Daily Gospel Reflection - Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
August 31,2022
Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Lk 4:38-44
Jesus went down to Capernaum, a town of Galilee.
He taught them on the sabbath,
and they were astonished at his teaching
because he spoke with authority.
In the synagogue there was a man with the spirit of an unclean demon,
and he cried out in a loud voice,
“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are–the Holy One of God!”
Jesus rebuked him and said, “Be quiet! Come out of him!”
Then the demon threw the man down in front of them
and came out of him without doing him any harm.
They were all amazed and said to one another,
“What is there about his word?
For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits,
and they come out.”
And news of him spread everywhere in the surrounding region.
*United States Conference of Catholic
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, in our Gospel, 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 Peter’s mother-in-law, and then the entire town comes to his door. He 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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