Daily Gospel Reflection - Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Daily Gospel Reflection - Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
September 1, 2021
Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Lk 4:31-37
After Jesus left the synagogue, he entered the house of Simon.
Simon’s mother-in-law was afflicted with a severe fever,
and they interceded with him about her.
He stood over her, rebuked the fever, and it left her.
She got up immediately and waited on them.
At sunset, all who had people sick with various diseases brought them to him.
He laid his hands on each of them and cured them.
And demons also came out from many, shouting, “You are the Son of God.”
But he rebuked them and did not allow them to speak
because they knew that he was the Christ.
At daybreak, Jesus left and went to a deserted place.
The crowds went looking for him, and when they came to him,
they tried to prevent him from leaving them.
But he said to them, “To the other towns also
I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God,
because for this purpose I have been sent.”
And he was preaching in the synagogues of Judea.
Source: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, in our Gospel today, we see Jesus in action. He is always hurrying from place to place, on the go. Today, Luke gives us a sort of "day in the life" of Jesus. And it is quite a day! Our Gospel opens just after the dramatic expulsion of a demon in the Capernaum synagogue. And after entering the house of Simon, Jesus cures his mother-in-law, and then the entire town comes to his door. Jesus spends the whole evening curing presumably hundreds who were variously afflicted.
In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, in an attempt to make Jesus more palatable to rationalists and "realists," theologians put great stress on Jesus’ preaching, especially his ethical teaching.
But this is not the Jesus that Luke presents. Rather, he is a healer—Soter, rendered in Latin as salvator, which just means "the bearer of the salus" or health. Jesus is portrayed as a healer, a savior. In him, divinity and humanity have come together; in him, the divine life and divine power are breaking through. God’s deepest intentions for his beloved creatures appears—what God plans for us in the kingdom to come is now historically anticipated.
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