A Reflection for Saturday of the Twenty-Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you,
but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”
In the “Meditation on the Two Standards” in his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius calls our attention to one of the evil spirit’s time-tested strategies for turning the human soul away from God: “Consider the discourse which he makes them, and how he tells them to cast out nets and chains; that they have first to tempt with a longing for riches—as he is accustomed to do in most cases—that men may more easily come to vain honor of the world, and then to vast pride. So that the first step shall be that of riches; the second, that of honor; the third, that of pride; and from these three steps he draws on to all the other vices.” Among Jesuits today, Ignatius’s thesis is often summarized as “Honors to riches to pride.”
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke warns us of the same danger.
The disciples come to Jesus overflowing with joy, exuberant at having been able to exorcise others’ demons by invoking his name. Their ebullience is all well and good in itself—as long as it is properly oriented towards God’s glory, and not towards a sense of personal pride in being magical masters of spirits. Jesus, astute as ever about the pitfalls in human nature that the evil spirit can exploit, detects and calls the disciples’ attention to this potential peril. He urges them—and us, by proxy—to remember that the proper reason to rejoice is not because they can do “cool” things such as exorcisms, but because they are infinitely loved and cherished by God. The source of their joy is in the Lord, not in their own power; indeed, their very ability to perform these exorcisms is only made possible through God’s grace, not through their own efforts.
There is a second essential lesson in these readings, less for the disciples than for those of us who read the Gospel today: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” Jesus tells us that those with the most earthly honors and riches—kings, lords, princes—are not always those who have the most intimate knowledge of the boundless riches of the kingdom of heaven.
If our response in today’s psalm is “Lord, let your face shine on me,” Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel shows that God’s face can shine on anybody, and quite often does so on those we might least expect to be privy to a direct revelation of divine grace. The bottom line: be kind to everybody, and be open to learning from every single person you meet, no matter your preconceived notions of them. Much as Hebrews 13:2 exhorts us to “not neglect hospitality, for through it some have entertained angels unawares,” Jesus’ words in Luke 10:24 reminds us not to neglect any one of our fellow human beings, especially the poorest and most—ostensibly—marginal.
