Twenty-Seventh Week of Ordinary Time: Oct. 6 - 13, 2007

Abstract

"Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers' victim?" He answered, "The one who treated him with mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." Luke 10The Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time|We read from Luke's Gospel on the Twenty-Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time about the apostles asking Jesus, "Increase our faith." Jesus assures them they only need faith the size of a mustard seed. Then, Jesus makes it clear that as disciples our role is that of servants.|There are no feasts or memorials this week.|This week's first readings are from the books of Jonah, Malachai, and Joel. Jonah is the reluctant prophet sent to deliver God's warning to the people of Ninevah. Malachai (the Messenger) shows a grim picture of the practices of the leaders of the people right after the return from exile. Joel tells of a coming Day of the Lord to put all things right.|Luke's Gospel begins with the parable of the good Samaratan. When asked "who is my neighbor?" Jesus replies with the story that says, "be a neighbor." When Martha asks Jesus to tell her sister Mary to help with the kitchen work, Jesus calms Martha's anxiety about so much and praises Mary's focus on listening to Jesus. When his disciples ask him to teach them to pray, he teaches them the Lord's Prayer, which we pray at the Eucharist and at Morning and Evening Prayer. Jesus asks us to be persistent in prayer - to ask, to seek, to knock. He wants to give us what we need. When his enemies even claimed he was acting our of the Devil's power, Jesus simply told them how silly that was. When a woman comes up blessing Mary for giving birth to Jesus and nursing him. Jesus says the real blessing is the one that comes to the disciple to hears his word and keeps it.|For the Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time we have the powerful story about Jesus healing ten lepers and only one of them coming back to give thanks, and that one was the foreigner. It reminds us of the importance of gratitude.Daily Prayer This Week|Jesus is so full of surprises. This week, we can let his surprising ways interact with our daily lives. All of us, in some ways, tend to kill - or at least intensely resist - the prophets who call us to conversion. We are all asking our Lord to tell us what we need to do to have eternal life. We might all know the ways we don't like his answer. The invitation to love our neighbor, the way the lowly Samaritan did, can be a revealing question for us this week. Who is the neighbor or stranger or enemy whom I'm called to help, care for their wounds, and provide for their recovery? Or, we can reflect upon whether we are too busy, and not focused enough on what really matters - spending some time just listening to Jesus. Perhaps, we have some desire, need, struggle that we very much want to turn to the Lord with. This could be the week we ask, seek and knock - persistently and confidently. All week, we can ask for the grace to be "with" Jesus and to "gather" with him, perhaps especially alert to ways we are "against" Jesus or "scatter" in different things we do or attitudes we take.|All it takes for us busy people is a little focus. We will get into the habit of beginning each day by bringing our attention to these strong desires with practice. At first, it may work best to rely on a line in one of these Guides - letting it be our expression of what we need and returning to it consciously throughout the day. With practice, we will grow in comfort with naming our own desires more precisely. For example, I might already be more like Mary than Martha. I might want to be asking our Lord, "Help me keep listening to you, Lord, throughout this day." It may be that I haven't said the Rosary with devotion in years. This may be a week to rediscover that powerful prayer, a decade at time, throughout the day, reflecting much more deliberately on the traditional mysteries or the reflections of this week.|Every night, we can all express our thanks to the Lord for the faithful way we are being invited to a closer relationship, in the midst of our busy, daily lives.