Friday of Week 27 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Luke 11:15-26

As said by the prophet Jeremiah:

Hear this, O foolish and senseless people,
who have eyes but do not see,
who have ears but do not hear. (Jer 5:21)

In today’s passage, Jesus frees a person from enslavement to an evil power which had rendered him mute, so that he could not speak (in Matthew’s version of this story, the man is also blind). As Christians, many of us can suffer from the same evil influence when we refuse or are afraid to acknowledge openly our Christian faith. We hide and we remain silent, especially when the values we hold are attacked or ridiculed. Once liberated, the man could speak and he did so, much to the amazement of the crowd. Let us, too, pray for this gift of speech—to be able to say the right thing at the right time.

But there were those present who accused Jesus of using the demon’s power to drive out the evil spirit. At the same time, in spite of the extraordinary signs that Jesus was initiating on almost a daily basis—including the one they had just witnessed which caused such astonishment among the people—his enemies asked him for a sign from God.

There is a clear gap between the leaders and the people here. While the leaders keep asking Jesus for his credentials, the people are shown as constantly praising and thanking God for all that is being done among them through Jesus.

Jesus then shows the self-contradictions in his opponents’ charges. A kingdom that is split by internal rivalries cannot survive. Why would evil spirits attack each other and as such frustrate their goals? And, Jesus says to his accusers:

Now if I cast out the demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your exorcists cast them out?….But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

When people are liberated from the control of evil spirits, that is a sure sign that the loving power of God is at work. Any other interpretation does not make sense. And the ‘Kingdom of God’ is personified and embodied in Jesus himself. It will also become present in his disciples who do his work.

And Jesus goes on to give another image. A strong man guarding his house and possessions remains undisturbed until someone stronger comes and overthrows him. That is clearly what is happening. Jesus is the stronger one and the evil spirits are being driven away by him. They are helpless before him. This liberation of people and society from evil powers is one of the most dramatic proofs that the all-powerful reign of God is present in the person of Jesus. What further signs could be asked for?

Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

There can be no neutrality where Jesus is concerned. We have to make our choice—for him or against. Not to choose is itself a choice—against him. Compare this with the similar, but actually quite different saying we saw earlier:

…for whoever is not against you is for you. (Luke 9:50)

This was in the context of the Apostle John complaining that he saw a man cast out demons in Jesus’ name. In so far as that nameless person was doing Jesus’ work and doing it in Jesus’ name, he was with Jesus. That surely has implications for the many good things that non-Catholics and others who are not Christians at all are doing.

And this saying about the non-acceptance of neutrality leads to another warning. It is not enough to have been liberated from the power of an evil (“unclean”) spirit. Otherwise this “unclean spirit” may say:

I will return to my house from which I came.

But:

When it returns, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself…

The end result is that the evil spirits:

…enter and live there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first.

No, instead, the emptiness left by the departure of the evil spirit has to be actively filled with the Spirit of Jesus.

Was Jesus referring to some of the people around him? Was he especially calling out his critics? These were people who by their meticulous observance of the Law saw themselves as morally blameless, but in whose lives the positive presence of the Spirit, as exemplified in Jesus himself, was totally absent.

It is easy to use the sacrament of reconciliation to get the forgiveness of our past sins and leave it at that, feeling comfortable with having a ‘clean slate’. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but the devil loves one!

The true reconciliation that the sacrament calls for, even demands, is a new and stronger commitment to the living of our Christian life. The sacrament is intended to be an experience of conversion and change. It is much more concerned with the future than with the past.  The past is gone and there is nothing we can do about it. The present is in our hands and that is where we meet God.

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Saturday of Week 27 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Galatians 3:22-29

Today, Paul continues to compare the ineffectiveness of observing the Law with the effectiveness of faith in Christ:

We know that we are God’s children and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. (1 John 5:19)

Everyone is touched by sin and the Law does not help; if anything, it makes things worse by making us more aware of our shortcomings. One ‘Do not’ after another creates feelings of such negativity and is so depressing. Wherever one turns, one is in danger of putting a foot wrong and can hardly avoid doing so.

The only way to experience the promises made to his people by God is by faith—a total commitment to Jesus Christ and his gospel of truth, love and service. Only those who have such a faith can have this experience. Being made right with God is a free gift; it is not owed to us in any way and there is nothing we can do of ourselves to force God to give it to us. He is, and never can be, in debt to us.

Every ‘good’ act we do is simply evidence of God himself working through us. And so we read of the prostitute who burst into the house of Simon the Pharisee and covered the feet of Jesus with her tears and her kisses:

…her many sins have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. (Luke 7:47)

Her sins are not removed because she loves; she loves because the gift of forgiveness has been given.

Certainly, allowances have to be made for the huge number of people who have no opportunity of hearing the gospel proclamation. We leave that to God’s love and God’s providential care. Paul’s words today, however, have a crucial relevance for us who have been given the message.

Paul sees the Law as a temporary expedient, necessary until the message about faith in Christ was made known. Before the way of faith, we had no real freedom under the Law; we were, as it were, the Law’s prisoners. It acted as a kind of guardian or ‘baby-sitter’ imperfectly showing us the way to God—”don’t do that…don’t go there”. Paul uses the Greek word paidagogus (from which our word ‘pedagogue’ comes). The paidagogus was the slave who looked after and monitored the young free-born schoolboy in Greek culture. He accompanied the boy at all times and had some disciplinary authority over him.

It is not until we make the surrender of faith in Jesus as Lord that we can have full freedom. We do not need the guardianship of the Law any more because, through our faith commitment, we have become children of God—full adults and heirs in God’s family—in a way that was never possible only under the Law. We are now free. The only law we are under is the liberating law of love.

Addressing all the Galatian Christians, Jews and Gentiles alike, Paul tells them that, since they have all been baptised into Christ (the sacramental sign of their faith in him), they “have clothed” themselves in Christ (symbolised by the white garment they put on after emerging from the baptismal water). Each one is now another Christ and all the previous distinctions that divided them have fallen away. Now, there is neither Jew nor Greek—no ethnic distinctions; neither slave nor free—no social distinctions; neither male or female—no distinctions based on gender. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Cor 12:13)

This is surely one of the greatest contributions of Christianity to the world’s cultures, but alas, one that has not yet been fully realised even in many Christian communities. (See The Secular City by theologian Harvey Cox, who claims that it was this thinking that paved the way for our contemporary trans-national and multi-cultural societies.)

Paul says that merely:

…if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

We are among the numberless heirs, more numerous than the stars in the heavens or the sands on the seashore, that were promised to him. This happens by our saying one, unconditional ‘Yes’ to Christ and all he stands for and committing ourselves unconditionally to his vision of life.

The underlying message for the Galatians is that there is now no need of the Law and they should ignore those who are trying to tell them otherwise. Belonging to Christ in faith is all that is needed. Everything else will flow from that.

Let us then today renew our commitment of faith, our unconditional surrender to God through Jesus and his gospel. Let our Christian life, too, be based on that faith, and let us not fall back into a legalistic mentality (always asking “Is it a sin?”). It is on this foundation of a total self-surrender to Christ’s Way that the Kingdom is built, that Kingdom that Jesus came to proclaim and establish.

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