Tuesday of Week 23 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Colossians 2:6-15

We come now to the instruction part of the letter with some warnings against errors into which the Colossians were reported to be falling. As we saw in yesterday’s reading (Monday of Week 23), they were apparently being carried away by a fascination with various cosmic powers and angelic forces. Paul begins by telling the Colossians that, since they have received Jesus as their Lord and Christ (Messiah), their lives should be totally rooted in him and built on him. They will be held firm by the faith which was passed on to them and they should be filled with expressions of thanksgiving.

But then comes the warning. They are to make sure that they are not made captive by the lure of some kind of ‘philosophy’, a set of ideas that comes from humans and which is based on the principles of the world, but not on Christ. To deny or abandon Christ after he has liberated them from the tyranny of ‘darkness’ by going back to error is nothing else than to undergo a new slavery.

As he did earlier, Paul goes on to refute the ideas with which the Colossians had been toying, ideas that the world was governed by cosmic angels of some kind. It is in Christ and only in him, in bodily form, that the divinity lives in all its fullness.

The word “fullness” (Greek, pleroma) here is defined as the ‘divinity’ that is now ‘filling’ Christ in his human body. In other words, the risen Christ, through his incarnation and resurrection, unites together the divine and the created. In this way, he himself is the pleroma of all possible categories of created being.

And it is in Christ, too, that the Colossians find their own fulfilment, in the One who is the head of every sovereignty and ruling force. A Christian shares this pleroma of Christ by being part of it, i.e. part of Christ’s body, and as a consequence of this, humans are raised to be higher than even the highest grade of angel. Paul then also reminds them that they have been circumcised, but with a special kind of circumcision. Here he is likely speaking to the Jewish Christians. There may have been some backsliding on their part and others coming under the influence of Jewish proselytisers emphasising the importance of circumcision. The same problem is dealt with in the letter to the Galatians.

Christian ‘circumcision’ is one performed not by human hands, where a piece of skin is removed, but:

…a spiritual circumcision, by the removal of the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ.

It is the total giving of oneself to Christ, to God—the complete letting go of the natural self. This is circumcision according to Christ and it is sacramentally celebrated through baptism. Baptism was done by having the catechumen take off his or her clothes, be fully immersed in a pool and then emerging and putting on a white garment. It was a re-enacting of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus himself and an expression of total identity with him.

…you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

Then, speaking to the gentile Christians, Paul says:

And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.

Through our faith, that is, through our total commitment to Jesus, we are reconciled and made one with him. No physical circumcision can bring about this. Prior to that, they were dead, but now:

…God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses…

The Colossians—both Jewish and Gentiles—are now liberated from their debt to the Law; it no longer governs their lives. This liberation was brought about by that debt’s being wiped out—by nailing it to the cross.

The Law was able to do nothing about a sinner except condemn that person to death. This death sentence is what God has carried out on his own Son in order to suppress it for the rest of the world, and it was for this very reason that God’s Son was ‘made sin’, ‘subject to the Law’, and ‘cursed’ by the Law.

In the person of his Son, whom he allowed to be executed, God nailed up and destroyed our death warrant, as well as all the charges it made against us. Finally, God:

…set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.

The tradition was that the Law had been brought down to Moses by angels, and by honouring them as the lawgivers, people became distracted from the true Creator. Now that God has brought the regime of that Law to an end by means of the crucifixion, these angelic powers have also lost the one thing that had given them power, and they too must acknowledge that Christ has triumphed over them.

Once again Paul demonstrates that Christ is supreme in sovereignty and the angels and all other cosmic powers are subservient to him. Christ, then, as we saw earlier, is the head of all created things and the head of his people—his body, the Church. Before him everyone must bow.

For us, it is important that we not be misled by fads and fashions which can come into our society or into our church. The problems the Colossians had can be found practically everywhere in the Church and society today.  We have the paradox of an agnostic worship of science combined with an obsession with ‘New Age’ thinking and all its eccentricities.

It is so important to realise and to experience that the Gospel in its purity is a genuine source of freedom, because it touches the deepest aspirations of the human spirit. Many sects and elitist groups both within and outside the Church, however attractive, do not normally increase our inner freedom; often they do quite the contrary.

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Tuesday of Week 23 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Luke 6:12-19

In today’s Gospel, we move on now to a different phase in Luke’s story and some very crucial sayings of Jesus. We are told that Jesus went up into the mountains to pray and spent the whole night there in prayer to God. Some might wonder what Jesus would have to pray about. Such a question may reveal a limited concept of what prayer is. It is not just a question of asking for things. It is even less a question of fulfilling a religious duty, i.e. ‘saying our prayers’.

Prayer is ultimately making contact with God, the beginning and end of all things. It makes a lot of sense that Jesus would have wanted to be in intimate contact with his Father and to spend long periods with him. One of Jesus’ main concerns was that he do the will of his Father. Prayer was one way of making sure that there was complete harmony with that will.

Luke’s Gospel shows Jesus at prayer more than any of the others. He shows Jesus praying before all the important stages in his public life.

As soon as this period of prayer was over, he called together his disciples and from them he chose twelve as Apostles. We know that among those who came to hear Jesus was a group, comprising both men and women, who regularly followed him and were committed to his teachings. Elsewhere we know of 72 such disciples who were sent out on a mission to do what Jesus was doing. After the Ascension, we are told of 120 believers waiting for the coming of the Spirit. It is from these that Jesus chooses 12 to be Apostles, with a special mandate to continue his mission for the Kingdom. Although the order of names varies in the different Gospels, the list is always headed by Peter while Judas is placed last.

We can sometimes be rather casual in our use of the terms ‘disciples’ and ‘apostles’, but they have very distinct meanings. The word ‘disciple’ is applied to any person who commits himself to be a follower of Jesus. The word ‘disciple’ comes from a Greek word which means ‘to learn’ (discere). There is a passive element present, in the sense of the disciple sitting at the feet of the guru and learning from him. Jesus’ disciples regularly called him ‘Rabbi’ or teacher. The word ‘apostle’ (Greek, apostolos), however, has a much more active meaning. It refers to a person who goes out as an emissary, delegated to pass on information or commands or instructions to others on behalf of some authority.

In the Gospel, the word ‘apostle’ first applies to the twelve people who were especially chosen by Jesus to hand on his message. They would, after the departure of Jesus, become the foundation stones of the new community. In them would be invested the integrity of the original message and it would be up to them to interpret its acceptable developments. They were the beginnings of what we call today the ‘magisterium’, the teaching body of the Church responsible for the maintenance of the integrity of the gospel message.

In this, as in all the lists of the Apostles, the first person listed is Simon, whose name is now changed to Peter. In Matthew, the change is made at Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah (Matt 16:18). There are variations of the Apostles’ names in all the lists. Bartholomew here seems to be the same as Nathanael in John (1:45) and is associated with Philip. Matthew seems to correspond to Levi (Mark 2:14). James, son of Alphaeus, is probably the same as James the younger, not the brother of John (Mark 15:40). The other Simon is called a Zealot. This could be either to describe his religious zeal or indicate his original membership in the party of the Zealots, a Jewish revolutionary group violently opposed to Roman rule. Judas, the son of James is another name for Thaddaeus (Matt 10:3; Mark 3:18). He is also known as Jude to distinguish him from the other Judas, who always appears last in the lists. ‘Iscariot’ may mean that Judas came from Kerioth. The town Kerioth Hezron was about 19 km south of Hebron and appears in the Old Testament (Josh 15:25; Jer 48:24).

We know, of course, that one of the chosen failed utterly and betrayed his Master. He was replaced by Matthias. Later, too, Paul—who never saw the pre-resurrection Jesus—would be called to be an Apostle. The term would also be applied to others in the New Testament, e.g. Barnabas, a missionary colleague of Paul.

Secondly, however, the word ‘apostle’ applies to every baptised Christian. All of us, one way or another, are called to pass on the Gospel message so that others can hear and respond. There are many ways we can do this. One thing, though, is clear—it is not enough for us simply to be disciples, i.e. passive followers.

Immediately following the call of the Twelve comes what is really Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. Significantly, for him it is going to take place in a plain, down on the ground in the midst of all the people. Luke’s version is sometimes known as the “Sermon on the Plain”. It somehow indicates the humility of Jesus and his closeness to the people, while Matthew uses the more biblical concept of a mountain as the place where God reveals himself.

Jesus is surrounded by all his disciples, his newly chosen Apostles, and a huge crowd from Judea and Jerusalem, from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, including both Jews and non-Jews. They all came to listen to Jesus, and to be healed. And they were all eager to touch him physically, because a certain power went out from Jesus and brought healing to all.

Let us then hear today the call of Jesus, first to be his disciples, totally committed to accepting and assimilating his message. As well, let us accept the responsibility to spread the gospel actively through the way we live our lives, through the way we speak and through the relationships we establish with people. Finally, let us also reach out and touch Jesus so that we may experience his healing wherever we need it.

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