Daily Gospel Reflection – Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time - Gospel: Mt 8:1-4
June 25, 2021
Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Mt 8:1-4
When Jesus came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him.
And then a leper approached, did him homage, and said,
“Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.”
He stretched out his hand, touched him, and said,
“I will do it. Be made clean.”
His leprosy was cleansed immediately.
Then Jesus said to him, “See that you tell no one,
but go show yourself to the priest,
and offer the gift that Moses prescribed;
that will be proof for them.”
Source: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, in our Gospel today, we see Jesus healing a leper. The man who knelt before Jesus and begged for a cure was not simply concerned about his medical condition; he was an Israelite in exile from the temple—and hence he was a very apt symbol of the general condition of scattered, exiled, wandering Israel. In curing him, Jesus was, symbolically speaking, gathering the tribes and bringing them back to the worship of the true God.
That’s why he tells the man, “Go show yourself to the priest.” In other words, go back to the Temple from which you’ve been away for so long. The leper here stands, not so much for the socially ostracized, but for the one who has wandered away from right worship, the one who is no longer able or willing to worship the true God.
What’s so important about worship? To worship is to order the whole of your life toward the living God, and, in doing so, to become interiorly and exteriorly rightly ordered. To worship is to signal to yourself what your life is finally about. It’s nothing that God needs, but it is very much something that we need.
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