for September 5
Saturday of the Twenty-Second Week of Ordinary Time

Today’s gospel sets up the conflict between the Pharisees and Jesus that comes into the open in the next passage, which will be read as Monday’s gospel. But the incident at hand is not just a transition between more important events; it raises challenging questions for us right now.

Jesus and his disciples are grazing on heads of wheat as they pass through a field on a Sabbath day. Imagine, perhaps, your adolescent children and their pals passing through your kitchen on their way from one activity to the next, inhaling everything edible within their reach, whether it was intended for the evening’s meal or not.

What’s the Pharisee’s complaint? Not that the disciples are helping themselves to something that they shouldn’t, to what doesn’t belong to them. Perhaps the Pharisees are remembering the Deuteronomic injunction to leave the edges of one’s field to be harvested by the hungry, and they don’t go there. No, the Pharisee’s complaint is about timing—that Jesus’ disciples are doing this on the Sabbath.

At first, Jesus’ rebuttal seems to be about his status: a not-so-subtle equation of his actions with those of the great King David, the concluding assertion that “the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.” Now, remember everything that has led up to this moment, and notice something more: by the sixth chapter of Luke, Jesus has cast out an unclean spirit, cured Peter’s mother-in-law, a leper, a paralytic and everyone in Capernaum “sick with various diseases.” He’s also provided a miraculous catch at the end of a long, unsuccessful night of fishing and feasted with a tax collector. 

For Jesus, religious practice is shaped by his mission of healing the broken and satisfying the hungry. He is ‘lord of the Sabbath’ not because he is above its laws of religious practice, but because he fulfills them. 

And yes, this will put him on a collision course with the local religious authorities. But for right now, it challenges us:

What about our religious practices? So many months into this pandemic, we must still conduct our religious practice in ways that protect us from catastrophic illness. Perhaps this makes the old questions more urgent: how does the Eucharist shape our lives if we can not hold it in our own hands? How is our religious practice shaped by the brokenness of our day and its hungers for common worship, food, work, safe homes, justice? How do we live not by the letter, but in fulfillment of God’s law?

As we wrestle with these questions, let us return to an image from today’s gospel: that of Jesus as our companion, walking with us through the field where we labor and seek our sustenance.
—BJ Brown

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website.