Homily for Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Mass for the Theological College

September 11, 2023
Theological College
Washington, D.C.

Colossians 1:24-2:3
Psalm 62:6-7, 9
Luke 6:6-11

We listen to the Word of God proclaimed in our midst, the Word whose completion we are entrusted like Saint Paul to bring about, the mystery hidden from ages and generations past. In listening, we hear questions asked and answered, we hear questions curdled into suspicions, we hear answers given and rejected; and we see indifference and denial overcome by charity and the Truth.

In the verses immediately preceding the verses from Luke’s Gospel, the Pharisees ask Jesus why he and His disciples do what is unlawful on the Sabbath in plucking the heads of grain on the Sabbath. Jesus responds with an appeal to His messianic lineage, that of David, citing as a precedent that David shared with his hungry companions the bread of the offering reserved for the priests. Then, Jesus concludes, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” This is new! This is stunning because Jesus intimates His identity as the Son of God. It is unexpected, unbelievable, unwelcome, but revelatory.

Today the Pharisees are silent but suspicious of what Jesus will do with the man with the withered right hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath. It should be noted that it was a custom with religious overtones to reserve the use of the right hand for eating, social relations, and religious rituals. The left hand was reserved for personal hygiene and refuse—it was unclean and its use in other functions would be forbidden.

So, this man, was de facto excluded and isolated from meals with family, celebrations with friends, and religious rituals. The disfigurement of his hand was understood to be the effect of his sin and a punishment by God.

Where is the focus? The Pharisees are neither focused upon God nor upon the man as a person. They are focused only on compliance to the Law and its customs. They are focused on whether or not Jesus is going to violate the Law by doing work on the Sabbath in healing the man’s hand. Jesus is attempting to save the Pharisees from their suspicions and His disciples from their curiosity. So, Jesus asks a different question, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” No one answers the question, so Jesus reveals the answer behind the question and the silent suspicions: He asks the man to come forward and to give witness and then Jesus commands the man to stretch out his hand. The man does so, and he is healed.

Jesus does not use the man as an example for Him to make a point; He invites the man to give witness to Christ’s sovereignty by receiving the grace of his healing in a place where he previously would not be allowed to stand. The man is receptive and willing, he is not passive. He is a witness not a bystander. Jesus frees the man from the power of sin. He focuses on the Father and the mission that His Father has entrusted to Him; He focuses with compassion upon the man in delivering him from the paralyzing effect of sin and its effects. He focuses on the work of God, not on the law. He focuses upon the power to forgive sin and to heal its effects and not merely to change the subjective values of the community that appear to be misguided. Jesus’ action and response are sacramental. The disciples are amazed, and the Pharisees are enraged. The Pharisees now decide to see Jesus as their adversary because He has refused to be useful to them as a mascot. The disciples and the man are overcome by the power of Christ’s charity and the strength of His truth.

This charity and truth are what prompted Saint Paul to write, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh, I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of His Body, which is the Church, of which I am a minister in accordance with God’s stewardship given to me to bring to completion for you the Word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.”

A question to be asked: What could be lacking in the afflictions of Christ? Aren’t they omnipotent? Did they not bring about our salvation and forgiveness of sin? What’s more, Saint Paul claims that his suffering is ministerial for the Church.

The lacuna in the afflictions of Christ is itself a gift to us from Christ. The lacuna envelops our afflictions. The lacuna is left there for us by Christ to offer us the grace to receive and to express compassion through mutuality with Christ in suffering. Christ desires to be with us in our own suffering that we might be present with Him in His suffering and witness to His Cross for our Redemption for others. This grace of mutuality is not a quid pro quo; there is no equality of terms in the exchange between Christ and each of us; it is not something that is transactional. In giving us this lacuna in His afflictions, Christ gives us the capacity to love with compassion for our neighbor and not simply to pity our neighbor. Unlike pity, which is simply existential, compassion recognizes both the reality of sin and its effect.

Compassion requires humility, gratitude, and awe in the complete selflessness of Christ’s love that goes to such great lengths to save each person from sin and its bitter effects. The grace of this lacuna as a compassionate gift from Christ is the source of our renewed freedom and capacity to love with charity. Pity simply limits one to ignore the man’s hand and to deny its paralysis even to the point of claiming that the man is “differently abled” only for the sake of avoiding the interior awkwardness that one feels within oneself about his situation and not about the plight that has afflicted him.

The grace of compassion established in the redemptive suffering of Christ transforms our pain and woundedness—the effect of sin—into a positive action for our own performance. Christ offers this to us, and we receive it through the grace of the sacraments. This grace transforms the impoverishment and paralysis of pain, illness, isolation, estrangement, and dying into a dignified human action replete with generosity and freedom. This transforming and sacramental grace, with faith and wisdom, changes our suffering into patience, our patience into fortitude, fortitude into hope, hope into love, and love into Divine Charity. All of this is manifest in authentic compassion, and it is the ministry of the priest to be stewards of this mystery in everything we do and with every word we preach. Without the grace of the lacuna in Christ’s afflictions left for us by Christ, there can be no compassion for human beings, just pity or denial.

We as priests must begin by recognizing our own paralysis and indifference and our need for Christ’s compassionate mercy if we are to be effective stewards of the mysteries and labor and struggle in accord with the exercise of Christ’s power working within us.

In a few moments, we will not simply go to Communion. We will rather accept the Lord’s invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery of His compassion for us and for those He asks us to serve as stewards of these mysteries. It is this mystery that transforms us to love as He loves. We enter the mystery of Christ’s suffering and our redemption. “We receive what we are and become what we receive. Behold the mystery of our salvation laid out before us.”