Daily Mass Gospel Reflection- Birth Marks

Word on Fire Ministry ^ | 9.6.22 | Bishop Robert Barron

[MurphsLaw]

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 6:12–19

Friends, after Jesus names his twelve Apostles in today’s Gospel,
he heals a multitude of people.
And that multitude represents us,
for we all stand in need of the Savior’s healing touch.

We are made for love and connection and justice and nonviolence,
but at every turn and in every way we are twisted in the direction of hatred,
separation, injustice, and violence.
We are, as St. Augustine put it, wandering in the land of dissimilitude and in the grip of the libido dominandi.
The contemporary philosopher René Girard has reminded us that all of our social arrangements
are marked by scapegoating and oppression.

The human race is best characterized as a dysfunctional spiritual family,
all of us having been marked from birth by the effects of sin.
Sin has found its way into every aspect of human life, personally and institutionally.
We would be hopelessly naïve to think otherwise.

And so we need not just a philosopher or social theorist
or political activist or military hero,
but a Savior, someone who can break into our dysfunction from the outside
and heal us.

[MurphsLaw]

+++Jesus departed to the mountain to pray,
and he spent the night in prayer to God.
When day came, he called his
disciples to himself,
and from them he chose Twelve, whom
he also named Apostles:
Simon, whom he named Peter, and his
brother Andrew,
James, John, Philip, Bartholomew,
Matthew, Thomas, James the son of
Alphaeus,
Simon who was called a Zealot,
and Judas the son of James,
and Judas Iscariot,
who became a traitor.

And he came down with them and stood
on a stretch of level ground.
A great crowd of his disciples and a
large number of the people
from all Judea and Jerusalem
and the coastal region of Tyre and
Sidon
came to hear him and to be healed of
their diseases;
and even those who were tormented by
unclean spirits were cured.
Everyone in the crowd sought to
touch him
because power came forth from him
and healed them all.+++