We remember the way he tempted Jesus in the desert to set his sights on material bread in order to thwart him from his mission and focus on bodily wants and needs more than on his mission. John calls the concupiscence of the eyes, remains one of the greatest ways the devil seeks to possess multitudes. We know that in the terrible choice of abortion, many other things are prioritized - career, personal autonomy, the money and sacrifices necessary to raise a child - over human life and how Planned Parenthood resists any initiatives that do anything to affect their profits.
Pope Francis wrote about this in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “How can it be that it is not a news item,” he asks, “when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” For many people, the stock market is more important than people dying through neglect. Still today, people can give possessions primacy over people, allowing people to be disturbed, even possessed, even killed as long as their possessions are left undisturbed.
This is not a problem just for ancients. They essentially cared more for the swine they had lost than the brother they had gained. They worried that if he stayed he might next endanger their sheep, too, or their grain, or other aspects of their livelihood. After Jesus frees this man from a legion of demons - and a legion in the Roman army was 600 troops - by casting them into a herd of 2,000 pigs who, now possessed, ran off a cliff and drowned in the Sea of Galilee, the people of that pagan region of the Gerasenes didn’t rejoice at the liberation of the man who used to gouge himself with stones, break chains that attempted to bind him, and terrorize the people of the region they didn’t come to Jesus to ask him likewise to free the other possessed people in the region, or to cure their sick or to teach them instead, they asked him to leave their region. It points to something that needs to be exorcised from all of us in every age. Today we see that amazing and astonishing authority on display again in another exorcism, but today’s Gospel is about more than one more dramatic expulsion of evil. Yesterday we witnessed in the Capernaum synagogue the astonishing and amazing authority of Jesus not only as he taught unlike the scribes but also as he exorcised a man as the screaming demons identified Jesus as the Holy One of God and obeyed him in departing from the man. 
The following points were attempted in the homily: To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: Monday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Retreats for Priests, Deacons, and Seminarians.
0 kommentar(er)
