A reading of the Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke. On a Sabbath day, our lord came to teach in the synagogue where there was a man whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the pharisees were on the watch to see if Jesus would perform a cure on the Sabbath so that they could find a charge against him. You understand that performing a cure would be work, and of course, it was absolutely forbidden to do work on the Sabbath. Ergo, if our Lord performed a miracle on the Sabbath, he was guilty of working and therefore guilty of violating the law.
There's nothing wrong with the logic. The truth of the matter is very absurd. But anyway, that's what they were about, to see whether they could catch him in order to launch a charge against him. Jesus knew their thoughts and said to the man whose hand was withered, get up and stand out there in front. The man rose and remained standing.
Now Jesus then said to them, the people, I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil? To preserve life or to destroy it. He looked around and said to the man, stretch out your hand. The man did it, and his hand was perfectly restored. At this, the onlookers became frenzied, and began asking one another what could be done to Jesus.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. Here we have another illustration of human nature at its worst, which includes all of us. All of us.
Notice you're talking here about the leaders of the people. Their one concern with Jesus was to catch him in order that they could make a legal charge against him and eliminate him. That's one way of hand handling an opposition, eliminate it off with their heads. Their one concern was getting rid of Jesus because he was a threat, and not merely a theoretical threat. This was actual.
His fame had gone on out through the North and the South Of Palestine. No question of it. It had reached as far as the sea in the West and beyond the Jordan in the East. That we're sure of. We're absolutely sure of that.
He he may have come from a nondescript little old town up there in the North. He may have been practically an anonymous son of a carpenter from the same little old town up there. But when we're talking about Jesus speaking in this synagogue, you're talking about a man who was notable, and he was a threat to the status quo. A very serious threat. And these good men called the scribes and the pharisees and the lawyers, which means those who were learned in the law, the Jewish law.
And remember, the Romans left them alone. They could run the show just as they wanted. The one thing the Jews couldn't do was to execute the death penalty. That had that was reserved for the Romans. But for the rest, the Romans left the Jews free with their own law to do as they saw fit.
Now the Jews had a tremendous respect for the Sabbath, and don't underrate that. Because today we have very little respect for the Sabbath. And they still do. I remember one of the first things that struck me when I went to Saint Charles College, that was that school. It is now gone.
It become a retirement home where young men started their long career for to study for the priesthood. And I met some young boys, young men from Connecticut. And I was absolutely astonished to hear how they picked up their spending money by going around on a Saturday morning and lighting the gas stoves for orthodox Jews. They wouldn't so much as light their gas stove because that was work, and they were not going to violate the Sabbath with work. Therefore, they paid these very illustrious young men to go around and light their gas stoves.
Now you'll say this is carrying things to extremes, is it? Or isn't it? I'm only saying this the fact that the Jews in our Lord's time took that commandment very seriously to honor the Lord's day. And one of them was to do no work, not even to touch a shovel. Because they said if you touch the shovel, you may be tempted to use it.
You must eliminate temptation. Now there's nothing wrong in that idea of eliminating temptation. Every time we say the Lord's Prayer, we say lead us not into temptation. But let's keep our feet on the ground. Where did these good Jews, the Pharisees, the scribes and I'm not some of them our lord said, you you're a bunch of hypocrites.
He said that. I'm not saying it. But they did have a very decent, maybe an exaggerated concept of the Sabbath. You can't say that we have an exaggerated concept of the Sabbath. We have seven days in the work week now.
But, anyway, remember that commandment still holds, I should keep holy the Lord's day. But you see, here's what's wrong here. There's a lot that's right here, remember. Our Lord doesn't rebuke them for their fidelity to the law. What he does rebuke them for is their interpretation, their application of it.
That is, the absurdity to which they reduced it. Because as he says, you see, notice, they don't answer his question. Our Lord asks a question which they don't answer. He says, is it better or is it right to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath day? No.
They don't answer that question. That's of course, they how could they? They couldn't say it's that you should do evil on the Sabbath day, could they? That's absolutely impossible. And if they said, well, you're supposed to do good, then their argument's gone completely.
So they don't answer it. They just ignore it. And they had to. They couldn't possibly answer that question of our Lord. He had them nailed.
And so, what follows? Now, what's wrong here? What's wrong here can be so easily wrong with our own religious life. I've said this many times, I'll say it many times and I hope again. It can't be emphasized.
We can be religiosity is the enemy of religion. We can lose ourselves in the things that we call religion. We can lose And by losing, I mean we lose God. We can lose God in our daily living. We can get so immersed in all the things that we have to do.
Notice I say have to do. I mean that. In other words, it's the will of God that I do it. And I can't take any pride in not doing it. I'll be doing wrong.
Because if there's anything I'm sure of is that that we have to fulfill our duties in life. That may sound Kantian, but I'm all for it. And you don't have to look around too hard to find what that is. Most often we can't find it because we don't want to see it. It's very inconvenient and embarrassing, this duty thing business.
But I know nothing better than that we fulfill our duty or our vocation. But in actually doing that, in being a good father, a good mother, a good provider, a good clerk, a good manager in an office, a good bricklayer, a good grave digger, whatever, I can become so immersed in trying to do that job well. And and and and in providing for the future and avoiding them the hazards and saving my kids from this and saving myself from that, that I forget God. I say I'm doing this for God and forget all about him. I went to a Christian Brothers School for about seven years.
Don't blame anything you see on them. But the first thing that the first class of the year, the teacher appointed a monitor, and gave and this was the first grade all the way up through the fourth year high school. And the monitor chosen by the teacher was given a bell and a book. And we began class with a prayer by the monitor. And then halfway through the period, thirty minutes later he would ring that little old bell.
Then he would say, no matter what was going on, thirty minutes it was his job to ring the bell, everything stopped. And he said, let us recall the presence of God. Then he would open his little book and read the prayer appropriate to that particular session. And then we would say, Hail Mary, and then pick up the class again. Every class was like that.
That was a Catholic school. What can you do better than remembering the presence of God? What are you living for? These good Jews, and I say some there were good pharisees, there were good scribes, there were good so called lawyers of of the law. Good men, men who did put the law of God before everything, and they jealously preserved it.
They not all of them were a bunch of hypocrites. We know that from the text. I'm not theorizing at all. But you see, they had lost the substance for the doggone shadow. And we can do the very same unless we recall the presence of God and what it's all about.
What is it all about? And we come to the penny catechism. Why did God make you? You. To know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next.
That's your vocation. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.