My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, may the Lord give you peace. As many of you know, I'm here in Rome, and I'm blessed to be able to walk around this beautiful city—but also continually tempted because of all the amazing pizzas that you see as you walk by, and bakeries, and sweets. And it's really hard for me, because food is one of my greatest weaknesses. Saint Paul, in today's letter to the Romans, reminds us that we do not live according to the flesh. How hard are these words for our carnal ears? Because we're just so inundated with so many amazing and beautiful things. If you live according to the flesh, he says, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
My brothers and sisters, I think all of us have made some kind of sacrifice in life that was really bitter, really hard—but then we tasted the amazing fruitfulness of life that it bore, right? We make a sacrifice, and we celebrate the feast afterwards. The world has it the other way around: feast first, and then comes the inevitable sacrifice.
So, getting our bodies attuned to penance, to sacrifice, to the mortification of the flesh—mortification, to mortify, to put to death, right? To mortify our eyes when they get too curious and when they can lead us into impurity. To behold something good and beautiful, and recognize it as such, but to not go beyond.
When it comes to impure thoughts, for example, and impure actions—we see a beautiful person. They're beautiful. There's no ifs, ands, or buts. They are objectively beautiful. Now, we can either fall to the temptation and go places with our minds and our hearts that we would be ashamed to have shown to the world—and that should shame us before God—but we forget that He sees our thoughts, He sees our hearts.
Or we can turn it into a prayer. We can say, Lord, this beautiful woman (or in the case of the ladies, this good-looking man)—grant, Lord, that this person makes it to heaven. Save him, save her, Lord. Protect her purity. And then commence with a Hail Mary for them: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
And before you know it, that thought—which either came to you out of your own concupiscence of the flesh or from the devil—God gave you the grace to turn into an act of charity. Imagine if God gives that person the grace of salvation because you mortified your flesh so as not to turn them into an object. Imagine that person comes to you in eternity, if you should make it through the grace of God and His mercy, and they tap you on the shoulder and say, I just want to thank you. You prayed for me that day.
Imagine how many people we can save if all of our temptations we turn into prayers for salvation—the salvation of souls.
Our Lord, in today’s Gospel, bemoans the fact that some of His persecutors were very steeped in the works of the flesh and the exterior acts without penetrating the spirit, the heart of the law. He heals a woman, we are told, who had been crippled by a spirit. She was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect, for eighteen years.
When Jesus saw her, He called to her and said, “Woman, you are set free of your infirmity.” He laid His hands on her, and she at once stood up straight and glorified God. Now, if we were there and we saw that, would we not glorify God as well? Who knows?
But the leader of the synagogue, indignant that Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, said to the crowd in reply, “There are six days when work should be done. Come on those days to be cured, not on the Sabbath day.” Right? Because for them, seeking healing meant you would seek out a doctor—making him work—and it was a capital crime.
But in thinking in that way, they lost sight of the mercy of the Lord, the Spirit of the Lord, for which and through which He had created the Sabbath to begin with—a day of rest. He had mercy on us.
My brothers and sisters, let us ask the Holy Spirit to make us His sons and daughters according to the Spirit. If we live by the Spirit, we live by the Spirit of Christ. And if we suffer with Him, we too may also be glorified with Him.
May Almighty God bless you—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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