Friday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
November 3, 2023
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/110323.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, as we read our scriptures for the day, we sense that both Jesus and Paul suffer heartbreak for those who resist the Gospel.
Brothers and sisters:
Romans 9:1-3
I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie;
my conscience joins with the Holy Spirit in bearing me witness
that I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart.
For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ
for the sake of my own people,
my kindred according to the flesh.
Paul expresses his deep regret that his own people, the Israelites, resist the Messiah who is God’s final gift to them in a long line of unique blessings:
They are children of Israel;
Romans 9:4-5
theirs the adoption, the glory, the covenants,
the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises;
theirs the patriarchs, and from them,
according to the flesh, is the Christ,
who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
In our Gospel, Jesus encounters a man with a withered hand. From the get-go, Jesus plans to heal the suffering man, but he decides to use the occasion to teach the Pharisees a lesson.
Jesus invites the scholars and Pharisees to move beyond the written Law and into the true practice of its spirit:
Jesus spoke to the scholars of the law and Pharisees in reply, asking,
Luke 14: 5-6
“Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath or not?”
But they kept silent; so he took the man and,
after he had healed him, dismissed him.
Then he said to them
“Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern,
would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?”
But they were unable to answer his question.
What Jesus asked was apparently too much for them. They were so encrusted in the worldly benefits the Law had brought them that they couldn’t challenge themselves to hear Jesus’s message. So they were silent – they gave no response to the divine invitation to life-giving change.
And to be fair to the Pharisees, Jesus’s invitation was a huge challenge. Their lives had become entirely dependent on a system that had lost its true meaning. The Law no longer led them to God but to themselves. They had lost the way through the woods, as you will see in Kipling’s poem below.
There are many levels on which we can pray with this passage. We are surely aware of the same kind of resistant silences in ourselves and in our world.
We may be caught in a sort of personal woods where we can’t make our way through to a life-giving choice or, like the Pharisees, to an inclusive, merciful understanding.
Or we may see this kind of entrapment happening in a beloved’s life.
Or we may see the atrophic effects of dead, unreviewed laws in our country, world, and Church. Failing to adapt laws that have lost their true spirit allows us to normalize outrageous behaviors based on manufactured”legality”. The image of a 16-year-old carrying an AK-47 down a neighborhood street, “legally” shooting unarmed protesters, comes to my mind!
All of these situations arise when we are entwined in a system that no longer gives life. The spirit and energy of the Gospel is the key to our un-entwining. Let’s pray for it in ourselves and in our very knotted world.
Poetry: The Way Through the Woods – Rudyard Kipling
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.
Music: Dave Eggar – Fallen Leaves
Lavish Mercy 