Saturday August 1, 2009

Saturday August 1, 2009 of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time
The Feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor
Readings: Romans 6: 1-4 Leviticus 25: 1, 8-17
Psalm 67: 2-3, 5, 7-8 Matthew 14: 1-12
Psalm Response: “Lord, let all the nations praise You.”

When God gave His law to the people through Moses, He stipulated the number of days, weeks and years were to expire to put some of His ordinances into effect.
Seven was a symbolic number to the Jews, meaning completeness. Not having a grammatical method to display superlatives, by the use of a series of numbers, words or phrases, the Jews demonstrated superlatives. For instance, they couldn’t express God as the holiest, so they repeated “Holy” three times. Thus when we recite, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty” to begin the consecration of the sacred species, we imitate the Jewish practice to emphasize God’s supreme Holiness.
In today’s reading from Leviticus, God instructs Moses in the tradition of the Jubilee Year. For seven years after the sale of a piece of property, based on the term fifty years as the paradigm for a Jubilee, the purchaser could dispose of the property at six-sevenths of the fair price. However, after seven x seven of these years the property was to be sold back to the original owner as no property became another’s, as long as there were any ancestors living.
Sounds weird to us but the Law set before the Jewish people stipulated the practice as described.

Paul describes the privilege of those who were baptized into Christ. They were no longer free to act on their own and remain in Him. Therefore, Paul enjoined them to remain faithful to their Baptismal promises and distain the ‘sinful flesh’, a term reserved for the lack of God’s love in our dealing with fellow Christians. Some have relegated the term to sexual perversion or decadence but any digression from the Love of God and neighbor can be a ‘sin of the flesh”.

The psalmist expresses what should be our attitude toward God. He is our creator and has dominion over us and all our actions. However, He has given us free will to do what we wish. However, we must be aware of the consequences and submit to His recipe for obtaining forgiveness to be offered His forgiveness once again.

As was his wont, Herod Antipas, one of Herod the Great sons, is infamous for having no guts, when Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, told Salome her daughter, to ask for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod was rapt in admiration of John’s wisdom but drunk and embarrassed, by his promise before his court, to give Salome anything she wanted; he gave into having John beheaded, much to his chagrin.
Now when he hears of the deeds Jesus is doing, he thinks Jesus is reincarnation of John.
As a superstitious person Herod saw Jesus as the “worker of miracles” rather than the Divine God-man He was!
We, at times, forget Who Jesus is. He is the omnipotent God, the Word by Whom everything was created and sustained. We should bow low at our entrance into His realm and adore His majesty in His Eucharistic presence!