Daily Reading
First Reading
Baruch 1:15-22
And you shall say: The Lord our God is in the right, but there is open shame on us today, on the people of Judah, on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and on our kings, our rulers, our priests, our prophets, and our ancestors, because we have sinned before the Lord. We have disobeyed him, and have not heeded the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in the statutes of the Lord that he set before us.
From the time when the Lord brought our ancestors out of the land of Egypt until today, we have been disobedient to the Lord our God, and we have been negligent, in not heeding his voice.
So to this day there have clung to us the calamities and the curse that the Lord declared through his servant Moses at the time when he brought our ancestors out of the land of Egypt to give to us a land flowing with milk and honey.
We did not listen to the voice of the Lord our God in all the words of the prophets whom he sent to us, but all of us followed the intent of our own wicked hearts by serving other gods and doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord our God.
Psalm
Psalm 79:1b-2, 3-5, 8-9
O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
they have defiled your holy temple;
they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.
They have given the bodies of your servants
to the birds of the air for food,
the flesh of your faithful
to the wild animals of the earth.
They have poured out their blood like water
all around Jerusalem,
and there was no one to bury them.
We have become a taunt to our neighbors,
mocked and derided by those around us.
How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever?
Will your jealous wrath burn like fire?
Do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors;
let your compassion come speedily to meet us,
for we are brought very low.
Help us, O God of our salvation,
for the glory of your name;
deliver us, and forgive our sins,
for your name’s sake.
Gospel Reading
Luke 10:13-16
“Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.
But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you.
And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades.
Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
Reflection
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus passes judgment on towns who have failed to believe in him and his signs: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.”
This Gospel and the verses leading up to it also contain a word for us. What is the first thing that the minister should do upon entering a city? “Cure the sick in it.” Christ is Soter, healer of both body and spirit. So many of the saints were healers; so many of the apparitions of the Blessed Mother led to healing.
Another great task of the Church is to proclaim, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” The Church is an announcing, proclaiming, evangelizing organism. What we proclaim is that, in Jesus Christ, a whole new way of ordering things has appeared, that God, in Christ, is drawing all things to himself. The great ordering principles of the world—money, fame, power, sex, pleasure—are overthrown. A new King has come, a new way of organizing life. Love, inclusion, compassion, nonviolence, forgiveness, especially of enemies—this is now the way sanctioned by God.