Daily Gospel Reflection – Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
June 07,2022
Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Mt 5:13-16
Jesus said to his disciples:
“You are the salt of the earth.
But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?
It is no longer good for anything
but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the light of the world.
A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.
Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket;
it is set on a lampstand,
where it gives light to all in the house.
Just so, your light must shine before others,
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your heavenly Father.”
*United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus calls his followers salt and light, thus exhorting them to evangelize their culture.
The theme of Jesus’ "inaugural address" is conversion: "The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel." And the motif of his final words is mission: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations." The Christian life is lived in between, and under the conditioning of, these two imperatives.
Having been seized by the beauty of revelation, our only proper response is a change of life and a commitment to become a missionary on behalf of what we have seen. In the scriptural tradition, no vision or experience of God is ever given for the edification of the visionary; rather, it is given for the sake of mission. Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Peter, and Paul are visionaries because they are missionaries.
When Jesus crucified and risen is not proclaimed, a beige and unthreatening Catholicism emerges, a thought system that is, at best, an echo of the environing culture. Peter Maurin, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, said that the Church has taken its own dynamite and placed it in hermetically sealed containers and sat on the lid.
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