Friday in the 26th Week of Ordinary Time, October 6, 2023

Luke 10:13-16

Jesus said to them, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. And as for you, Capernaum, ‘Will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to the netherworld.’ Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

We see in this account preserved by St. Luke that the Lord Jesus speaks very harshly to the cities where he had spent quite a lot of time preaching and healing.  Certainly he spent more time in these cities, crouched around the Sea of Galilee, than he did in Jerusalem.  But the citizens of these places did not see this as the tremendous favor that it was and hardly changed their lives at all in answer to his preaching.  The Lord responds to this effective rejection, as he continues his path to Jerusalem for the last time.  He will not return to them ever again for he is going  now to die on the Cross, but he issues a warning to them.  It is also something more than a warning, for he is God and knows all things, including the destinies of men and women.

For comparison, we can look at how the Lord pronounced woe on an earlier occasion in Luke’s Gospel.  Luke 6, 24-26: “Woe to you who are rich: for you have your consolation. Woe to you who are filled: for you shall hunger. Woe to you who now laugh: for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when men shall bless you: for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”  We notice that those who live complacently in this world and do not share their riches or repent in grief from their sinful lives shall be punished in a way that fits their sins.  This is true justice.  They are undeserving of mercy for they showed none during the time of their testing on earth.  The Lord’s use of the word “woe” here indicates that he knows how the end to which such people shall come: “You shall hunger”, “You shall mourn and weep”.  This is not, Unless you turn from your sins you will be destroyed.  The Lord knows that they will not.  Applying his manner of speaking here to his pronouncement of woe for those who dwell in the cities he has named, their future appears bleak.

What the Lord says to Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida also brings to mind how he wept over Jerusalem in Luke 19:42–44: “If you also had known, and that in this your day, the things that are to your peace: but now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you: and your enemies shall cast a trench about you and compass you round and straiten you on every side, and beat you flat to the ground, and your children who are in you. And they shall not leave in you a stone upon a stone: because you have not known the time of your visitation.”  The things that are for the peace of the people of Jerusalem and the other places the Lord visited were “hidden” from them the way that the starving Lazarus was hidden from the rich man: They chose preoccupation with the things of this life, and self-indulgence to the Gospel and repentance.

The time of our visitation is now, and we have only this day and the rest of the days of our lives to turn to God.  And let us pray for all around us to convert while there is time.