Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
September 11, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091123.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings affirm this fundamental truth: God’s greatest desire for us is our wholeness.

Paul’s impassioned verses to the Colossians demonstrate how he suffered to assure their spiritual integrity:

Brothers and sisters:
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake…
… in accordance with God’s stewardship given to me
to bring to completion for you the word of God,
the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.

Colossians 4:24;28

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False teachers are the cause of the suffering Paul describes. They are charismatic but ill-intentioned people who latch on to a good thing distorting it for their own purposes.

We are painfully familiar with these devious strategies in our own time. For example, good things such as the internet, artificial intelligence, and various drug therapies are discovered and introduced into our culture. These can enhance our lives but, sadly, can also be manipulated to victimize us.

It is profoundly sinful when religion and spirituality are perverted in this way. Yet that is what Paul contended with as he worked for the spread of the Gospel in Asia Minor.

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We are not free of such false teachers in our day. For the sake of money, power, and political influence, counterfeit prophets and evangelists abound throughout history. Jesus encountered such duplicitous leaders in his ministry as well:

The scribes and the Pharisees watched Jesus closely
to see if he would cure on the sabbath
so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.
But he realized their intentions
and said to the man with the withered hand,
“Come up and stand before us.”

Luke 6:7-8

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How do we avoid such entrapments that feed on our desire for honest spiritual fulfillment? Today’s Gospel offers a clue:

Then Jesus said to them,
“I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the sabbath
rather than to do evil,
to save life rather than to destroy it?”

Luke 6:9

Anything that inhibits or destroys the sacred life within us or others can never be of God. The Pharisees misinterpreted and misused the Law. They would have invoked “the sabbath” in order to leave this poor man crippled. But Jesus countermanded them, restoring the man’s right hand, and exposing them for the hypocrites they were.

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Around our world today, how many spurious “laws” are promoted by those who profit from the constraint of others, or who feed their own egos by a controlling prejudice toward anyone different from themselves! How many prejudicial codes inhibit freedom and life for women, refugees, people of color, and those burdened by poverty, disability, or homophobia.

These vulnerable persons come before our prayerful consciousness today just as the man with the withered hand came before Jesus. How do we respond – like Jesus or like the self-deceived Pharisees? Or perhaps we respond somewhere indifferently in-between which is its own kind of sinfulness.

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Prose: from Peter Wehner, Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum

The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset
that characterizes so much of our politics
has found a home in many American churches.

When the Christian faith is politicized,
churches become repositories
not of grace but of grievances,
places where tribal identities are reinforced,
where fears are nurtured,
and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized.

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Music:Take All the Lost Home – Joe Wise