Daily Gospel Reflection – Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 10, 2023
Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Mt 9:18-26
While Jesus was speaking, an official came forward,
knelt down before him, and said,
""My daughter has just died.
But come, lay your hand on her, and she will live.""
Jesus rose and followed him, and so did his disciples.
A woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him
and touched the tassel on his cloak.
She said to herself, ""If only I can touch his cloak, I shall be cured.""
Jesus turned around and saw her, and said,
""Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you.""
And from that hour the woman was cured.
When Jesus arrived at the official's house
and saw the flute players and the crowd who were making a commotion,
he said, ""Go away! The girl is not dead but sleeping.""
And they ridiculed him.
When the crowd was put out, he came and took her by the hand,
and the little girl arose.
And news of this spread throughout all that land.
*United States Conference of Catholic
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus demonstrates his miraculous power to heal the sick and raise the dead. He cured a woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years who came up behind him and touched the tassel on his cloak. And he took the hand of the official’s daughter and raised her from the sleep of death.
Christianity is, first and foremost, a religion of the concrete and not the abstract. It takes its power not from a general religious consciousness, not from an ethical conviction, not from a comfortable abstraction, but from the person of Jesus Christ.
It is Christ—in his uncompromising call to repentance, his unforgettable gestures of healing, his unique and disturbing praxis of forgiveness, his provocative nonviolence, and especially his movement from godforsaken death to shalom-radiating Resurrection—that moves the believer to change of life and gift of self.
And it is the unique Christ—depicted vividly in the poetry of Dante, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the sermons of Augustine, the stained-glass windows of the Sainte Chapelle, and the sacred ballet of the liturgy—who speaks transformatively to hearts and souls across the Christian centuries.
This true God is one who does not insist on hoarding power or defining himself over-and-against. This true God is love, is a communion, a sharing, a family.
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