Saturday in the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, September 30, 2023

Luke 9, 43-45

While they were all amazed at his every deed, Jesus said to his disciples, “Pay attention to what I am telling you. The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.” But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it, and they were afraid to ask him about this saying.

Momentous events precede that recorded here by St. Luke, used for today’s Gospel Reading.  In Luke 9, 12-17, the Lord Jesus feeds the five thousand.  From reading St. John’s account of this miracle we know that the Lord delivered his Bread of Life teaching at this time.  Following this, in Luke 18-21, the Lord asks the Apostles who they think he is, and Luke records Peter as saying, very simply, “The Christ of God”.  Following this, in Luke 9, 22-27, the Lord for the first time teaches his Apostles that he will be arrested, killed, and rise again.  Coupled with this he teaches that those who persevere in following him will attain eternal life.  In Luke 9, 28-36, the Evangelist gives his account of the Lord’s Transfiguration.  In Luke 9, 37-42 we learn how Jesus exorcised a demon from a child in a very dramatic scene.  And this brings us to the present Reading.  Throughout this chapter, the Lord has established himself as both divine, with power over the natural and the supernatural worlds, and that his divinity is cloaked in human flesh so that he can suffer and die — and then rise from the dead.  If we include the teaching of his coming Death at the end of the Transfiguration, which Luke omits but which Matthew and Mark tell of, during this short period the Lord has told them three times that his Death is near.  He hammers at this in order to warn the Apostles that his coming journey to Jerusalem will not end in reestablishing the kingdom of David but in what will seem a catastrophe.  This is the meaning of Luke’s pointing out that, “while they were all amazed at his every deed, Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Pay attention to what I am telling you’.”

“But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it.”  What he was telling them openly and with assurance so starkly contradicted their expectations of him as the Messiah of Israel that they dismissed it so that it left not a mark on their thinking.  The scribes, the Pharisees, and the priests had put the picture of their Messiah in the minds of the people and reinforced it continually.  Not even the words of the Messiah himself could now persuade them otherwise.  Only after he rose from the dead and taught them did they accept them: “O foolish and slow of heart to believe in all things, which the prophets have spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and so, to enter into his glory?” (Luke 24, 25-26).  

When we read the Lord’s words about his coming suffering and Death we ought to think of how he felt when he was speaking them.  He was looking at his Apostles, whom he loved, including Judas, and thinking of how they would abandon him and deny him.  His Heart must have weighed so heavily within him as he spoke.  He was going to do this in his love for them, a love they could not begin to understand.  He was looking down through the ages at us as well.  Let us return his love and never abandon or deny him with our thoughts and actions.