By Colleen
O’Sullivan
“… 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.” (Romans 9:2-3)
Then he said to (the Pharisees and scholars
of the law) “Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern, would not
immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?” (Luke 14:5-6)
Piety
You are the visible face of the invisible Father,
of the God who manifests his power above all by
forgiveness and mercy;
let the Church be your visible face in the world,
its Lord risen and glorified.
You willed that your ministers would also be
clothed in weakness
In order that they may feel compassion for those in
ignorance and error;
let everyone who approaches them feel sought after,
loved, and forgiven by God. (From Prayer
of Pope Francis for the Jubilee)
Study
Another set-up by the Pharisees.
Jesus is invited to dinner at one of their homes. All the invited guests know it’s a trap, so
they watch intently to see what will happen.
Luke tells us they place a man suffering from dropsy right in front of
Jesus. It is, of course, the
Sabbath. Hopefully, Jesus will break the
law and they can snare him.
Unless we read books written many years ago, dropsy isn’t a word we are
familiar with. Substitute edema or
retention of fluid and you’ve got the picture.
The cause could be anything from kidney problems to heart disease. Whatever the cause, it’s not a condition
anyone wants to have. Swollen hands,
legs, ankles, or feet – people tend to stare.
The person with the condition is likely to be very uncomfortable. Joints don’t bend easily and getting around
can be difficult. If heart problems are
the cause, breathing could be difficult.
How despicable the Pharisees are, taking a suffering person and trying
to use him as their pawn in an entrapment scheme.
Jesus heals the man and turns on the host and his fellow scholars. He points out that if it was something
valuable to them that was endangered, they wouldn’t hesitate to save their
child or their work animal no matter what the day. So, “Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath or
not?” Don’t compassion and mercy in the
face of human need outweigh the bazillion man-made laws zealously enforced by
the Pharisees about exactly how much energy anyone could expend on the Sabbath
before they broke the rules. And there were
lots of rules in Jesus’ day, down to the permissible weight of a lamp that
could be moved from one side of a room to the other on the Sabbath.
The Pharisees don’t realize that Jesus is the human face of God. They don’t stop to consider how often
throughout the history of their people God has been kind and compassionate to
them. But that’s exactly what Paul is
reflecting on in our first reading. God gave
my people everything, he muses – life, love, the Law, prophets to call them
back when they strayed, forgiveness. Even
the longed-for Messiah was one of us.
Yet many of my people have turned their backs on what God has wrought in
our midst.
This lament of the apostle Paul is only a very small part of a larger
section encompassing chapters 9-11 of his letter to the Romans. The overall emphasis is more on the
faithfulness of God than the faithlessness of some of his people. If there is a bright light in any of this, it
is that the unbelief of some of the Jews has allowed the Gospel to spread to
all the world through the Gentiles. Paul
ends these chapters saying that God has not rejected Israel; they are the
people God chose. God will patiently
wait for them to respond. At the end of
chapter 11, Paul asserts that whatever God is doing and however God is doing
it, God ultimately wants to show mercy to all (11:32).
Action
Mercy and compassion – the threads running through both our Scripture
readings today. Mercy and compassion –
the threads running through the discussions at the Synod on the Family these
past few weeks in Rome. Mercy – the
theme for the upcoming extraordinary jubilee year proclaimed by Pope Francis.
Mercy and compassion – the gifts God wants us to extend to others. How well do we do that?
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