Daily Reading
First Reading
1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13
But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Psalm
Psalm 33:2-3, 4-5, 12 and 22
Praise the Lord with the lyre;
make melody to him with the harp of ten strings.
Sing to him a new song;
play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.
For the word of the Lord is upright,
and all his work is done in faithfulness.
He loves righteousness and justice;
the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.
Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord,
the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
even as we hope in you.
Gospel Reading
Luke 7:31-35
“To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not weep.’
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”
Reflection
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus observes that the people of his generation criticize him as “a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”
Jesus came as God’s own self into our dysfunctional world. He came to bring the light of God’s presence and love to the far country of sin and death. Accordingly, he went to the poor, the disabled, the marginalized, the forgotten, those crippled by sin.
He came to bring the ordo of God into a disordered world. He came as the keynote to tune up a cacophonous universe. And thus the proponents of disorder and the producers of the cacophony sought to destroy him.
The Church is the mystical body of Jesus, the living organism that makes present Christ’s mind and will in the world. It is his love made flesh throughout the ages, his hands and feet and eyes and heart. We are all, through baptism, members of that body. Our purpose is his purpose—to carry the nonviolent and forgiving love of God to a hungry world; to go to the darkest places, to the far country in quest of sinners; to be both judge (sign of contradiction) and bearer of salvation.