Monday, September 11, 2023
Col 1:24-2:3; Lk 6:6-11
In today’s Gospel, we find Jesus manifesting the Divine priority.
It is a Sabbath Day – The Day of the Lord!
It is ironic that the Pharisees, who were supposed to offer praise and worship to the Lord, were assembled in the synagogue to watch Jesus ‘closely to see if he would cure on the Sabbath so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.’
Their intention being impure, the very purpose of observing the Sabbath Day remains defeated.
Secondly, the healing that Jesus performs is divided between questions of legality and morality. When the Pharisees uphold legality, disregarding the person’s misery, Jesus restores the meaning of true religion by being compassionate towards the man with the withered hand. For Jesus, it is both unethical and unspiritual to neglect the needy, which is, in fact, the Divine priority. Nothing can explain better the faithful observance of the Lord’s Day than restoring a person’s dignity, as Jesus does.
The authentic spirituality of Jesus also challenges their notion of God who was being portrayed as a strict judge and not as a loving Father. By choosing to be compassionate on the Sabbath, Jesus seeks to reassert God as the Loving Father and to reinstate love as the meaning and measure of religion.
Following the footsteps of Jesus, ensuring humanity is the authentic proclamation of the Gospel.
Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar
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Beautifully said, Fr. Britto! It is always about love and always about the poor. How far our Church, as a whole, has drifted from those divine goals! Too many Catholics haven’t heard, nor digested that message. Otherwise, the world would recognize us by our compassion and not our excluding rules.