God’s
servants. They can humiliate people by
their remarks. They can also withhold a
desired religious service until the bidder bends to their demands. Once I saw a priest rush to the back of the
church at the end of mass to make sure that no one left until the recessional hymn
was finished. We should, of course,
comply with the Church’s traditions as well as right morals. But we shouldn’t have to bow to authoritarian
clerics.
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 25, 2020
(Exodus 22:20-26; I Thessalonians 1:5-10; Matthew 22:34-40)
(There is a saying: "All roads lead to Rome." You
can change the saying for the four gospels. "All roads lead to
Jerusalem." The purpose of the gospels is to show how Jesus dies in
Jerusalem to redeem man from sin. For the past four Sundays we have found Jesus
in Jerusalem debating with the Jewish leaders. First, he had to explain to the
high priests why he had overturned the tables in the temple. So last Sunday he
proved more cunning than the Pharisees who wanted to trip him up with the
question about the tribute to Caesar. Now Jesus answers another leading
question.
A doctor of the law approaches Jesus asking which
commandment is the greatest. There are 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law. They
are all considered important. Is the greatest the first one written in Genesis,
"Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it"? Or perhaps it
is the first in the Decalogue: "You will have no other gods apart from
me." Still, Jesus doesn't seem discouraged by being tested with such a
knotty question. On the contrary, as a bright young man he seems eager to
manifest his understanding.
Jesus answers the question more with wisdom than mere knowledge.
There is no elder authority that forms the first commandment in the same way as
it. Perhaps Socrates would say, "The greatest commandment is 'Know
yourself.' Machiavelli, the famous political philosopher of the Renaissance,
perhaps would propose: "Be strong so that everyone respects you." But
Jesus, whose human will always conforms to the divine will, does something
wonderfully original. Because of his Jewish ancestry, he says that you have to
love God above all else. But immediately he adds, as if there were not the
first without the second, you have to love your neighbor. Like horse and
carriage, it is not possible to love God if we do not love other human persons.
But what is love that Jesus refers to? It's certainly not
the taste of tourists wearing T-shirts: "I love New York." Nor is it
sexual gratification as contemporary songs would have. No, the love that Jesus
has in mind is the sacrifice of the self for the good of the other. It is the
love that Saint Paul wrote to the Romans: "God showed us his love in that,
while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
You can see this love in the lives of the saints. Saint
Teresa of the Child Jesus wanted to go to the missionary lands and die as a
martyr. But she was not only a nun in a convent but also sick and weak. Then
she realized that she could fulfill her desire to be martyred by deepening in
love. She devoted herself more and more to prayer and the good of her
companions in the convent. Likewise, it is said of San Martín de Porres that
she spent the nights in prayer and penance and the days showing the goodness of
God in full force. One day when he returned to his convent, Martín found a
bleeding man lying in the street, the victim of a murderer's dagger. Martín
bandaged the wound as much as possible and rushed her to her convent to save
her life. There he had to put him in his own bed because the superior of the
convent forbade him to shelter the sick in the convent. When the superior found
out, he demanded an explanation from Martín. The humble brother said he did not
think that the precept of obedience exceeded that of charity.
"He who loves a lot, long ago" is a simple saying.
It is rooted in the gospel and also in the lives of the saints. This type of
love surpasses the dissimulations found in songs and in T-shirts. Those who
follow him fulfill the first commandments of Jesus: "Love God first, then
your neighbor."
