Tuesday of Week 28 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Romans 1:16-25
In today’s reading, Paul begins:
…I am not ashamed of the gospel…
Paul says this because his is a message that meets with a lot of opposition and ridicule. But he continues:
…it is God’s saving power for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek….The one who is righteous will live by faith.
This also expresses the theme of the whole Letter. In speaking of shame, perhaps he is thinking of his coming journey to Rome, the capital of a whole empire, with all its pagan sophistication. There were many other places where his message was ridiculed, such as Athens and Ephesus, to give just two examples. Right at the beginning he uses the word “faith”, the understanding of which is at the centre of his whole message.
The characteristics of Christian faith, as presented in the New Testament, may be listed as follows:
- A response of the human being to God as Truth and Goodness;
- The one source of salvation.
Faith requires belief in the Son and the kerygma or proclamation made by the Apostles, which says that God raised Jesus from the dead, made him Kyrios (Lord) and through him offers life to all who believe in him.
Faith is a necessary condition for salvation. It is not only intellectual assent, but includes trusting and obeying the life-giving Truth. It is a reliance on God and not on self. As such, it is in contrast with the old order of the Law and its vain search for holiness by works.
Only faith can bring about true holiness. In so far as faith is related to the promise made to Abraham, it makes salvation accessible to all, pagans included. When coupled with baptism, faith calls for public profession, and expresses itself in love (agape). Faith is supported by hope and must be allowed to grow amid struggles and sufferings, demanding fortitude and tenacity right up to the vision and possession of God.
Because Paul sees the gospel as “God’s eternal power”, it brings salvation, wholeness and life to all who accept it, Jews and Gentiles alike. This is something he has personally experienced.
The gospel reveals the ‘justice’ of God, his inner truth and goodness and harmony which we are invited to share. The key to reaching it is faith: the acceptance of the truth of the message and a total commitment in trust to basing our lives on the message and its Messenger.
Salvation comes to “the Jew first”. In the actual development of salvation history the Jews come first. In John’s Gospel Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that:
…salvation is from the Jews… (John 4:22)
Jesus, the Messiah, was himself a Jew. Paul said that:
…the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.
(Rom 3:2)
The covenants, Law, Temple worship, revelation of the divine glory, and the Messianic prophecies came first to the Jews. These privileges, however, were not extended to the Jews because of their superior merit or because of God’s partiality towards them. It was necessary that the invasion of this world by the gospel begin at a particular point with a particular people, who in turn were responsible to carry that gospel to the other nations. And Paul is not ashamed of the gospel:
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”
“Righteousness” here is not the justice of giving someone what belongs to them, but speaks rather of the inner goodness of God, who extends his promise of salvation to all as a free gift. But the experience of this justice requires a faith and trust in God as Lord of one’s life.
Paul now moves on to consider the fate of those unbelievers who totally reject God:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth.
In developing the theme of righteousness and justice from God, Paul sets the stage by showing that all have sinned and therefore need the righteousness that only God can provide. He shows the sin of the Gentiles and the sin of the Jews and then summarises the sin of all—Gentile and Jew alike. He begins by saying that no one—not even one who has never heard of the Scripture or of Christ—has an excuse for not honouring God, because the whole created world reveals him.
The “wrath of God” is not a petulant, irrational burst, such as humans often exhibit, but a holy, just revulsion against what is contrary to and opposes his holy nature and will. This ‘wrath’ is being revealed now in the wicked becoming the victims of their own evil acts. By their behaviour they “suppress the truth”. That is, they block the truth about God which is so clearly evident in our created world:
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made.
Reason alone, by observing the beauty of creation all around, can easily bring us to an awareness of the Source of all these things.
As the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom we have cited numerous times before, said:
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
This sentiment has been repeated by poets and artists all down the centuries and in every culture. Hence, as Paul says:
…they are without excuse, for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened.
An awareness of a Creator being responsible for such Truth, Goodness and Beauty naturally leads to forms of praise and thanks and worship. We give thanks for many earthly blessings such as sun, rain and crops and we offer prayers of petition when these things are lacking.
Again, this is a phenomenon found in some form in every human culture. Instead:
Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.
The glory of God in nature was replaced by the making of all kinds of images—the likeness of humans, birds, animals, reptiles and other living or non-living things. Even the sophisticated Greeks and Romans, with all their enlightened philosophies, indulged in such idolatries and superstitions.
The result of such behaviour was that:
God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.
The pagan temples all over the Near East and the Mediterranean were notorious for the sexual indulgences and perversions which were widely practiced. In Paul’s letters we read how even Christians were tempted and often fell. The traditional biblical phrase “God abandoned”, or “left them”, used three times for emphasis, means that religious error, if blameworthy, results in moral and social ills. Sin produces its own consequences and its own punishment.
Though Paul judges and condemns pagan society, he does not condemn individuals (whose intentions God alone must judge) since he presupposes that there are pagans who obey the natural law written in their hearts. What so many of the Gentiles did was to exchange God’s truth for a lie, because they worshipped and served a creature instead of the Creator.
We have been blessed with the revelation of God which has come to us through the Scriptures and especially through Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and his Church. Even so, we too can profit by seeking and finding God’s active presence in the world in which we live and spend our days.
We live, as the Jesuit writer Teilhard de Chardin wrote, in a “divine milieu”, an environment where every single thing we come in contact with is touched by God. And there is the beautiful phrase from the Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade, describing our celebrating: “The sacrament of the present moment”—where every single moment of every day is a sign of God’s presence and love. We are never alone.
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Friday of Week 29 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Romans 7:18-25
Paul today describes an experience which all of us have had. He senses the tendencies to wrongdoing in himself which are at variance with a desire to do what is good and right.
As Jesus said to his disciples during his Passion:
…the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
(Matt 26:41)
Paul is speaking of someone still under the empire of sin and not yet justified by Christ’s grace. In contrast, in chapter 8 of Romans, he speaks in the name of the justified Christian with the gift of the Spirit who, nevertheless, is still aware of an inward struggle while on earth. So the person who does not yet experience the justifying grace of God recognises a rift between a rational desire for the goodness proposed by the law and one’s actual performance contrary to the law.
There is a radical opposition between the two. While still under the law, one is unable to be free from the slavery of sin and the power of death. But one can only be rescued from defeat by the power of God’s grace working in oneself through Jesus Christ. A grace that comes through the act of faith made in Jesus as Lord:
For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
How often have we not had a similar experience? However, Paul is not saying that there is no goodness at all in each one of us. But the goodness we do have so often seems incapable of dealing with the urge to do what is wrong. And yet, when Paul does something that he does not really want to do, he senses that it is not his real self, but the sinful urge that lives within.
Here again, Paul is not denying his personal responsibility for what he does, rather, he is affirming it. He does something which is in conflict with his deepest self. And so, this is his constant experience—even when he desires to do nothing but good, the evil choice is always close at hand.
For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
There is a war going on between his inmost, rational self and his sensual, pleasure-seeking body. The rational self is the one which dearly loves God’s law. That law is imprinted on our minds—we all have an innate hunger for truth and goodness. The sensual, pleasure-seeking self wants to by-pass the law of truth and goodness, and tries to convince the self that in pleasure and sensuality there is goodness. Though in reality, we never choose anything except under some guise of goodness or attractiveness, however distorted.
In this terrible impasse, Paul cries out for help:
Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
He knows that by himself there is nothing he can do. But he knows where the answer is:
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
That is where his delivery is to be found. On Paul’s view of the relationship of the human body with Christ the Jerusalem Bible makes the following comment:
“Paul is concerned with the body and its component members, that is to say with the human being as he actually is, a sentient creature, with a sexual life, because it is in the body that man lives morally and religiously. The body, though tyrannised by the ‘flesh’, by death, and therefore a ‘body of flesh’, a ‘body of sin’, and ‘a body of death’, is not however doomed to perish, as Greek philosophy would have it, but in accordance with the biblical tradition, destined to live, through resurrection. The principle of this renewal is the Spirit, which takes the place of the psyche, and transforms the body of the Christian into the likeness of the risen body of Christ. Until this ultimate deliverance takes place, the body of the Christian, provisionally delivered from the ‘flesh’ by its union with Christ’s death, is even now the home of the Holy Spirit, who produces in it a new life of righteousness and holiness, which is meritorious, and gives glory to God.”
And Paul concludes:
So then, with my mind I am enslaved to the law of God, but with my flesh I am enslaved to the law of sin.
On our own, we can never win this war. But with Christ’s help, which can come directly, but also in a very special way through the support of a Christ-centred community, I can grow in freedom and overcome these irrational and destructive instincts. In their place, the values of the gospel become more and more a reality in my daily living. In the end, I may be able to say with Paul,
…it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.
(Gal 2:20)
That is the meaning and the goal of our being baptised into Christ.
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10 January – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 4:14-22
After his baptism, Jesus is full of the Spirit of God. He has been commissioned and is now ready to do his Father’s work. The Gospel says he has been in Galilee already for some time, and people everywhere are hearing about him as he preaches in synagogues. Today we see him in his home town of Nazareth. And, as he usually did, he went to the synagogue there on a Sabbath.
As was the right of any Jew, he read from the Scripture. The passage is from the prophet Isaiah (61:1-2). It is a messianic prophecy which he applies to himself:
Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
And what is it that he read?
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me…
That is, the Lord God has made him King and Lord. He has been made Messiah (Hebrew)—meaning “the Anointed One”. In Greek it is Christos. This is a formal announcement of his identity. (Compare this to Mark’s Gospel where Jesus hides his true identity until much later.)
And what is the mission of Jesus as Messiah?
…to bring good news to the poor.
…to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
More than any of the other Gospels, Luke emphasises Jesus’ attitude to the economically and socially poor. We see that at Jesus’ first appearance in the world, when it is the poor and outcasts—the shepherds—who come to pay homage to the newborn child. The poor are also linked to the oppressed and afflicted, the forgotten and the neglected. Yet it is they who are most open to the Good News—so much so that the poor are described as “blessed”.
Jesus gives a message of liberation and freedom for the world. It is important for us to realise that Jesus came to make us truly free. So many Christians abandon their church in order to be ‘free’. They find being Christian a stifling experience. Yet, we must insist both by the way we present the message of the gospel and by the way we live it that, as Christians, we enjoy a particularly high level of freedom. True freedom does not consist in doing just what we feel like doing—that can be very destructive both to ourselves and others. True freedom is the ability to make the good choice—good for oneself and good for others. Agape-love points us in that direction.
The words of Isaiah that Jesus uses are to be taken both in their literal and in a fuller sense. It is a message for those who are materially poor, for those who are in prison, those who are blind and those who are oppressed. But all these terms can be understood in a much wider sense. There are all kinds of poverty. In addition to the material kind, there is intellectual, emotional and social poverty. There are all kinds of things which imprison people, including various forms of addictions and compulsions. Blindness is not only a physical disability, but there are other forms of blindness due to ignorance, prejudice and a lack of true vision in life. There are many ways a person can experience oppression. People can feel oppressed by forces which dominate their lives, like an obsession with materialistic values and consumerism, or driving ambition at the expense of others. It is for each one to look into their own lives and see where they need liberation most.
These words of Jesus can be seen as his ‘mission statement’. It is what his whole life will be based on. It is not primarily a religious manifesto. It is a manifesto for the kind of life that every human being is called to follow.
Jesus only began this work. Its continuation and fulfilment depends on our cooperation with him. We are not to hear these words only as receivers, but also as a challenge to us. To what extent am I part of this empowering, liberating, eye-opening mission of Jesus for my society and the world?
The people in the synagogue are deeply impressed by the words of Jesus, but they are also amazed and say:
Is this not Joseph’s son?
Very soon they would turn against him because they presumed they knew who he was, but they did not. They had grown up with him and were too close to him—a matter of familiarity breeding contempt. The same can happen to us when, as happens again and again, we cannot detect the presence of Christ in a person who is very close to us. Not only can we not see Christ in that person, like the people of Nazareth, we often do not want to.
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Thursday of Week 32 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 17:20-25
Jesus was asked by some Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come. In their mind, it was a definitive time that would be suddenly realised by the arrival of a triumphant Messiah-King. Jesus says it is not going to be like that at all. The Kingdom cannot be found by looking around for telltale signs so that you can say it is ‘here’ or ‘there’.
No, says Jesus:
…in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.
Not only is it “among” them, it is right in front of them! It is first of all in the very person of Jesus, who is the embodiment of God’s Reign. He is the Messiah-King. He is the living incarnation of God’s loving power revealed in his authoritative teaching, in his many healings of the sick, in his freeing of those from the power of evil spirits, and in his compassion for the sinner and the outcast. All are clear evidence that the reign of God “is among you”.
In every age, including our own time, there are people who get worked up about the ‘final coming of Christ’. But instead of focusing on a date in the calendar, we should be focusing on the realities of our everyday lives where, to those with eyes that see, the reign of God can easily be discerned working in other people’s lives and in our own. Wherever people are reflecting in their lives the vision of life—the values that Jesus revealed to us—the Kingdom is there. And such people are not confined to the Church. They can be, and are found, everywhere.
Jesus then turns to his disciples, telling them they :
…will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it.
In the very early Church, many were convinced that Jesus would make his final coming during their own lifetime. It is likely that, from time to time, certain events were interpreted as signs of that final coming. People were saying, “Look there! or Look here!”, i.e. he is to be found in this place or that. But by the time Luke’s Gospel was written, many in that first generation of Christians had already died and there was still no sign of Jesus’ coming.
The ‘days’ following his expected coming may have all the more been longed for during times of severe persecution, when they looked for relief and help from their pain. An anxiety is reflected in the story of the disciples’ trying to wake a sleeping Jesus while their boat is threatened by mountainous seas (see Mark 4:35-41).
Jesus says that, when his day does come, it will be:
…as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other…
It will be both sudden and everywhere. In the meantime, Jesus:
…must endure much suffering and be rejected by this generation.
These words clearly refer to his own suffering and death, but can also be applied to the whole Risen Christ, including the Church, his risen Body, into our own age.
So, on the one hand, the reign of God is already here among us, and we need look no further than the daily experiences of our own lives to know and experience the power and presence of Jesus. On the other hand, the time of that final coming which “will wipe every tear from [our] eyes” and be the end of all suffering and rejection is not for us to decide—nor to be anxious about.
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Saturday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 3:9-24
The Man and the Woman now experience the results of their disobedience to God. It begins with a lovely, but sad dialogue between God and the Man and the Woman. God is looking for them in the Garden, asking “Where are you?” God, of course, knows where they are, but he needs to elicit the confession of their sin. The Man says they are hiding because they are naked. Nakedness now fills them with a sense of shame and guilt. They can no longer face their God. Their original innocence is gone, and from now on nakedness is linked to immorality and base desires.
God asks the Man:
Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?
God now interrogates the Man, who blames the Woman, who blames the serpent. God’s judgements, however, are pronounced in the reverse order. What follows provides explanations for the origin of some present-day realities: agriculture, prepared or cooked food, childbearing, family of husband and wife.
We now see a pathetic shifting of responsibility to someone else. First, the Man blames the Woman—the “woman whom you gave to be with me”—even God is being held partly to blame! “Yes, I ate the fruit, but she made me do it.” She, in her turn, blames the serpent for putting temptation in her way:
The serpent tricked me, and I ate.
The Hebrew for the verb “tricked” is hiss’iani and suggests the hissing of the snake.
All now pay the price of their wrongdoing.
The serpent
The serpent is condemned to crawl the earth, forever eating the earth, hinting that in the original creation, the snake was once upright. He will be cursed for ever among all the animals.
From now on, a strange enmity will exist between the Woman and the serpent, and between her offspring and the serpent’s:
…he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.
Later theology would see here not just enmity between snakes and humans, but the serpent is identified with Satan, whose eventual defeat seems implied in the contrast between ‘head’ and ‘heel’. Later generations saw in the passage the first promise of a Redeemer for sinful humanity. In that case, the Woman’s offspring is Jesus Christ.
The New Jerusalem Bible has the following comment:
“The Hebrew text, by proclaiming that the offspring of the snake is henceforth at enmity with the woman’s descendants, opposes the human race to the devil and his ‘seed’, his posterity, and hints at ultimate victory. It is the first glimmer of salvation, the proto-evangelium or ‘pre-Gospel’.
The Greek version has a masculine pronoun (‘he’, rather than ‘it’ will bruise…), thus ascribing the victory not to the woman’s descendants in general, but to one Son in particular, and thus providing the basis for the messianic interpretation given by many of the Fathers. The Latin version has a feminine pronoun (‘she’ will bruise…) and since in the messianic interpretation of our text, the Messiah and his Mother appear together, the pronoun has been taken to refer to Mary.” (edited)
The Woman
The Woman will experience great pain when giving birth. She will have a strong desire for her husband, but he will ‘rule over’ her. Women’s historical subordination to the male is presented as a consequence of human events, not an ideal in its own right. Responsibilities of procreation will compromise the freedom of both genders. The Man will ‘rule over’ her, but he will need her to continue his family line.
The Man
In the garden the Man had just to pick the fruit from the trees. Now the tilling of the unfriendly and infertile soil will become a laborious and painful task, resulting often in brambles and thistles. From now on his life will be one of hard physical labour, until the day he goes back to the soil from which he was originally made. Agriculture was a major step in human evolution, but one beset with difficulty and hard work. Unlike the abundant fruit of the Garden just waiting to be picked, bread, for instance, requires many steps and much human cooperation in its preparation. And at the end, the Man will return to the earth from which he came—the first clear indication of human mortality.
In a final touch, we are told that God made skins for the Man and his wife to wear to cover the shame of their nakedness. Some see in this a new alienation between humans and animals, which did not exist in the Garden. Animals now were being killed by humans for food, clothing and other purposes—and humans were often being killed and eaten by animals. Later, the prophet would dream of a day when:
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together…[i.e. Paradise regained] (Is 11:6)
At the same time, the Man and the Woman were now able, like God, “…[to know] good and evil”. They now knew all the possible extremes, they knew about sex, mortality and moral distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong. There was a danger that they could reach out to the Tree of Life and win immortality. They must be removed from the Garden and sent back to the earth from which they had originally come. They will have to settle for the modified immortality of succeeding family generations—a human family tree.
To the east of the Garden in Eden, cherubim and a flaming sword were placed to keep the Man and the Woman out and away from the Tree of Life.
Lastly, the Man now gave his wife the name of Eve, which means “bearer of life”. She would be the mother of every person to be born in succeeding ages. This second naming of Woman reflects the couple’s new role as procreators. Much later, spiritual writers liked to take the Latin form of her name Eva and turn it round to read Ave, the word of greeting used by the angel at the Annunciation to Mary, our new Mother.
Obviously, all of this is less a historical account than an explanation why things are the way they are. It is part of the answer to the question we raised earlier: If everything God created was so good, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Human pain and sorrows are not intended by God. Evil is the result of our own misbehaviour.
Again, the New Jerusalem Bible comments:
“The punishment is appropriate to the specific functions of each: the woman suffers as mother and wife, the man as bread-winner. The text does not imply that, without sin, woman would have given birth painlessly or that man would not have had to work with sweat on his brow, any more than that, before sin, snakes had feet” [i.e. did not have to crawl on their bellies].
Sin upsets the order willed by God: Woman, instead of being Man’s associate and equal, becomes his seductress, while he for his part reduces her to the role of child-bearer. Man, instead of being God’s gardener in Eden, has to struggle against a now hostile environment. But the greatest punishment is the loss of intimacy with God. These penalties are hereditary. The doctrine of hereditary guilt is not clearly stated until Paul draws his comparison between the solidarity of all in the Saviour Christ and the solidarity of all in sinful Adam (Rom 5). This is the ‘original sin’.
We should avoid a fundamentalist, literal understanding of all this, as if we were dealing with ‘real’ history. What is being said is that the human race, as far back as we can go, has been infected with sinful acts against truth, love and justice and, as a consequence of its own choices, has suffered hardships of all kinds.
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Thursday of Week 6 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 9:1-13
After the Flood, God extends his blessings over Noah and his family and over all the animals that have survived. Furthermore, the mandate given to the Man in the garden is repeated. The family of Noah, effectively the ancestors of all humanity, are to be fruitful and multiply. In addition, Noah and his descendants are given responsibility and lordship over every living thing—on the earth, in the air and in the water.
In the Garden, Man had been blessed and was consecrated lord of creation; he is now blessed and consecrated anew. All creatures are now at his disposal. Now, not only are plants given as food (as was the case in the Garden), but the other creatures, too, like animals, may be taken as food. They may also be used for doing heavy work (e.g. ploughing) or for their skins (e.g. to make tents and clothes). In the Garden, where answers to all needs were readily available, there was no need to work nor, in their innocence, to wear clothes. Humans and animals alike were plant-eaters only. Now the animal can become the victim of Man’s needs.
And, with the eating of animals, a new element is introduced with the prohibition to eat meat in which blood, the source of life, has not been already removed. Israelite law also forbade eating animal flesh torn in the field by other animals (here, there is a reading back into pre-history of regulations that only were legislated later on).
Furthermore, there is to be absolute respect for human life and no spilling of human blood, for every human person is made in the image of God. Animals, too, were to be punished if they caused the death of a human person. According to the Mosaic law, a domestic animal that had taken human life was to be stoned to death.
Because a living being dies when it loses most of its blood, the ancients regarded blood as the seat of life, and therefore as sacred. Although, in itself, the prohibition against eating meat with blood in it is comparable to the ritual laws of the Mosaic code, the Jews considered it binding on everyone. This was because it was given by God to Noah, the new ancestor of all mankind. And so the early Christian Church retained this restriction for a time (see Acts 15:20,29).
God himself is the great defender of human life, which is precious to him because Man was created in his image, and because Man is the earthly representative and focal point of God’s kingdom. God then makes his first covenant with mankind to last forever, a covenant which includes every living thing that was with Noah in the ark.
…never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.
The sign of that covenant is a rainbow crossing the skies. Rain and the rainbow doubtless existed long before the time of Noah’s flood, but after the flood the rainbow took on new meaning as the sign of the covenant with Noah. Every time it appeared, it was a reminder of the covenant. Rainbows, too, are the sign of sunshine after rain.
The covenant with Noah, which is represented by the rainbow, involves the whole of creation. Later covenants will be more specific. The covenant with Abraham, the sign of which is circumcision, was to be limited to his descendants only (Gen 17). The covenant with Moses was to be confined to Israel alone and entailed corresponding obligations: fidelity to the Law and to Sabbath observance in particular.*
For us, of course, the final covenant is the New Testament between God and the world, signed in the blood of Jesus on the Cross and celebrated in every Eucharist. But each one of us can and does dishonour this Covenant every time we violate the Way that Jesus has shown us. This New Covenant is renewed every time we celebrate the Eucharist together, but the keeping of this covenant depends on how we live our daily lives in relationship with God, with those around us and with ourselves.
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*For a list of covenants, see the section about this in the NIV Study Bible.
Saturday of Week 30 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Romans 11:1-2, 11-12, 25-29 (more…)
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Saturday of Week 25 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 9:43-45
After yesterday’s reading where the disciples recognised their Master as the Messiah and are told about the death and resurrection of Jesus, there follows the scene with the three chosen Apostles on the mountain, where they get a glimpse of Jesus in glory (the transfiguration). This is followed by the healing of the epileptic boy.
The reaction of the crowds to this cure was that:
…all were astounded at the greatness of God.
The were not astounded, we might note, by the mighty power of Jesus. Even the crowds could recognise the real source of what Jesus was able to do.
It is at this high point of Jesus’ popularity that he says just to his disciples:
Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands.
What Jesus seems to be saying is that they are to realise there is no contradiction whatsoever between Jesus revealing in himself the unlimited power of God and his being handed over, powerless, to the power of his enemies. Only when they can see and understand the meaning of a suffering Messiah will they fully know the Way of Jesus.
But Luke tells us, they were not ready yet for this:
…they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said. (Luke 18:34)
And Luke tells us today:
…they were afraid to ask him about this saying.
To what extent can we say that we understand and accept the idea of a suffering Messiah? We are used to looking at the cross of Jesus, but to what degree do we see the place of suffering in our own lives? Can we see that, without pain and suffering in our own lives and in those of others, our lives would be in many ways impoverished? Strange as it may seem, it is pain and suffering that can bring out what is most deeply human in all of us.
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Wednesday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Mark 7:14-23
After defending himself against the accusations of some Pharisees and scribes about his not observing the traditions of the elders, Jesus now turns to the people. He enunciates what for him are the main principles:
- Nothing that goes into the body from outside can make a person ritually or religiously unclean.
- What makes a person unclean is the filth that comes from inside their mind and is spoken through their mouth or expressed in action.
This was a major issue in the earliest days of the Church and was dealt with by the Council of Jerusalem. The story is told in the Acts of the Apostles (chap 15).
The first Christians were all Jews who continued to observe Jewish customs. But when non-Jews began to be accepted into the Christian communities, should they also be obliged to follow these laws and customs? It became clear that, from a religious point of view, no food could be called unclean. This helped to break down the barriers between Jew and Gentile. It has been pointed out that, immediately after this, Jesus entered gentile territory, something he did not often do in his own ministry (see tomorrow’s commentary).
Even Jesus’ disciples seemed shocked by Jesus’ teaching (probably reflecting the reactions of some of the early Jewish Christians). Jesus repeats what he says in the light of the Kingdom he was proclaiming:
He said to them, “So, are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.”
Real uncleanness is in the ‘heart’—i.e. in one’s mind. Real uncleanness comes from within ourselves in the form of:
…sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
As Christians, we do not normally worry about clean and unclean foods on religious grounds, but we can sometimes judge people’s religious commitment by their observance or non-observance of purely external things—a nun not wearing a habit, a person not taking holy water on going into the church, or someone taking Communion in the hand versus by mouth.
We may have gotten rid of the problem of unclean foods, but there are many other ways by which we focus on trivial externals while ignoring the real evils, the places where real love is absent—in ourselves.
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Tuesday of Week 14 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 32:23-33
We jump a few chapters in our story of Jacob and come to an experience even more strange than the vision of the ladder/staircase going up to heaven. Jacob has been preparing to meet with his estranged brother Esau. He was not at all sure what kind of meeting it was going to be with the brother whom he had cheated out of his birth-right. Each one was now rich and powerful in his own domain.
As our reading opens we are told that Jacob takes his two wives (Rachel and Leah), his two slave-girls and his 11 children (the youngest, Benjamin, has been conceived but not born), together with all his possessions, across the River Jabbok to a safer place while he stays behind alone.
‘Jabbok’ is possibly a play on ‘Jacob’. (The author loves toying with names in this way—see below.) The river is an eastern tributary of the Jordan originating near present-day Amman. It is known today as the Wadi A-Zarqa and flows westwards into the Jordan about 30 km north of the Dead Sea.
Jacob is now alone and then, during the whole night until dawn, he wrestles with an unknown man. As is clear later on, this ‘man’ is a messenger of the Lord, if not the Lord himself, in human form. Is this to be seen as a ‘real’ experience or was it just another dream or some purely internal experience? ‘Wrestled’ in Hebrew (ye’abeq) is a play on ‘Jacob’ (ya‘aqob) and ‘Jabbok’ (yabboq).
Jacob has struggled all his life to prevail, first with Esau, then with Laban, his uncle who is the father of his wife, Rachel. Now, as he is about to re-enter Canaan, he is shown that it is with God that he must “wrestle”. It is God who holds his destiny in his hands.
When the ‘man’ sees that Jacob is getting the upper hand, he strikes Jacob on the hip and dislocates it. The hip socket is in the fleshy part of the thigh. There is a hint of injury to the sexual organs and, indeed, with Benjamin, his 12th and youngest son, already conceived, Jacob will have no more children. God came to him in such a form that Jacob could wrestle with him successfully, yet he also showed Jacob that he could disable him at will.
With the coming of morning the stranger says:
Let me go, for the day is breaking.
But Jacob will not let the man go without receiving his blessing. He seems to suspect the divine origin of his opponent. There is also an indication that Jacob is still having problems over their father’s blessing which he got by deceit. He wants now a direct blessing from God himself.
“What is your name?” asks the stranger. “Jacob” is the reply. Then, the stranger says:
You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.
The probable meaning of the word ‘Israel’ is ‘May God show his strength’, but here it is understood as ‘He has been strong against God’.
At the very moment Jacob reaches full maturity as father and patriarch, his descendants acquire their national name. Later, Israel’s encounters with God will constantly entail intense struggle, with the divine and human alike. God will later confirm Jacob’s new name (Gen 35:10). The present incident, where the name Israel is alluded to, is referred to in a passage from Hosea (12:5) where the mysterious wrestler is explicitly called “the Lord”.
Jacob then asks the stranger his name but the only answer he gets is:
Why is it that you ask my name?
Given that the stranger is God himself, it is wrong to ask such a question and, in any case, it cannot be answered. The name of Yahweh could not be uttered by any observant Israelite, but the man does give Jacob his blessing.
Jacob, however, is now well aware of who the stranger is:
…I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.
In the Hebrew Testament, to look upon the face of God spells instant death, except by special privilege. So in Exodus we read:
Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. (Exod 33:11)
After these encounters his face shone so brightly that he had to keep it veiled when speaking to his countrymen. But God also said to Moses:
…you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live. (Exod 33:20)
Only God’s ‘back’ or ‘feet’ or ‘form’, in a symbolic sense, were allowed to be seen.
So Jacob calls the place where he had his experience with the stranger “Peniel”, which means ‘face of God’. The word is a variant of ‘Penuel’, the name of a town on the north bank of the River Jabbok in Gilead.
Then he leaves, limping because of his damaged hip. Limping is a frequent motif in myth and legend (Oedipus, too, limps), suggesting a maturing in his relationship with God, who is the real Lord of his life. It parallels in some ways the experience of Abraham at Moriah where he was told to sacrifice his only son. Although less whole physically, it is precisely through his experience that he becomes more spiritually complete. He is now Israel and not just Jacob.
And, the reading tells us, to this day Jews will not eat the sciatic nerve which runs near the hip, because that is where God had struck Jacob. Although mentioned nowhere else in the Hebrew Testament, this dietary prohibition is found in the later writings of Judaism. Jacob retained in his body, and Israel retained in her dietary practice, a perpetual reminder of this fateful encounter with God.
Finally, the Jerusalem Bible comments on this scene:
“This enigmatic story, probably Yahwistic, speaks of a physical struggle, a wrestling with God from which Jacob seems to emerge victor. Jacob recognises the supernatural character of his adversary and extorts a blessing from him. The text, however, avoids using the name of Yahweh and the unknown antagonist will not give his name. The author has made use of an old story as a means of explaining the name ‘Peniel’ (‘face of God’) and the origin of the name ‘Israel’. At the same time he gives the story a religious significance: Jacob holds fast to God and forces from him a blessing; henceforth all who bear Israel’s name will have a claim on God.
It is not surprising that this dramatic scene later served as an image of spiritual combat and of the value of persevering prayer (e.g. St Jerome and Origen). It was advice that Jesus himself gave, and also St Paul.
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