Saturday in the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time

The Feast of Blessed Theresa of Calcutta

Luke 6:1-5

While Jesus was going through a field of grain on a sabbath, his disciples were picking the heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands, and eating them. Some Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?” Jesus said to them in reply, “Have you not read what David did when he and those who were with him were hungry? How he went into the house of God, took the bread of offering, which only the priests could lawfully eat, ate of it, and shared it with his companions?” Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

Travelers customarily cut through grain fields in ancient Galilee, over time creating more or less permanent paths, and farmers expected people to help themselves to the heads of grain as they went along, though leaving the path to gather them was not allowed.  The Pharisees walking with Jesus and his disciples, in today’s Gospel reading, would not have spoken up if the plucking of the grain heads had happened on a day other than the Sabbath.  The fact that they object here comes from their interpretation of the Torah’s laws concerning the Sabbath.  One of the sticking points between the Pharisees and the other Jewish sects, such as the Sadducees, arose because the former insisted on making adaptations of the ancient law to modern times.  They permitted themselves to make a number of adaptations to the law governing the Sabbath which went into considerable detail, and so they could say that plucking the heads of grain constituted an act contrary to that law.  The Lord Jesus goes beyond merely defending his disciples and shows the Pharisees that their adaptation went too far, and had no basis in the Scriptures that they venerated: “Have you not read what David did when he and those who were with him were hungry? How he went into the house of God, took the bread of offering, which only the priests could lawfully eat, ate of it, and shared it with his companions?” The passage in question is found at 1 Samuel 21, 3-6.  

In the Old Testament story, the priest is concerned only about whether David and his men are ritually clean.  The bread in question had been placed “before the face of the Lord”, that is, before the ark of the covenant, as a sacrifice, but by the time David asked the priest for them they had been replaced by fresh loaves.  According to the law, the priest and his assistants, were permitted to eat them, but no one else.  Jesus uses this account from the Scriptures to show the Pharisees that even if they were correct in their interpretation of the law, the need for nourishment in this case outweighed the exact following of the law.  And Jesus does something more: he claims: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”  By making this claim of lordship over the Sabbath, Jesus does not merely insist that he possesses the authority to interpret the law, putting himself on the same basis as the Pharisees, but that he himself made the law.  He claims to be divine.  St. Luke does not describe the reaction of the Pharisees.  They probably could not believe that they heard him right.  But afterwards, their belief that Jesus broke the Sabbath formed part of their argument against him.

An important feature of this account is often missed because translators try to smooth it over or because they simply do not understand it.  The translation here for instance has it that this event occurred on “a Sabbath”, but Luke says very specifically, in the Greek, that this happened on “the second first Sabbath”.  Now, few non Jews would understand what this means and assume it is a misprint.  However, the term “second first Sabbath” indicates the first Sabbath after the Sabbath of Passover, which is called the “first Sabbath”.  This tells us that Jesus and his disciples were walking through this field during the Spring when the grain would be nearly ripe.  We can also interpret this spiritually, that the Lord died on the day before the Sabbath in Passover (the first Friday) and rested from the work of his Passion on the Sabbath itself.  By his Passion he delivered all men from sin, and instituted the new law, loosing the bonds of the old.  Therefore, his disciples were free from its restrictions when the next Sabbath (the second first Sabbath) arrived.  This means for us that the Death of Jesus opens the way for us to enjoy the ground wheat of his Body in Holy Communion, and prepares us for the eternal Sabbath in heaven.

We celebrate today the Feast of Blessed Theresa of Calcutta.  The Lord permitted me to me her on a couple of occasions so that I might speak a little about her from a personal point of view.  In the years before I entered seminary, my sister and I used to spend our summers as live-in volunteers at the Gift of Peace in Washington D.C., which served as a hospice for the indigent dying from AIDS at that time (the mid 1980’s).  Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity worked there, bringing care and consolation to people suffering the last horrible stages of an incurable disease, and who had been abandoned by family, friends, and even hospitals.  Mother Theresa used to visit about twice a year.  Her visits filled the thirty or so sisters with great joy and excitement.  It was like Christmas for a child, when she came.  And she herself was like a little child.  She was short and bent-over in those days, but if she had stood straight she would only have come up to my shoulder, so about five feet.   But what made her child-like was her own joy, her own playfulness.  She would hide from the sisters giving her a tour of the facility, causing them to scramble all over to find her.  She also joked with them and would laugh at their jokes.  There was a lot of teasing, back and forth.  Such a small face contained such a wide smile, and when she smiled, her eyes sparkled, but her expression turned to attentive concern when a resident talked to her about his sufferings.  She was a very practical woman, too.  When something needed to be done, she did it or got it done.  The story goes that on a visit to D.C. in the early 1980’s, a large building that had been a Catholic school near the National Shrine attracted her attention.  Later in the day, Cardinal Hickey, very full of himself, asked her what he could do to help her work.  I suspect that he thought she would say, “Just pray,” and he would be off the hook.  Instead, she told him to give her that big building she had noticed.  Hickey stammered that he could not do that since he was using it for Catholic Charities (I think it was).  She looked at him and told him again that she wanted it.  Cardinal Hickey, surrounded by the press and “important” people, was in the same position as King Herod when his niece asked for the head of John the Baptist, and he gave it to her.  Her order continues to use the building for their work today.  The love of God burned fiercely in her tiny body and her great soul and gave life to her every action and word.  People felt her presence when she entered a room.  And now she reigns in heaven with God.