Homily for Monday, 27 October 2014– Ferial

Monday of the 30th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 4:32-5:8; Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6 (R: based on Ephesians 5:1); Luke 13:10-17

My sisters and brothers in Christ, in what way do we “live as children of the light” as St. Paul invites us to live in his letter to the Ephesians? How do we “behave like God as his very dear children,” putting into practice what our Psalm response urges us to do?

I think that, at the core of our message in Ephesians and in our Responsorial Psalm is St. Paul’s phrase in our first reading: “But instead, thanksgiving.”

The Letter to the Ephesians lists many ways in which Christian disciples were not to act. “Obscenity or silly or suggestive talk… is out of place,” as are immorality, impure actions or speech, and greed. These are the deeds of “darkness” against which we are to turn in order to be “children of light”; to behave like the “very dear children” of God.

Do not most if not all of us have a strong sense of right and wrong? This is to be encouraged, and yet I ask who has given us the moral ideals by which we live? These ideals are a gift from God. But then who among us has ever entered a confessional and confessed a long list of recurrent sins or bad habits? Again, this is laudable, and please be assured that God, through the Church, forgives these and all sins for which we seek forgiveness.

But then how many of us pause to give thanks for God’s gift, not only of forgiveness and absolution in the sacrament of reconciliation, but for the moral ideals that God has put into our hearts in the first place; for the desire to confess when we have fallen short of these ideals; for God’s mercy and grace; for having made us his own “very dear children”?

It would give me great joy if we were all able to answer “yes,” all or at least most of the time to this question. At least most of the time, I; we give thanks to God for moral ideals given to us through Scripture; through the Church; through the people we love. “But instead, thanksgiving,” St. Paul says to us. Thanksgiving is of highest value in being “children of light”; God’s “very dear children.”

Thanksgiving is what “the leader of the synagogue” in our Gospel reading today and other religious leaders in Jesus’ time were lacking. The Sabbath had become a law to follow instead of God’s gift for which to give thanks. The synagogue leader is “indignant”: How dare Jesus cure the woman on the Sabbath? But the woman Jesus cures understands the core message: “But instead, thanksgiving.” With thanksgiving, our Gospel reading says, the woman “at once stood up straight and glorified God.”

We are invited to be like this woman. We are invited to thanksgiving; to give thanks to God for the gifts he has given us, whether healing, forgiveness, the moral ideals that lead us to God, or the very fact that we are here to worship as a community of faith. “But instead, thanksgiving”… By our thanksgiving we live as God’s “very dear children”; as “children of light.”