Saturday of Week 12 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 8:5-17

Today we read about the second of the ten miracles of Jesus described by Matthew after the Sermon on the Mount. It is a story also found in Luke and John, but strangely enough, not in Mark.

The significant element in this story is the fact that the person asking for help is a centurion, a soldier and presumably not a Jew. Yet he has this great faith in Jesus. It is a sign of the future role of Gentiles in the originally all-Jewish Christian community.

The centurion asks Jesus to cure a servant who has become paralysed. Jesus immediately responds that he will go and cure him. The centurion replies:

Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.

These words should be very familiar to us from the paraphrase used in the prayers before sharing in Communion. And the centurion goes on to say that as an army officer, he just has to give commands and they are carried out on the spot. When it comes to healing, he knows that Jesus can do the same.

Jesus is astonished at the faith of this pagan:

Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.

And he foretells that this is a sign of what is going to happen in the future when Gentiles from all over the world will enter the Kingdom while many of Jesus’ own people will be left outside. What is more, they will become God’s people sharing glory with the Jewish ancestors: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is a sad theme running through the whole of this Gospel: the rejection of Jesus by so many of his own people and their self-chosen exclusion from the Kingdom.

The faith that Jesus expects is not an acceptance of religious doctrines. It is rather an act of total trust and surrender by which people commit themselves to the power of God—in this case, the power of God in Jesus.

Paraphrasing from the Jerusalem Bible:

Christ asks for this faith especially when he works his miracles, which are not so much acts of mercy as signs attesting his mission and witnessing to the kingdom; hence he cannot work miracles unless he finds the faith without which the miracles lose their true significance. (edited)

For this reason this faith was not easy to give, especially for many of Jesus’ hearers who could not see the presence of God in Jesus and hence could not commit themselves to him. Even the disciples were slow to believe. We see this especially in Mark’s Gospel. But once present, such a faith can bring about the transformation of a person’s life, as many converts to Christianity can attest.

Turning to the centurion, Jesus says,

Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.

And we are told:

…the servant was healed in that hour.

What is clear from this story and from many other healings by Jesus is the crucial element of faith in the one approaching Jesus. It is the only condition necessary—all other characteristics are irrelevant. Luke will tell us that Jesus was restricted in the help he could give to the people in his home town of Nazareth because they simply did not have faith in him.

Let us pray that we may never lose that gift of faith which has, in the mysterious ways of divine Providence, been given to us. And let us remember that, without that faith, God will be hampered in reaching out his healing love to us.

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Saturday of Week 12 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Lamentations 2:2,10-14,18-19

Today’s reading is from the Book of Lamentations. We have come to the end of our readings about the history of the Kings, contained in the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings and the books of Chronicles. We began with Saul and finished with Zedekiah, a puppet king installed by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.

According to the Vatican II Missal:

“The Book of Lamentations contains five poems of sorrow over the destroyed Jerusalem. Written probably by an eyewitness, these words express a poignant grief that the chants of Tenebrae [in Holy Week] put to music.”

Our reading today is taken from chapter 2 which speaks of the Lord’s anger against Zion, i.e. Jerusalem. In this chapter the author describes the wretched fate of kings, priests, prophets, elders and children. Then, addressing Zion, he reminds her how the false prophets have lied, and urges her to bewail her fate before God.

The passage reflects the bitterness and suffering of the people in Jerusalem who are undergoing the effects of a terrible siege. The buildings of the city have all been torn down. The king and his family have been humiliated and take into exile. The men of the city, in penitential sackcloth and ashes, sit in silent misery on the ground. The women:

…have bowed their heads to the ground.

The author is overcome with bitterness as he sees children and babies die of starvation. Piteously they ask their mothers for food. But there is none. Eventually they die in their helpless mothers’ arms.

There are harsh words for false prophets, the propagandists of their day. They denied the reality with idealistic and misleading or specious visions, instead of pointing to the real cause of the people’s sufferings—their infidelity to their God, to the true and the good. Jeremiah frequently denounces false prophets. The words ‘misleading’ or ‘specious’ in the Hebrew come from the same root as that underlying the words ‘to drive out’ (‘banish’ in some translations; see Jeremiah 27:10,15). In other words, the lies of false prophets mislead the people with “false and deceptive visions” and thus lead to banishment by the Lord—so they are ‘banishing’ in their effect.

There is a personification of Jerusalem and its inhabitants:

Cry aloud to the Lord!
O wall of daughter Zion!

The people indeed have much to weep for, both for their present miseries and the reason for them. Their only remedy is to turn to their God in prayer:

Arise, cry out in the night,
at the beginning of the watches!

There were three watches in every night, so the whole night could be spent profitably in prayer.

The passage continues:

Pour out your heart like water
before the presence of the Lord!

That is, let them pour out their hearts in prayer and petition. Let them lift up their hands in supplication, especially for the lives of their little ones, the victims of their parents’ wrongdoing.

It is a sober reflection that there are still so many places and times in our contemporary and supposedly technologically ‘sophisticated’ world where people are in similar and even worse circumstances, where children walk around naked and in a daze, so long deprived of food that they do not even know they are hungry.

And the causes are still the same: the sins of people, the sins of greed and neglect and a failure to see each other as brothers and sisters and to accept responsibility for them. Cain’s question is still being cynically asked:

…am I my brother’s [and sister’s] keeper? (Gen 4:9)

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