MONDAY OF THE TWENTY-THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

6th September 2021

Colossians 1:24-2:3;

Ps 62:6-7.9;

Luke 6:6-11

BEING INSTRUMENTS OF THE MISSION OF GOD

In the first reading saint Paul writes to the Colossians reminding them how committed he is to the mission he received from God: to nourish them in faith and in love and to manifest the glory and love of God among them in words and deeds at all time. The purpose of saint Paul is to help the community to come to the full knowledge of God and his divine knowledge and wisdom so that they might live according to God’s laws in their daily lives. As we can see, Paul does not make his mission a personal gift for his own benefit but rather he wants it to be for the profit of others and always remembering that the gift attached to his mission is from God, not from his own initiative.

How are we directing our gifts and good actions? Are they for the benefit of our brothers and sisters or we prefer to make them for our own interest and for our own glory? How often are our brothers and sisters benefiting from our work, our talents and words? Whenever we put ourselves first in our mission on Earth, we exclude God as source of the good we do and place our ego where God was supposed to be; such scenario does not guarantee the success of our mission because we feed our pride and replace God’s glory with our own effort, forgetting that whatever we are and have come from God for the benefit of our brothers and sisters and we are just instruments of the mission of God.

In the holy Gospel according to Luke the topic of fulfilling the mission of God continues as Jesus continues to faithfully carry out his purpose on Earth, and at this time He faces opposition from the Scribes and Pharisees who in the name of tradition they intend to stop Jesus from fulfilling his mission: restoring health to the man with the withered hand. With great courage Jesus challenges the tradition for the sake of welfare of that man.

Jesus teaches us to respect the dignity of humans above everything, including our own traditions, habits, customs and even laws. All these are to be at the service of man and his dignity. Actually, this is the core of mission of Jesus: to restore the dignity of man, given by God, because man was created in the image and likeness of God. Our mission as well in whatever we do should be based on the restoration of the dignity of man.

This powerful message of Jesus makes us reflect on our lives, if what we do in the church, in our families, in our working places, in the society, it contributes to the mission of God for the benefit of man and his dignity; may we think twice before we carry out an action that we know that is against the dignity of man, and therefore against the mission which we were entrusted by God himself as mere instruments.

“I ask you, is it lawful on sabbath... to save life or to destroy it?”