Tuesday of Week 14 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Matthew 9:32-37
We come today to the end of the section recounting ten miracles of Jesus (chaps 8-9). The last miracle described is that of a man whose deafness arises from his being possessed by a demon. It follows immediately the cure of two blind men, a story which we did not read and which is told again by Matthew in chapter 20. It seems to correspond to the healing of the blind man Bartimaeus in Mark (chap 10), although there are significant differences.
The man is brought to Jesus by the people. Jesus drives out the demon and the man immediately is able to speak. There is a double reaction. The people are astounded:
Never has anything like this been seen in Israel.
The implications of Jesus’ divine origins are very clear. On the other hand, Pharisees were saying:
By the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons.
Elsewhere Jesus will show the absurd illogicality of that charge.
Stories of the blind, deaf, and mute in the Gospels always have a deeper meaning. Far more serious than physical blindness, deafness and an inability to speak are being spiritually blind, deaf and mute. The Pharisees in the Gospels represent such people, and we see it happening in this story. They are blind because they cannot see or do not want to see God at work in Jesus. They are deaf because they do not hear or do not want to understand what he says. And they are also mute because they cannot speak the words of life that Jesus gives them.
The very same can happen to each one of us. Let us pray today to be able to see clearly, to understand what God says to us and to be able to share it with others.
This section of Matthew concludes with a general description or summary of what Jesus was doing. He was going through all the towns and villages of Galilee; he was teaching in synagogues; he was proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom; and he was healing all kinds of diseases and sickness.
But behind all that he does, is his deep compassion for the needs of the people. He sees them harassed and dejected, wandering and aimless, like sheep without a guiding shepherd—a familiar image in the Old Testament (see Ezekiel 34). Then, looking at his disciples, he says:
The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few…
Jesus cannot do it all on his own. In fact, he will hardly step outside the boundaries of Palestine. He needs many helpers.
Today, the situation has not changed. The harvest is as big as ever; people are as lost and rudderless as they have ever been in spite of the great strides in knowledge we have made. Where are the labourers? They are not just the bishops, the priests or the religious brothers and sisters. That is a very narrow concept of labourers.
Every single baptised person is called, in some way, to be a harvester, to help people find and experience the truth and love that God gives in Jesus. Every single person, in that sense (and it is a very real sense) has a vocation, a call to serve and to build the Kingdom. What and where and with whom is my vocation?
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Tuesday of Week 14 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Hosea 8:4-7,11-13
Hosea is in a very different mood today from yesterday. He makes a scathing attack on the idolatrous practices of the Northern Kingdom (referred to here also as “Israel”, “Samaria” and “Ephraim”) when they set up kings without the Lord’s approval.
This passage refers to the dynastic upheavals of Israel’s declining days. Between the death of Jeroboam II and the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians, a matter of some 25 years, there were four separate dynasties on the throne and as many murdered kings. In fact, after Jeroboam II there were five kings in 13 years, and three of them took power violently. They were certainly not God’s choice.
Worse still, they melted down their silver and gold to make false gods, a move that could only bring the downfall of the people. The Lord said:
Your calf is rejected, O Samaria.
Jeroboam I (930-909 BC) had set up golden calves in the shrines of Bethel and Dan and told the people, “These are your gods”. But says Hosea:
…it is not God.
And the Lord commands:
The calf of Samaria
shall be broken to pieces.
The prophet then quotes a proverb that we still hear today:
When they sow the wind, they will reap the whirlwind.
One evil leads to something much worse. And another saying:
The stalk of grain that forms no ear can yield no flour.
This is another familiar proverb about the results of doing evil. In the Hebrew, there is a play on the similar-sounding words for ‘stalk’ and ‘flour’.
Israel sowed the wind of idolatry and reaped the whirlwind of Assyria. And, even if it did produce flour, it would be devoured by the stranger, namely, the Assyrians. Israel will be swallowed up and, among the nations, become of no value. The idolatry of the people, their turning their backs to their God in favour of idols, will lead to the disaster of the Assyrian invasion and their deportation into exile.
Meanwhile the very ordinances of God are seen now as something foreign. They go through the motions of offering sacrifices and eating the sacrifice as a sign of participation and unity, but God knows their hearts are far from him:
When Ephraim multiplied altars to expiate sin,
they became to him altars for sinning.
Some of the sacrifices were partly eaten by the offerer and priests as a sign of the sacrifice’s union with the god. There was no such union, of course, nor could there be with man-made idols.
God is mindful of their guilt because of their idolatrous practices and recourse to impotent gods. They shall be punished by “return to Egypt”. To go back to ‘Egypt’ was to go back into foreign bondage, as was the case before the Exodus. Now the slavery and bondage is under the Assyrian ruler who will carry them off into exile.
We might ask ourselves two questions today, arising out of these readings:
- How sincere is my offering of myself to God and to Jesus when I celebrate the Eucharist? Is my daily life truly an expression of what I am doing in the church?
- Who or what are the gods in my life? And do they impede service of my Creator God?