Saturday in the 26th Week of Ordinary Time, October 7, 2023

The Memorial of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary

Luke 10, 17-24

The seventy-two disciples returned rejoicing and said to Jesus, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.” Jesus said, “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky. Behold, I have given you the power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.” At that very moment he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”  Turning to the disciples in private he said, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”

“Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.”  St. Luke records the return of the seventy-two disciples to the Lord after he had sent them out on the way to Jerusalem.  Luke seems to confuse the episode of the sending out and return of the Twelve Apostles with that of the seventy-two, but the meaning of his teaching is not affected.  Now, according to Luke, the seventy-two disciples was their power over the demons through the invocation of the name of Jesus.  All their lives these men had been afflicted with and often succumbed to the demons: the demons had power over them.  But now, in the name of Jesus, they had power over the demons and could save others from them.  “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky.”  The tense of the main (Greek) verb is imperfect, not perfect, so “I was observing Satan fall from heaven” is a better literal, translation, but better English requires: “I saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.”  The use of the imperfect indicates that the Lord saw him fall all the way down into hell.  Satan fell like “a flash of lightning”: with a burst of light and in the time it takes for an eye to blink.  One moment Satan was in heaven and the next he was gone completely with no sign left to show that he was ever there.  The Lord teaches here his own pre-existence and his Father’s omnipotence.  The Lord is explaining to the disciples about his own power over Satan: he has always surpassed the evil one in power and he always will.  It is as though the Lord shows that as Satan was driven from heaven, now, through the work of the disciples, he was being driven from earth.  “I saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” is one of the most striking lines ever uttered or written down.

“Behold, I have given you the power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you.”  We should understand “serpents and scorpions” as those who do the devil’s bidding and plot against the Church and her ministers, and this applies as well to all those who seek to do the will of Almighty God in their lives.  “Nothing will harm you”, that is, the devil can only hurt you if you let him.  “Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”  The wicked spirits are subject to you on earth, but you will live on earth for only a brief time: you will live in heaven forever.  Their name “are written in heaven”, as though in the Book of Life.  Revelation 3, 5: “He who shall overcome shall thus be clothed in white garments: and I will not blot out his name out of the Book of Life. And I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.”  This “book” is the foreknowledge of Almighty God of who shall be saved.

“I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”  This verse and the next sound very much the way the Lord talks in the Gospel of John.  This is the Lord’s prayer to the Father, and it is to be expected that he speaks to him in a way distinct from how he speaks to his Apostles.  “No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”  Matthew 11, 27 also records this teaching, placing it just after the Lord pronounces woe upon Capernaum and the other towns of Galilee.  The Lord speaks similarly in John 6, 46: “Not that any man has seen the Father: but he who is of God, he has seen the Father.”  The Lord is teaching a very deep mystery about his life with the Father.  The only one who “knows” the Father is the Son, who is “in the bosom of the Father”.  The One who knows the Father intimately is the only one who can reveal him to us, and he does this not through a direct infusion of knowledge into each human person but through the Church which he has established.  

“Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”  The Lord compares his disciples, who are very ordinary folks, to prophets and kings, and reveals to them how much more blessed they are since they have looked upon the “Image of the invisible God”, the One “who is the Firstborn of every creature . . . in [whom] were created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominations, or principalities, or powers. All things were created by him and in him, [who is] before all: and by him all things consist” (Colossians 1, 15-17).  He, Jesus of Nazareth, is the One of whom the Prophets spoke long ago, and for whom kings in their glory pined.  And blessed are we who know him and yearn to see with our eyes when he comes again: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and on the last day I shall rise out of the earth, and I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God, whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom” (Job 19, 25-27. 

On this feast of our Lady of the Holy Rosary we honor her who, before and other and more than any other, “treads” upon the “serpents and scorpions” of the netherworld and crushes them with her heel.  Her holy name is written first in the Book of Life.  She, the little one, the Handmaid of the Lord first received the revelation of the mysteries hidden from the creation of the world.  It was to her, first and foremost, that the knowledge of the Son of God was given through the Angel Gabriel.  And most blessed is she who not only beheld the Son of God with her eyes, but carried him in her womb, gave birth to him, held him in her arms, fed him with her breasts,  heard him with her ears, and loved him fully with her heart.