The Solemnity of St. Joseph, Thursday, March 19, 2026

Matthew 1, 1, 16; 18–21; 24

Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.

Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. 

Above all else, St. Joseph was a man of obedience.  He was also a man who sought the will of God so that he could be obedient to it.  If he had not been, he would have acted quickly when he learned, from her lips, that she had conceived by the Holy Spirit.  Whether he took her into his home as his wife or left her as knowing his unworthiness of the mystery of the Incarnation, he would have acted quickly, assuming that his will was God’s also.  But he pondered and he prayed.  The counsel of the angel in his dream decided him, and he obeyed.  The obedience could not have come easily because his feeling of unworthiness persisted, but he obeyed anyway.  The obedience was not a single act performed once, either, but one which he continued to perform throughout his life.  

St. Joseph, then, is a wondrous model of seeking out the Lord’s will and adhering to it.  In this, he imitates the Prophet Jeremiah, who was called as a youth to prophesy to the Israelites.  At the time of his call, he presented to the Lord good, solid reasons why he should not prophesy, among them that he was too young.  But the Lord insisted and off Jeremiah went to do the Lord’s work.  He did so throughout the rest of his days despite his own doubts, imprisonment, threats, and beatings.  Towards the end of his life, after the fall of Jerusalem, he remained behind to console the Israelites not taken into Israel.  A band of them approached him, led by a man named Azariah, and asked him what was God’s will for them.  Azariah, speaking for the group, promised to obey whatever God told Jeremiah (cf. Jeremiah 42, 2-3).  Instead of giving his own opinion, which must have been tempting, the Prophet prayed for ten days, and the end of which God spoke to him.  Jeremiah then told Azariah and the others that God did not want them to go as refugees into Egypt but to stay in the land of Judah, where he would prosper them.  However, Azariah had made up his own mind that he was going to Egypt.  “You lie!” he accused the Prophet (Jeremiah 43, 2).  He then made up a silly accusation that Jeremiah’s secretary Baruch had turned him against them.  We are told that he took his band to Egypt despite what the Prophet had told them, and there they disappear from history.

We are all tempted from time to time to sidestep God’s will after we have ascertained it when it does not accord with what our “gut” tells us, or when it goes against what other people say or what we fear they will say.  But as important it is to seek God’s will, it is for us to obey it and to obey his laws as well as his inspirations.  We ought to shun the self-serving behavior of Azariah and gladly follow the example of St. Joseph.

Personal Note: My next injection in my eye happens Wednesday morning. Please pray that it goes well!

Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 18, 2026

John 5, 17-30

Jesus answered the Jews: “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.” For this reason they tried all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but he also called God his own father, making himself equal to God.  Jesus answered and said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also. For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does, and he will show him greater works than these, so that you may be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes. Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life. Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to the Son the possession of life in himself.   And he gave him power to exercise judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not be amazed at this, because the hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come out, those who have done good deeds to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked deeds to the resurrection of condemnation. I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.”

The Lord Jesus is speaking here to the Jewish leaders who hunted for him after he healed the lame man by the pool, as recounted in the Gospel reading for yesterday’s Mass.  It is not immediately clear whether they desire to kill Jesus because he cured on the Sabbath or because he told the cured man to pick up his mat and go, thus encouraging him to break the Sabbath according to their reckoning.  The other Evangelists make it clear that the Jewish leaders hated him for curing on the Sabbath.  But by both curing and causing someone to carry something on the Sabbath, the Lord was challenging the Pharisees about their interpretation of the Law.  On the one hand, there is a miracle that could only be performed through the divine will and power.  On the other, an apparent breaking of the Law.  But rather than reconsider their interpretation of the Law, they ignored the miracle and clung to their own ideas.  This ought to remind us of the behavior of the lame man after the Lord healed him: he seems to forget the marvelous sign of God’s mercy and rather than examine his life so as to live in accord with God’s will, he prefers to cling to his sinfulness so that Jesus warns him of the consequences for doing this.

The Jewish leaders charged the Lord with “breaking” the Sabbath.  “Breaking” is perhaps not the best word to elucidate their meaning.  The Greek word actually means “loosing” or “destroying”.  When we today speak of someone “breaking” the law, we mean on one occasion, as in, The man broke the law when he stole the necklace.  However, the meaning in the Gospel text is that the whole Sabbath law was destroyed.  The Jewish leaders saw the Lord’s actions as invalidating the law on the Sabbath that had its origins in God’s creation of the world.  For them, this amounted to a challenge against the rule of God and the Law that made them the Jews his people.  The Lord answers this charge when he says, “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.”  The Greek text does not make the first clause causative of the second, but joins them together with the conjunction “and”.  This allows the Jews to understand that he is claiming equality with God.  The wording also implies that the Son, equal to the Father, is not ruled over by the Father.  The Father does not cause the Son to work by his own work, but the Son works of his own will.  Equal in nature, and distinct as Persons.  Jesus appears to contradict Exodus 7, 11: “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day: therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it”, explaining the basis for the Third Commandment.  For the Pharisees, the “rest” ordered by the commandment meant almost no activity at all, though, as the Lord pointed out to them on another occasion, “On the sabbath days the priests in the temple break the sabbath, and are without blame.”  He then added, “But I tell you that there is here a greater than the Temple” (Matthew 12, 5-6).  The point Jesus is making is that the commandment applies to human beings, not to God, and he is God.  Furthermore, God was said to have “rested” once, but he is not said to have rested ever again.  The Sabbath was made for human beings, not for God.  The Jewish leaders knew exactly what he was saying: “They tried all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but he also called God his own Father, making himself equal to God.”  

“Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also.”  The Lord Jesus explains what he meant in referring to himself as the Son of God in these next several verses.  He wants to make clear that he does not claim to be the Father though he is equal to the Father.  And he reassures the Jews that the Son does not depart from the will of the Father, but does what he does.  For us, as the Son does only what he sees the Father doing, so should we do only what we see the Son doing.

Personal Note: I feel much stronger today than in the last few weeks since the eye surgery. I am very grateful for your prayers.

Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 17, 2026

John 5, 1-16

There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes. In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.  Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who was cured, “It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” He answered them, “The man who made me well told me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’“ They asked him, “Who is the man who told you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” The man who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there. After this Jesus found him in the Temple area and said to him, “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went and told the Jews that Jesus was the one who had made him well. Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus because he did this on a sabbath.

The Pool of Bethesda with the five porticoes was the lowermost of two pools in Jerusalem, the upper pool being a reservoir for the city.  It fed the lower pool, which is conjectured to have been originally meant for ritual washing.  The porticoes were of a wall that separated the two pools.  The fact that the water of the lower one was widely considered to possess healing properties is attested by the Romans building a temple to their god of medicine Aesculapius on the location after Jerusalem was destroyed following the second Jewish revolt of 132-136 A.D.  In the years after the legalization of Christianity, a church was built on the site, later destroyed by the Moslems, who built another structure in its place.  For centuries thereafter the site of the pools was forgotten and by the nineteenth century there was doubt about their existence because no ruins of them could be found.  Finally, in 1888, the German archaeologist Konrad Schick discovered the upper pool, and in the twentieth century the second pool, mentioned by St. John in his Gospel, was discovered and excavated.  This is a marvelous sample of how archaeology can help confirm and explain what we find in the Scriptures.  Particularly, this helps confirm the eyewitness testimony of John, as author of the Gospel, to the deeds of the Lord Jesus.

The name of the pool, “Bethesda”, means “house of mercy”, appropriately enough, for “a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled” lay near it in hopes of being cured of their conditions through washing in the water there.  Some old Greek texts of the Gospel contain the following, by way of explanation: “And an angel of the Lord descended at certain times into the pond and the water was moved. And he that went down first into the pond after the motion of the water was made whole of whatsoever infirmity he lay under.”  This passage is found in the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome and in the Douay Rheims it is found in John 5, 4.  Other Greek texts do not have this verse and most modern translations do not include it.  However, without this verse it is impossible to understand the meaning of the lame man’s words to Jesus: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up.”  

Many of us picture this cure of the infirm man as taking place in the Temple since after the healing we read that “Jesus found him in the Temple area”, but the pool is quite separate from it.  We should think, rather, of an open area in Jerusalem with the sun shining down on the multitude of sick people lying around this pool.  “One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.”  We read here and there in the Gospels of people having suffered terribly for many years at the time the Lord comes to them.  For instance, there is the woman with the blood flow for twelve years (cf. Luke 8, 43-48); the lame man in this account; and the man born blind (cf. John 9), who had grown into adulthood before his encounter with the Lord.  For us, this signifies the long centuries in which the world waited for its Savior and also the long centuries since his Ascension as we have waited for his return in glory.  More personally, we see in these cases how the Lord comes to help us when we persevere in hope.  

“Do you want to be well?” The Greek literally says, “Do you want to become whole?” which is has a different meaning: there is no action required in wanting to be well.  It might as well be a daydream.  But wanting to “become whole” carries consequences.  A person who wants to become whole must perform some action in order to achieve wholeness.  The man knows that Jesus means this, for he offers an excuse for why he has failed to become well after all these years: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.” This is a mere excuse because someone has been sustaining him all these years.  He probably cannot get to the street by himself to beg, and if he could, there seems no reason why he could not move himself to a more advantageous spot near the pool.  If he did have family to help him by bringing him food, then they could just as well have spent a few days with him to help him get to the pool so he could wash in it at the right time.  The man here signifies all the folks down through the ages who have claimed that they wanted to be helped but would not lift a finger to use the assistance that was available.  Spiritually, he is those who make excuses not to go to Mass on Sundays, or go to confession after sinning, or pray for their needs until it is too late.

The Lord loved this man despite everything, just as he loves us, and he said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.”  St. John remarks that the man became well “immediately”.  This was a more complete healing than he could have wished for from bathing in the pool.  Rising up, he took up his mat and walked.  We should note that the word translated here as “walked” can also mean “to conduct one’s life”.  He seems to have uttered no word of thanks, placing him in the large company of people who did not think to thank the Lord for the cures with which he healed them.  He did, however, go to the Temple area.  He is evidently not praying there, though.  Perhaps he was just strolling around, enjoying his newfound strength and health.  “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”  The verb “do not sin” is a present active imperative and has the sense of continuation: Do not be sinning, or, Do not continue sinning.  Perhaps when Jesus sees the man again, he is sinning or has resumed sinning.  The warning the Lord issues has the force of having caught the man in the act.  The irony here would be that the Jewish leaders accused the man of sinning by carrying his mat on the Sabbath, which he was obliged to do if he was not to lose it.  But here the Lord, who knows what is in the heart — “he knew what was in man” (John 2, 25) — speaks rightly to him of sin.  Since the word translated as “walked” also means “to conduct one’s life”, we can think of this in spiritual terms: that the Lord has come upon someone steeped in sin, forgives him, and tells him to take up his life again, free of sin; and then coming to the person at a later date, he finds him going back to his old ways and he warns him to give this up, as though saying, Remember how you were before.  If you do not stay out of the sin that got you into trouble before, something worse than that will happen to you.

“The man went and told the Jews that Jesus was the one who had made him well.”  The man utters no thanks, but instead goes off to the Jewish leaders to point out Jesus as the one they were looking for.  This man shows how we often repay kindness with ingratitude and even scorn.  For all that, the Lord still laid down his life on the Cross for him.  We can ask ourselves whether the man treated the Redemption the Lord won for him in the same way as he treated his physical cure.

Monday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 16, 2026

John 4, 43-54

At that time Jesus left [Samaria] for Galilee. For Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his native place. When he came into Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, since they had seen all he had done in Jerusalem at the feast; for they themselves had gone to the feast. Then he returned to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. Now there was a royal official whose son was ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, who was near death. Jesus said to him, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” The royal official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus said to him, “You may go; your son will live.” The man believed what Jesus said to him and left. While the man was on his way back, his slaves met him and told him that his boy would live. He asked them when he began to recover. They told him, “The fever left him yesterday, about one in the afternoon.” The father realized that just at that time Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live,” and he and his whole household came to believe. Now this was the second sign Jesus did when he came to Galilee from Judea.

St. John’s use of the phrase, “A prophet has no honor in his native place”, brings to mind Matthew 13, 57 where the Lord Jesus applies it during a visit to his home town of Nazareth.  John does not link the phrase to Nazareth.  Instead, he uses the phrase as though the Lord’s homeland wasJudea.  This seems very odd, and appears to tell us that John was unaware that the Lord’s “native place” was Nazareth.  But in fact, the Lord was born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth, so his native place (the Greek word should be translated “fatherland”) really was Bethlehem in Judea.  The Lord’s spoken testimony that Judea was his native place indicates that others knew this also.  This puts a different spin on how we think about what the people of his time knew about him. If it was widely known that despite his Galilean accent he was from Judea, and specifically from Bethlehem, people would have been much more likely to see this as proof that he was the Messiah, for that was where the Messiah was said in the Scriptures to be born (cf. Micah 5, 2).  The usual idea is that since we do not hear the Lord ever claiming to have been born in that town, most if not all of his followers would have been ignorant of this fact.  That the leading Pharisees did not seem to know this when others do tells us of how little they had sought to understand who he was: “Search the Scriptures, and see that a prophet does not rise out of Galilee” (John 7, 52).  If they had searched his life, they might have learned something.

“When he came into Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him.”  John says that Jesus went back to Cana, where he must have had some connection, perhaps through the bride and groom whose marriage feast he had attended.  Pointedly, he did not return to Nazareth.  He had left that town months before and taken up residence in Capernaum. 

“Now there was a royal official whose son was ill in Capernaum.”  This sounds somewhat like the cure of the centurion’s slave as recorded in Matthew 8, 5-13.  The point of the story as The other Evangelists tell it is to praise the faith of the Gentile.  Here, the request of the royal official is met with, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.”  The official, abashed, repeated his request.  Strangely, the word translated as “slave” in the other Gospels is here translated as “son”.  It is the same word.  The Lord’s words shock us with their apparent lack of compassion, but he is speaking to the crowd, not to the man.  The English translator tries to make this clear by inserting “you people” here, but “people” is not on the Greek.  This is proved by the fact that the second person form of the verbs “you see” and “you will not believe” is in the plural, whereas if the Lord were speaking to the man, they would have been in the singular.  It is safe to assume also that John leaves out some details, such as comments by the crowd.  For instance, St. Luke informs us, in his account of this event, that the Jews insisted that Jesus perform this cure: “They besought him earnestly, saying to him: ‘He is worthy that thou shouldest do this for him. For he loves our nation: and he has built us a synagogue.’ ”  It is likely that the Lord was responding to both their impertinence and the lack of faith on their part, for which he condemned them later: “And you Capernaum, shall you be exalted up to heaven? You shall go down even unto hell. For if in Sodom had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, perhaps it would have remained unto this day” (Matthew 11, 23).  That is, they believed he could heal, but not that he was the Christ, whose words they should obey.  In contrast to the obstinacy of the citizens of the town, which must have persisted even to the time when John wrote his Gospel (so that it was well-known to the early Christians), we learn that the man “and his whole household came to believe.”   

Through our own searching of the Sacred Scriptures we can know much about the Lord Jesus so that our faith in him might grow, and help is maintain our belief even in times of trial.

The Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 15, 2026

John 9, 1–41

As Jesus passed by he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him. We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and smeared the clay on his eyes, and said to him, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam”—which means Sent—. So he went and washed, and came back able to see.  His neighbors and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar said, “Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?” Some said, “It is,” but others said, “No, he just looks like him.” He said, “I am.” So they said to him, “How were your eyes opened?” He replied, “The man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ So I went there and washed and was able to see.” And they said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I don’t know.”  They brought the one who was once blind to the Pharisees. Now Jesus had made clay and opened his eyes on a sabbath. So then the Pharisees also asked him how he was able to see. He said to them, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and now I can see.” So some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, because he does not keep the sabbath.” But others said, “How can a sinful man do such signs?” And there was a division among them. So they said to the blind man again, “What do you have to say about him, since he opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”  Now the Jews did not believe that he had been blind and gained his sight until they summoned the parents of the one who had gained his sight. They asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How does he now see?” His parents answered and said, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. We do not know how he sees now, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him, he is of age; he can speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone acknowledged him as the Christ, he would be expelled from the synagogue. For this reason his parents said, “He is of age; question him.”  So a second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give God the praise! We know that this man is a sinner.” He replied, “If he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know is that I was blind and now I see.” So they said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?” They ridiculed him and said, “You are that man’s disciple; we are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but we do not know where this one is from.” The man answered and said to them, “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.” They answered and said to him, “You were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” Then they threw him out.  When Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, he found him and said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered and said, “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “I do believe, Lord,” and he worshiped him. Then Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”  Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains.” 

The Pool of Siloam was a freshwater reservoir which stored water from the intermittent Gihon Spring, the main source of water for the region in which the city of Jerusalem was built.  It was first constructed by the Canaanites, and was last reconstructed about a century before the birth of our Lord.  It was formed in the shape of a trapezoid.  Recent excavations reveal that the pool had a width of over two hundred feet and featured steps leading to its floor.  Completely covered over by dirt and debris for the nearly two thousand years since the Jewish Revolt, it was only rediscovered in 2004.  Its finding adds confirmation of the Apostle John as an eyewitness to the events he describes in his Gospel, providing accurate details of Jerusalem during our Lord’s lifetime.

Throughout his Gospel, St. John shows how the Son of God uses our ordinary words to reveal heavenly realities.  The Lord uses “birth” for baptism; “wine” for grace; “temple” for his Body; “bread” for his life-giving Flesh.  In today’s Gospel reading, John shows how Jesus uses “sight” for faith.  In ancient Hebrew and Greek, the verb “to see” can mean what we do with our eyes and with our mind: it can mean “to perceive”, as in English we say “I see” when we mean that we perceive an idea.  In the reading, Jesus calls himself “the Light of the world”: Jesus is not an idea but something much greater, a Person.  The one who “sees” Jesus in faith, perceives him in a way that goes beyond mere human sight or understanding and sees him as he is, as Light.  This is not reflected light, as that of the moon, but Light itself.  This “light” of which Jesus speaks is his divinity.  With the eyes of faith, we can know Jesus as God.  John, in his painstaking account of the miracle or “sign” of a blind man’s healing, shows the steps by which earthly understanding grows into supernatural belief, the virtue of faith.  First, the man knows him as a prophet, then as a man of God, and finally as the Son of man, the Christ.  This might remind us of how St. Mark also used the healing of a blind man by Jesus to show the steps of faith (Mark 8, 24).  John shows us besides that the people who knew the man when he was blind did not recognize him after he gained his vision: someone who is baptized and becomes a Christian is transformed by grace and so can act and live in a manner unlike in his previous existence.  

Saturday in the Third Week in Lent, March 14, 2026

Luke 18, 9-14

Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else. “Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity - greedy, dishonest, adulterous - or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.’ But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, ‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’ I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

“Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.”  The Greek literally says, “. . . to those who had persuaded themselves that they were righteous”.  The distinction is that on the one hand, other people may have helped convinced the, of their righteous state, and, on the other, that they had done this themselves.  The latter is more reprehensible because it disallows the thoughts of others which might help one arrive at a truer conception of oneself.  One who persuaded himself that he is righteous is also not so much interested in being righteous as in believing others not to be righteous.

Now, this righteousness, as the Pharisees understood it, had to do with following through with certain external commitments.  The ones the man in the parable concerns himself with are fasting and paying tithes on his whole income.  This might have fulfilled a certain legal requirement entitling a person to call himself righteous, but it is obvious that he did not know Psalm 15:  “Lord, who shall dwell in your tent? Or who shall rest on your holy hill? He who walks without blemish, and works justice: he who has truth in his heart, who has not used deceit with his tongue, nor has done evil to his neighbor, nor taken up a reproach against his neighbors.”  To “work justice” meant to feed the poor and extend a helping hand to widows and orphans.  For the Christian, righteousness is fulfilled by the Lord through his own holiness and so now it means to be in a state of grace, that is, to be baptized (and so forgiven sin and filled with sanctifying grace) and to be living the life of faith. 

The Lord says in his parable that this Pharisee went to the Temple to pray, but he was only speaking to himself: “O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector.”  We see also the Pharisee’s poor and uninformed opinion of “the rest of humanity”.  Since the name “Pharisee” came from a word meaning “separated” and because the whole Pharisaic project depended on the Pharisees not mixing with non Pharisees unless absolutely obliged to do so, this man could not possibly know much about other men and women.  He does, however, use the tax collector whom he must have passed on his way into the Temple as an example of all that he hated.  In fact, the way he speaks, “or even like this tax collector” makes it sound as though he holds him in lesser repute than the greedy and dishonest people and the  adulterers about whom he speaks.  The Pharisee is in fact engaged in the sort of “judging” our Lord forbids the Christian to do.

“But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven.”  Not feeling worthy of heaven, he does not raise his eyes to it.  Whereas the Pharisee took a prominent spot in the Temple in order to speak his piece, the tax collector, knowing his unworthiness down to his marrow, stays in the back so that he might not be observed.  “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.”  This is the prayer that God loves best, short and straight out of the depths of the heart: “The Lord is close to those whose hearts are broken, and he will save the humble of spirit” (Psalm 34, 21).  Prayers of this kind do not trivialize God as though he is one who can be persuaded or manipulated to do something nor do they allow us space to attempt to justify ourselves to him.  We should keep in mind here that in those days, prayers would have been spoken aloud.  We should think of the Pharisee speaking his prayer so others could hear it and of the tax collector speaking his quietly in the shadows.

“I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former.”  “Justified” also can be translated as “made righteous”.  So the tax collector, not righteous when he went into the Temple, came home righteous; but the Pharisee went there not righteous and red turned home no better.  “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”  We humble ourselves when we engage in a serious examination of conscience, knowing that we are accountable before the Lord, and when, with broken hearts we cry to him for mercy.  We are exalted by the God of mercy through grace in this life, and eternal blessedness in the life to come.

Friday in the Third Week of Lent, March 13, 2026

Mark 12, 28-34

One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” The scribe said to him, “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, He is One and there is no other than he. And to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, he said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” And no one dared to ask him any more questions.

“Which is the first of all the commandments?”  We might think that the scribe’s question has an obvious answer and so we would wonder why he asked it.  After all, what he expect Jesus to answer?  But the obviousness may point to a drama we would otherwise not see.  It could well be that the scribe believed in Jesus and wanted to show the others the purity of the Lord’s teachings.  Or, he may have wanted to make a point, through the words of this teacher whom the crowds believed in, to the scribes and Pharisees about their own teachings: that they had gotten away from teaching the love of God and neighbor, which should have been the bedrock of their beliefs, and not the precise carrying out of dubious rituals, as though for its own sake.

“The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”. How wonderful and moving it would have been to hear the Lord Jesus, unimaginably in love with the Father, speaking these words!  

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This might not have been the choice of all the Pharisees.  They might have preferred the commandment about not worshipping false gods, or about keeping the Sabbath holy.  But it makes sense as the second of the two greatest commandments because the God whom we are so to love created the human person in his own image and likeness: the love of self and of neighbor thus is a way of loving God as well.

“Well said, teacher.”  The scribe had expected this answer, and his commendation of the Lord’s answer seems like a challenge to the attitude of the other scribes and Pharisees.  He even goes further, as though adding to the Lord’s answer: “And to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  This scribe certainly shows independence of mind and depths of intellect possessed by few of his fellows.  The burnt offerings and sacrifices, so dear to the hearts of the Pharisees, did not forgive sins.  They could not.  They were but signs of The Sacrifice, The Holocaust, that, offered to the Father, would take away the sins of the world. 

The scribe would not then have understood about a Sacrifice that had not yet been offered, but he was on his way to doing so.  For this reason the Lord said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”  This declaration stunned everyone within earshot, and, overwhelmed, “no one dared to ask him any more questions.”  

You and I are even nearer to the Kingdom of God than that scribe, who stood only feet away from the Son of God.  Let us pray that we may entry it.