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Contemplating today's Gospel

Today's Gospel + homily (in 300 words)

View saints: Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels
Wednesday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time
View 1st Reading and Psalm
1st Reading (Job 9:1-12.14-16): Job answered his friends and said: I know well that it is so; but how can a man be justified before God? Should one wish to contend with him, he could not answer him once in a thousand times. God is wise in heart and mighty in strength; who has withstood him and remained unscathed? He removes the mountains before they know it; he overturns them in his anger. He shakes the earth out of its place, and the pillars beneath it tremble. He commands the sun, and it rises not; he seals up the stars. He alone stretches out the heavens and treads upon the crests of the sea. He made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south; he does great things past finding out, marvelous things beyond reckoning. Should he come near me, I see him not; should he pass by, I am not aware of him; should he seize me forcibly, who can say him nay? Who can say to him, ‘What are you doing?’. How much less shall I give him any answer, or choose out arguments against him! Even though I were right, I could not answer him, but should rather beg for what was due me. If I appealed to him and he answered my call, I could not believe that he would hearken to my words.
Responsorial Psalm: 87
R/. Let my prayer come before you, Lord.
Daily I call upon you, o Lord; to you I stretch out my hands. Will you work wonders for the dead? Will the shades arise to give you thanks?

Do they declare your mercy in the grave, your faithfulness among those who have perished? Are your wonders made known in the darkness, or your justice in the land of oblivion?

But I, o Lord, cry out to you; with my morning prayer I wait upon you. Why, o Lord, do you reject me; why hide from me your face?
Versicle before the Gospel (Phil 3:8-9): Alleluia. I consider all things so much rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him. Alleluia.
Gospel text (Lk 9:57-62): As Jesus and his disciples were proceeding on their journey, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus answered him, "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head." And to another he said, "Follow me." But he replied, "Lord, let me go first and bury my father." But he answered him, "Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God." And another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home." Jesus answered him, "No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.

“Follow me”

Fr. Lluc TORCAL Monk of Santa Maria de Poblet (Santa Maria de Poblet, Tarragona, Spain)

Today, the Gospel invites us to reflect on a central point of our faith with great clarity and no less insistence: the radical following of Jesus. "I will follow you wherever you go" (Lk 9:57). With what simplicity of expression can one propose something capable of completely changing a person's life! "Follow me" (Lk 9:59). Words of the Lord that admit no excuses, delays, conditions, or betrayals...

Christian life is this radical following of Jesus. Radical, not only because its entire duration desires to be under the guidance of the Gospel (because it encompasses, therefore, the entire duration of our lives), but—above all—because all its aspects—from the most extraordinary to the most ordinary—desire to be and must be a manifestation of the Spirit of Jesus Christ that animates us. Indeed, from Baptism, ours is no longer the life of just any ordinary person: we carry the life of Christ within us! Through the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts, it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. This is the Christian life, because it is a life filled with Christ, because Christ flows from its deepest roots: this is the life we are called to live.

When the Lord came into the world, although "every human race had its place, He did not have it: He found no place among men (...), except in a manger, among livestock and animals, and among the simplest and most innocent people. This is why He says: 'Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’" (Saint Jerome). The Lord will find a place among us if, like John the Baptist, we allow Him to increase and ourselves to decrease, that is, if we allow Him who already lives in us to grow, being pliable and docile to His Spirit, the source of all humility and innocence.

Thoughts on Today's Gospel

  • “The consent to grace depends much more on grace than on the will, while the resistance to grace depends upon the will only. So sweet is God's hand.” (Saint Francis de Sales)

  • “God imparts unto us the motion of its power without hindering that of our will by adjusting his power to his sweetness and the freedom of our will.” (Benedict XVI)

  • “Man's vocation to eternal life does not suppress, but actually reinforces, his duty to put into action in this world the energies and means received from the Creator to serve justice and peace.” (Catechism Of The Catholic Church, Nº 2820)

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