COMMENT ON THE LITURGY OF THE SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
Collect
O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Readings
Eph 4:1-6; Lk 14:1-11
Comment
By healing dropsy man on Saturday, Jesus places the primacy of charity towards one's neighbor as the supreme law at the center of his message. He does not counter the Pharisees by denying or belittling the Mosaic law. In fact, he asks them to quote a passage from the law that forbids healing on the Sabbath and asks if they would not toil on the Sabbath to save a donkey or an ox, or to protect their wealth.
The illusion that the love of God can be made to coincide simply with the love of the law is a form of idolatrous reductionism: even if we do not worship foreign deities, we can fall into the error of believing that scrupulous respect for religious norms can in itself constitute a guarantee of salvation. This temptation, very widespread in Judaism contemporary with Jesus, can also pose a threat to Christianity if we follow the conviction of being able to accumulate merit through good works and prayers.
It is a spiritually self-centered attitude, away from selfless love for God and neighbor, from that sense of gratitude towards our Creator and Savior, which alone should be enough to make us act with righteousness.
The second part of the Gospel story, in which we witness the dispute between the guests about who should have occupied the most prestigious seats at the table, testifies precisely to the difficulty of overcoming self-centeredness, which should instead characterize the true religious experience.
Paul, for his part, in the letter to the Ephesians, underlines the profound link between fraternal charity and the need to give an adequate response to God's saving action towards us. We were first loved and saved by God; it is our duty to love our neighbor as God loved us. And this duty is even more binding on the brothers in the faith, with whom we share the gifts that the one Christ has distributed among his people. This is why the apostle exhorts us to keep peace in the Christian community.
To reinforce his words, Paul relies on his being "a prisoner for the Lord". He does not want to be pitied, but he wants to emphasize how far his self-denial for the cause of the gospel has pushed him. The believer is capable of identifying the hand of God even in the great trials of life, for this reason, Paul is a prisoner, but "for the Lord". Nothing happens by fortuitous circumstances, and even if we find ourselves in the hands of evil forces, we can be sure that every second cause acts because God, the first cause, allows it.
And even more, we must be absolutely certain that whatever happens to us is absolutely the most perfect, the most profitable, the best, here and now, for us, that can happen, according to God's inscrutable wisdom. So we can repeat with the psalmist, in every circumstance of our life: "In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him." (Ps 95:4).
- Rev. Dr. Luca Vona
