Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
As we continue to count our weeks of walking with the Lord in this 28th week of Ordinary Time, we continue to read through St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Although this letter concerns the practical issue of circumcision (as not necessary for Christians), Paul’s approach to the topic gives us insight on other matters as well. In today’s excerpt, Paul discusses Abraham’s two sons, Ishmael (born of Hagar) and Isaac (born of his wife Sarah). When all hope seemed lost that Sarah would ever bear a child, Sarah convinced Abraham to conceive a child with her servant Hagar. While this might seem strange to us, this was actually how fertility problems were surmounted during this time period. Abraham and Sarah should have had more trust in God’s promise of descendants.
Regardless, however, Paul’s reason for addressing this is to point out that Isaac and all of Abraham’s descendants through him were part of the fulfillment of a covenant. They stand as evidence that God keeps his promises - - even when the human beings on the other side of the covenant (like Abraham) try to fulfill them in their own way.
Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham. He is the descendant who offers his life, his death, and his resurrection for us all. And in so doing, Christ offers us freedom. Our sin is taken away through Christ’s sacrifice. The Father loves us so much that he sends his only Son, and that Son Jesus loves us so much that he lays down his life for us.
This man, Jesus, addresses us in today’s gospel passage from Luke. To the crowd who heard him and to us who hear this passage today, we are faced with the truth that we sometimes turn down this opportunity for freedom. Jesus here criticizes the people who fail to recognize God in their midst. Jonah preached to the Ninevites, justly accusing them of their sins, and they repented. The queen of the South traveled to see the great King Solomon, and yet Jesus is a much greater king than Solomon.
The people’s failure to recognize Jesus as God in their midst, come to save them from their sins, resulted in his death on the cross. Despite all of our best efforts, we also often fail to recognize Jesus as God in our midst. It is sometimes hard to keep God as our focus as we go about our daily lives, and so it is no surprise that we often make choices that in fact go against our own freedom offered to us by Jesus in his fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. Even when we want to choose the good, we often sin instead. And we are not always eager to repent of these sins and change our ways either.
This is our challenge for the everyday, for the “ordinary” of Ordinary Time. We must seek at all times to choose freedom. We must embrace the opportunity for freedom by recognizing Jesus in each thought and action of our day. We must also identify when we fail to choose freedom (the freedom of serving God) and instead choose sin (serving ourselves), and then we must repent of this. This is not an impossible challenge; the victory is already won for us in Christ Jesus. We must simply agree to submit – to put ourselves under Christ’s mission and to accept the opportunity for freedom.
- Maria Morrow