23rd Week of Ordinary Time C – Saturday

Saint Paul, speaking to the Colossians, reminds us, you once were alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds. God has now reconciled you in the fleshly body of Christ through his death to present you holy, without blemish, and irreproachable before him. Our Blessed Mother will always remain a symbol of this very scripture. She is a great icon of a creature of God that is preserved wholly intact, without blemish, irreproachable before him. This is what God wishes to accomplish within each and every one of us. Irreproachable, an unblemished soul. He died to make that possible, and he applies the blood of our sanctification within the sacrament of reconciliation.

 Therefore, we have the beautiful gift of reconciliation, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Our Lord is the reconciler, and he reconciles us to himself, to the father, to the Holy Spirit, to the entire church, to the angels and the saints within the Sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation/The Sacrament of Penance. Penance is intricately bound to our purification. Saint Francis used to insist on penance with his friars. Our Lady in Lourdes: “Penance. Penance. Penance!” – Where we mortify our senses out of love for God.

 Take, for example, when we're about to judge someone in our thoughts. Or, when we're tempted with impurity. When we mortify our gaze, our eyes, and what we look at and our thoughts and our tongue – what we say –  when we mortify our speech so as not to gossip. We can see how intricately bound penance is to God's sanctification within our souls. In other words, the sanctification happens through God's grace, but with our collaboration. Our Blessed Mother is a perfect example of that.

In the gospel, we see people getting on Jesus's case for allowing the apostles to eat when they were hungry on the Sabbath. While Jesus was going through a field of grain on a Sabbath, His disciples were picking the heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands and eating them. This apparently was considered “work” for the Pharisees, and so they asked him, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” And Jesus responds by giving them an example from the Old Testament, where David and those who were with him, when they were hungry walked into the house of God, took the bread of offering, which only the priests could lawfully eat and ate of it, and shared it with his companions. Jesus looked at the Pharisees and said, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” In other words, if David could do that, so much more, the Son of God, who is more concerned about their well-being. Indeed, the law was created to preserve the well-being of Man, his freedom, his rest from toil. It wasn't created to allow people to go hungry or allow people to suffer just because it's a Saturday, right?

 That's why, he says, “If you had a donkey and it fell into a pit on the Sabbath, would you not go and get it out?” Our Blessed Mother understood this perfectly: The difference, the distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law – this clarification, this better understanding of what the law was meant to accomplish.

 Let us ask our Blessed Mother to grant us the grace to be more clear and level headed when approaching others with the truth that God has revealed to us – a truth that is meant to set us free and meant to help us help others become free as well, in holiness and in goodness, just as our Blessed Mother was free.

Most Holy Mother, Queen of Freedom, pray for us who have recourse to thee. Amen.