30th Week of Ordinary Time C – Friday

Listen to his anguish, brothers and sisters: “I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie; my conscience joins with the Holy Spirit in bearing me witness that I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are children of Israel; theirs the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. Theirs the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.”

Now that’s the reading in its entirety. We can sense his deep sorrow for a people who had been given so much—chosen by God, meant to lead all the other nations of the world in offering right worship and living in a righteous and holy way before God during this pilgrimage on earth.

And yet, they rejected. They rejected God’s will. They threw it to the wind.

And, my brothers and sisters, we have to ask ourselves now—we, the new people of God—first of all, do I even feel like I belong to this new family of God? Do I feel like a son or a daughter of the omnipotent, almighty Father who loves me? Do I feel a part of the community, or have I gone off somewhere for whatever reason?

And we try to justify ourselves—breaking ourselves off from the rest of the community—either because that priest doesn’t celebrate Mass the way I like, or the music isn’t as beautiful as this other place I go to. Some of us even abandon the sacraments, so as to go for the good, stylish music of a Protestant church down the road, which can never give you the Body and Blood of the Saviour—flesh that has suffered for you, flesh that has died for you, flesh that wants to be one with you.

My brothers and sisters, look at what we give up. A lot of us give up our Blessed Mother—the Queen of Heaven that God has given to us to be our Mother, to accompany us, who also wishes to cradle us in her loving arms through the darkness of this world. But we turn her away because we do not understand. We neither understand God’s ways, nor even the ways of the human heart—for it was the human heart of Jesus that thought of us on the Cross in giving us His Mother. But we throw it all away.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus—loving His own people, speaking to His own, trying to, as we heard in yesterday’s Gospel, draw them to Himself as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings—is trying to teach them. And normally His persecutors would be asking Jesus questions, trying to catch Him in some kind of mishap or scandal. But in today’s Gospel, in speaking to the Pharisees and the scholars of the law, He asks them once and for all, after having healed a man and dismissed him on the Sabbath: “Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath or not?”

He’s trying to see if they’ve got their priorities straight. He’s trying to see if they know how to prioritise the Spirit over the letter of the law—or better, to penetrate the heart of the law, why the law was given.

The Sabbath was given for rest—that man needs to rest from all kinds of things: from physical labour, but also psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. And so a very beautiful expression of that is when somebody receives a healing—because they are set free; their sorrow, their pain, their illness is gone—they’re lightened. You’re giving rest to that person.

But they deemed the one that gives rest to those who are sick—the doctor—that he’s working. “You’re making him work on the Sabbath,” which, according to God (in their opinion), was outlawed. But God never said that. God is saying that we need rest.

Rest. We are not superheroes. We’re not aliens. We’re human beings. We need to rest.

And Jesus doesn’t shy away from this polemic. In fact, He purposely heals on the Sabbath to teach the Israelites the essence—the heart—of the law of the Sabbath.

But instead, like rebellious students—you know, you’ve ever seen those students in class, especially in modern times—they start throwing things around and paper balls at the teacher and creating havoc and rebelling. That’s the way these people were with Jesus. They simply would not listen.

So, my brothers and sisters, it is up to us to listen—and even more so, to appreciate what we have been given in Christ and all the gifts that He has given to us throughout salvation history—and to rejoice that we are the people of God, loved by Him, redeemed by Him, awaited by Him in heaven.

Amen.