THE HEAVENLY DOCTOR CAME FOR THE SICK

FRIDAY, THIRTEENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Gen 23:1-4,19,24:1-8,62-67; Ps 106:1-5; Mt 9:9-13

The Sick and Their Doctor

Because the spiritual life is altogether a divine life within us, we receive all our spiritual acts from the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us. The faith we profess in God and his word is the foundation of our spiritual life; it is necessary for the reception of the new spirit and subsequent cooperation with the Holy Spirit. The emphasis on this understanding is because we can hardly make any progress in spiritual life without a proper understanding of revealed truth. Many of us understand the spiritual life to consist of a set of rules and activities we must carry out daily, as rituals. The rituals are only the external form. Without the spirit, the rituals avail nothing for our salvation. The words of our Lord in the Gospel are very instructive in this regard. The Pharisees and scribes were content with their perfection in rituals and formal worship, which gave them the false notion of being virtuous. With their ritual perfection, they looked down on others as sinners. They had no desire for any Saviour, which was their undoing.

Many of us share this idea of religion with the scribes and Pharisees. We consider ourselves ready for heaven because we keep the commandments of God, attend Mass or worship on Sundays, pay our tithes, and so on. These activities are not sufficient for our salvation. There must be a continuous desire for conversion to our Lord Jesus Christ, a desire to know God's will for us and accomplish it daily in our lives. God gives us the Holy Spirit for this purpose. He dwells in our hearts to establish a steady and constant communion with us, to sustain in us a continuous desire for God. The analogy our Lord used to communicate this lesson to the Pharisees, who asked why he was dining with sinners, is that of a sick person in need of a doctor. “Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners? When he heard this, he replied, ‘It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. Go and learn the meaning of the words: What I want is mercy, not sacrifice. And indeed I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners.’” By this, he teaches us never to consider ourselves perfect and therefore needing no salvation or forgiveness, which the Son of Man brings daily to us. Because we are still weak in following the promptings of the Holy Spirit, who guides us in doing God's will, we commit sins daily. The will of the Father is that none gets lost. Therefore, the mission of the Saviour on earth is to save the sheep that have gone astray. He shares his Holy Spirit and his mission to save souls with us.

Subsequently, whenever we look at ourselves as saved without others, we have lost sight of the Saviour. Our communion with the Saviour is to bear fruit in our mission to save souls. Our interaction with the Son of Man reveals our shortcomings in loving God and our neighbours; we implore his forgiveness as we forgive others their failings. When this awareness is prevalent in us, we continuously feast in the presence of the Son of Man, who offers us the Father’s forgiveness and love, and beckons us to bring others, as Matthew did, to the banquet of love and forgiveness. “While he was at dinner in the house, it happened that a number of tax collectors and sinners came to sit at the table with Jesus and his disciples.” God has invited everyone to the wedding feast. By sending His Son in our human nature, God the Father designated all people to be part of His Son’s bride. Just as Abraham put his servant under oath to take a bride for his son, Isaac, from his people. The only condition that would free the servant from the oath is if the chosen bride refuses to come to the wedding. “God will now send his angel ahead of you, so that you may choose a wife for my son there. And if the woman does not want to come with you, you will be free from this oath of mine. Only do not take my son back there.” A sense of perfection or satisfaction with what we have would make us not desire the company of the Son of Man. But a good understanding of the vocation we have received from God, and who the Son of Man is for us, will make us abandon whatever we possess and keep our desire aflame for his company. Our hunger for his presence and love consoles the Son of God for all he suffers for us and makes him dwell in us and among us.

Let us pray: O God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error and selfish desires but always be seen to stand in the bright light and safety of truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.