23RD MONDAY HOMILY IN ORDINARY TIME — YEAR B

23RD MONDAY HOMILY IN ORDINARY TIME — YEAR B

HOMILY THEME: “Stand up! Come out into the middle…stretch out your hand.”

BY: Bishop Anthony Ewherido 

1 Cor 5:1-8, Psalm 5:5-7,12; Luke 6:6-11

Pessimists, adversaries, enemies of progress and those at the top can keep people on the sidelines for life and shrink them or keep them shriveled with policies, wrongly conceived religious traditions, laws, and conventions for long periods of time.

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In today’s gospel, Jesus delivered one of such victims just as he did with others, against the objection and opposition of the scribes and Pharisees. He brought the man with shriveled hand from the margins into the center, and he “called” the man’s withered hand back to life. While we must shun every effort to keep other people down and resist any such laws, policies and traditions, I humbly pray the those who are victimized by such unfortunate situations will be freed from the margins of life and called back to life and fruitfulness by Christ. If you feel held down in anyway, quite often by forces that make you feel helpless, I humbly pray that God would deliver you from the shackles of such forces. May God touch everyone who derives joy from keeping others down so that they may have a change of heart and get rid of their “old yeast of evil and wickedness and make themselves” into instruments of God’s saving grace. As we continue our journey of discipleship, St. Paul exhorts us in today’s reading to do the same: to purge ourselves of our ungodly ways and have “only the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

Lead me, Lord, in your justice and deliver me from every evil. Amen.

St. Peter Claver; Pray for Us.

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