3rd Sunday Ordinary Time - Year C

Be Strong and United

This week’s readings invite us to face the future united and strong.  Reading the word of God and interpreting it for life are the best means to meet this challenge.

In the 1st reading (Nehemiah 8:1-4,5-6,8-10) we find the emphasis on the power of the word of God to: (1) make God’s will known; (2) touch and change human hearts; (3) rally the people to be renewed in their resolve to listen to God’s will.  As Ezra read and interpreted the law for the people, their mood noticeably shifted from one of attentive affirmation and adoration to one of sorrow and weeping. As God’s word is read, the word reveals not only God’s goodness and love but also the failures and sinfulness of the one who listens.  Nevertheless, Ezra did not permit the people to wallow in regret.  Rather, he encouraged them to dwell not on  their sinful selves but in  the redeeming and liberating word of God, and so to replace their regretting with rejoicing. 

In the Gospel, (Lk 1:1-4;4:14-21), Jesus, like Ezra, reads aloud and interprets the word of God for his contemporaries in Nazareth.  He declared that the words he read were being fulfilled.  His words,  the words of Isaiah, were the words of good news, healing and liberation from every form of enslavement such as sin, injustice, slavery, poverty, illness, oppression.  Jesus did not merely promise “pie in the sky when you die”;  on the contrary he demanded that through the sharing of the rich with the poor, there be daily bread on the table, here and now.

In today’s second reading (1Cor. 12:12-30) Paul provides the praying assembly with the motivation for all their efforts at liberation – we are one body; we share one baptism; we are all given to drink of the same Spirit;  we, though many, are one; we, though with different social status, different ethnicity, different gifts, different functions, are all one body in Christ.  It is this very oneness that must move us to action, for when one of the members of the body of Christ suffers, all are affected.  Therefore, each one of us is responsible for the freedom and dignity of all of us.

Let us hope that the word of God, which we hear expounded today, might move us to an evolution from regret and repentance to a joyful realization and celebration of the healing, liberating mercies of God.