Saturday of Week 28 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Luke 12:8-12

Jesus continues to prepare his disciples for trials to come in the future. He encourages them to be faithful to their Christian commitment and to their faith in Christ as Lord. When we publicly acknowledge Jesus as Christ and Lord, Jesus too will acknowledge us as his faithful disciple.

Of course, it will be difficult during times of abuse and persecution, but disciples must always be ready to acknowledge their allegiance to Jesus. To deny that allegiance may win them a reprieve in this life, but not in the next. Jesus said on an earlier occasion:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matt 16:25)

The word for ‘deny’ in today’s Gospel is the same word used in Peter’s denial and disowning of his Master (see Luke 22:34,61).

Then comes a saying which can cause difficulty for some:

…everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.

Why should there be this one exception to the forgiveness of sin? And why is speaking against the Son acceptable, but not against the Spirit?

To speak against the Son is clearly wrong, but with repentance, there can be reconciliation. But to sin against the Spirit is to go against Truth itself. This was basically the sin of the Scribes and Pharisees. They not only criticised Jesus—that could be understood. But they locked themselves into a situation where they shut out any openness to the Truth—the Truth that others could so easily see present in Jesus. As long as they were in that situation, there was no possibility of reconciliation. To sin against the Spirit—the Truth—is to close the door on reconciliation.

It seems that in Luke’s context he may be applying the saying to those Christians who are under attack for their faith. If they deny the Spirit of Truth, they too lock themselves out from being reached by God. In times to come—even up through our own time—Jesus’ disciples will be dragged before civil and religious authorities. He is telling them they are not to be afraid or worried about how to defend themselves or about what they should say.

Again and again, people who have been in this position have attested that the words do indeed come and with them a certain peace and strength—provided one retains one’s integrity and wholeness. And it is the presence of that Spirit, the Spirit of God and of Jesus, that is at work.

Most of us will not have to suffer severely for our faith. But there will likely be times when we may find our religious beliefs and practices ridiculed and made fun of. We can be tempted at such times to go into hiding, to conceal our Christian identity. We may even fail to come to the support of people who are under attack, refuse to stand by them and refuse to stand up and be counted as committed followers of the gospel.

If that has happened in the past, let us ask forgiveness. Let us pray that in future we may have the courage and integrity in word and deed to let people know who we are and what we stand for.

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Thursday of Week 28 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Luke 11:47-54

There are more strong words from Jesus against the Pharisaic mentality. Today the charge is of hypocrisy:

Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors killed.

The people build monuments to remember the prophets of old, but those same prophets were killed by their ancestors. On the one hand, they are building the monuments as an act of atonement, while they themselves have exactly the same attitudes as their ancestors. They do not listen to their own teaching.

Jesus utters words which he identifies as “the Wisdom of God”:

I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute…

It is not a quotation from the Old Testament or any other book known to us. It could refer to God speaking through Jesus (the Word, the Wisdom of God) or presenting, in quotation form, God’s decision to send prophets and apostles, even though they would be rejected.

Jesus is basically saying that the mission of the Church (his Apostles) is linked with the mission of the Old Testament prophets, who, like Jesus’ disciples, suffered and, in some cases, died at the hands of their contemporaries. Jesus, of course, himself will be one of them, the last and greatest Prophet.

Jesus says the scholars of the Law carry with them guilt for the killing of every good person and every prophet since the murder of Abel down to that of Zechariah. The murder of Abel by his brother Cain is recorded in Genesis (4:8), the opening book of the Old Testament, and that of Zechariah, son of Jehoiada in 2 Chronicles (24:20-22). This latter book is regarded as the closing of the Hebrew Testament by the Jews. It is like our describing the whole Bible in terms of ‘from Genesis to Revelation’. Jesus was referring to the history of martyrdom right through the whole of the Old Testament.

There is one final attack against the scribes and their way of thinking and acting. They interpret the Law in such a way that they make it inaccessible to the ordinary person. And, what is worse, they do not observe it themselves:

For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.

They kept both themselves and the people in ignorance of the true way to salvation and wholeness. As it is put in Matthew’s Gospel:

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 23:13)

One wonders how many of our Church leaders, teachers and theological and moral ‘experts’ have not done exactly the same thing over the years and down to the present day? How many Catholic parents and teachers have made the Christian message basically inaccessible to the young, and then we wonder why they have no interest in religion?

Not surprisingly, all these attacks only increased the hostility of the Pharisees and the religious leaders against Jesus. They were able to get him to speak on a multitude of religious questions hoping that he would convict himself out of his own mouth. As far as they were concerned, they were more than successful.

What they did not realise was that Jesus was operating from a completely different vision of what life is really about. His new wine could not fit into their old wineskins. The questions for each one to ask are: Do I share the vision of Jesus? What does ‘Christianity’ mean to me?

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