October 8, 2025
Wednesday of the
Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 463
Reading
1
Jonah was greatly
displeased
and became angry that God did not carry out the evil
he threatened against Nineveh.
He prayed, "I beseech you, LORD,
is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?
This is why I fled at first to Tarshish.
I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God,
slow to anger, rich in clemency, loath to punish.
And now, LORD, please take my life from me;
for it is better for me to die than to live."
But the LORD asked, "Have you reason to be angry?"
Jonah then left the city for a place to the east of it,
where he built himself a hut and waited under it in the shade,
to see what would happen to the city.
And when the LORD God provided a gourd plant
that grew up over Jonah's head,
giving shade that relieved him of any discomfort,
Jonah was very happy over the plant.
But the next morning at dawn
God sent a worm that attacked the plant,
so that it withered.
And when the sun arose, God sent a burning east wind;
and the sun beat upon Jonah's head till he became faint.
Then Jonah asked for death, saying,
"I would be better off dead than alive."
But God said to Jonah,
"Have you reason to be angry over the plant?"
"I have reason to be angry," Jonah answered, "angry enough to
die."
Then the LORD said,
"You are concerned over the plant which cost you no labor
and which you did not raise;
it came up in one night and in one night it perished.
And should I not be concerned over Nineveh, the great city,
in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons
who cannot distinguish their right hand from their left,
not to mention the many cattle?"
Responsorial
Psalm
R. (15) Lord,
you are merciful and gracious.
Have mercy on me, O Lord,
for to you I call all the day.
Gladden the soul of your servant,
for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
R. Lord, you are merciful and gracious.
For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
abounding in kindness to all who call upon you.
Hearken, O LORD, to my prayer
and attend to the sound of my pleading.
R. Lord, you are merciful and gracious.
All the nations you have made shall come
and worship you, O Lord,
and glorify your name.
For you are great, and you do wondrous deeds;
you alone are God.
R. Lord, you are merciful and gracious.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia,
alleluia.
You have received a spirit of adoption as sons
through which we cry: Abba! Father!
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jesus was praying
in a certain place, and when he had finished,
one of his disciples said to him,
"Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples."
He said to them, "When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name,
your Kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread
and forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,
and do not subject us to the final test."
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/100825.cfm
Commentary on Jonah 4:1-11
After having
single-handedly (with some help from the Lord, of course) converted a city of
120,000 people from the king downwards, one would have thought that Jonah would
have been filled with a wonderful sense of achievement. At best, he would have
thanked and praised God for his wonderful works; at the least, he would have
been patting himself on the back for being such an effective prophet.
Instead, we find
him in a foul humour and very angry. He is angry that God could have compassion
on a longstanding enemy of Israel, one who had caused great suffering to God’s
people. His thinking was that God’s goodness should be shown only to
Israelites, not to Gentiles and certainly not to Assyrians.
His self-righteous
world has been turned upside down. As a devout Hebrew, one of God’s chosen and
a prophet to boot, he has regarded all unbelieving Gentiles as deserving only
of God’s fiercest punishments. That was why he did not want to have anything to
do with them; that was why he wanted to flee as far from them as he could get.
He is very
disappointed in his God, but attributes it to God’s basic weakness:
O Lord! Is not
this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to
Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God,
slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.
This description
of Yahweh is one which God himself gave to Moses (see Exod 34:6-7) at Sinai and
becomes a formula repeated more than once in the Old Testament. God’s
gentle patience is in strong contrast to Jonah’s anger.
Lord, please
take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.
To Jonah, God’s
mercy to the Ninevites means an end to Israel’s favoured standing. Jonah
shortly before has rejoiced in his deliverance from death in the sea, but now
that the pagan and sinful Nineveh lives, in anger and frustration he prefers to
die. But Yahweh asks:
Is it right for
you to be angry?
Jonah is angry
because God has not treated the Ninevites the way he thinks they deserve.
Jonah then leaves
the city and sits down to the east of the city where he makes a shelter for
himself. He wants to see what is going to happen to the city. He expects and
hopes that a terrible destruction is going to come down on it. After all, at
the beginning of the story God had said how angry he was with the Ninevites.
Jonah’s shelter
does not seem to have been very effective because God then ordains that a
castor-oil plant should grow up over him to give shade for his head and soothe
his bad humour. Jonah is delighted with the shelter the castor-oil plant
provides. A castor-oil plant is a shrub growing over 4 metres high with large,
shady leaves. God graciously increases the comfort of his stubbornly defiant
prophet. Jonah does not see the contradiction between God being kind to him
when he disobeys Yahweh, and his being kind to the Ninevites who have promised
to give up their sinful ways and disobedience.
But just when
Jonah is enjoying the shade of the tree, God ‘appoints’ a worm to attack the
tree which causes it to wither. On top of that, Yahweh further ‘prepares’ a
scorching east wind to blow in from the desert. Without shelter and under the
blazing sun, Jonah feels absolutely miserable:
It is better
for me to die than to live.
God then quietly
asks Jonah:
Is it right for
you to be angry about the bush?
Jonah replies:
Yes, angry
enough to die.
But it is now time
for Jonah to learn his lesson. The message is clear. Everything is God’s doing.
He is the ultimate Lord. He gives and he takes away. And he gives and takes to
whomever he will—Jew or Gentile.
Jonah has got all
worked up over a tree which, without any effort on his part, appeared overnight
and just as quickly disappeared. Why should Yahweh, then, not be concerned:
…about Nineveh,
that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand
persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals.
Jonah can only see
wilfully wicked people, but Yahweh sees a people, who, like small children,
need a father’s gentle compassion to point them in the right direction.
The message of the
story is clear. It says that God’s compassion reaches out to every single
person. Jonah, representing a certain class of Israelite, whom we see later in
the Gospel, could not extend God’s compassion to the Gentile. Jonah and his
countrymen traditionally rejoiced in God’s special mercies to Israel, but
wished only his wrath on their enemies. God here rebukes such hardness and
proclaims his own graciousness.
In the story, God
takes compassion on Jonah, when he is thrown into the stormy sea, on Nineveh
which repented of its sin and even on the prophet in his moment of self-pity.
At the end, Yahweh explains with gentle irony how his solicitude extends even
to the animals—how much more then to men, women and children, “who do not know
their right hand from their left”. The story thus prepares the way for the
Gospel: God is Love (see 1 John 4).
And this is the
lesson of the whole book. It is a lesson in tolerance. It is a lesson that
others besides God’s chosen people can be forgiven their sin, that they can
repent of their sin, that they can be open to the influence of God and do good
things.
In this book we
are very close to the spirit of the New Testament where Jesus comes to save and
not to condemn. The first Christians were all Jews and it came as something of
a surprise to them that Gentiles could receive and respond to the Spirit of
Jesus just as well as they could.
Jonah is a book
attacking narrow-minded bigotry and sectarianism. As such its message is still
all too relevant in a world where cynics say that the world would be better off
without religions which are the source of so much suffering, violence and
divisiveness. Let us remove all bigotry and intolerance from our Christian
lives. Let us rejoice to see the Spirit working in other people and be happy to
work with them to bring about the Kingdom.
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Commentary on Luke 11:1-4
It is surely no
coincidence that Jesus’ commendation of Mary for spending time listening to
Jesus should be followed by a section on prayer.
Luke’s Gospel has
been called the Gospel of Prayer. It is in his Gospel, more than any of the
others, that we are told about Jesus praying, especially before the more
important moments of his public life—such as at his baptism by John, the
choosing of the Twelve, before Peter’s confession of his Messiahship and in the
garden before his passion.
Today we see Jesus
just praying somewhere, and we get the impression that it was something he did
quite often. We mentioned earlier that it was perfectly natural for Jesus to
pray to his Father—if we understand that by prayer we mean being in close
contact with God.
Sometimes it will
be to ask God for help in our lives or in making the right decision, sometimes
it will be to thank and praise him, sometimes it will be to pray on behalf of
someone else and sometimes it will be just to be in his company. We saw this
yesterday with Mary of Bethany sitting quietly at the feet of Jesus listening
to him. In fact, a lot of our prayer should be in silent listening. Some people
talk so much in their prayer that God cannot get a word in! And then they
complain he does not answer their prayers!
After seeing him
pray on this occasion, Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them how to
pray. In reply, he gives them what we know as The Lord’s Prayer.
It is not quite the form we are familiar with—that comes from Matthew’s Gospel.
In the Gospel of Luke, the prayer is simpler, but the basic structure is still
the same.
Matthew’s text has
seven petitions (we know how he likes the number ‘seven’), but Luke’s has only five.
It is believed that Matthew follows an earlier form which may be closer to
Luke’s.
When Jesus taught
this to his disciples did he mean that praying meant reciting this formula at
regular intervals? In fact, it is (in Matthew’s version) a formula we all know
by heart and which we recite regularly during the Eucharist, when we say the
Rosary and on many other occasions. But it seems more likely that Jesus
intended to do more than just teach them a formula to be recited. It is
probably much better to see his words as an answer to their request:
Lord, teach
us [how] to
pray, as John taught his disciples.
We will get much
more out of the Lord’s Prayer if we take each petition separately and spend
time praying around each one. When we do that seriously and conscientiously, we
will see that it is a very challenging prayer.
Let us briefly
look at the petitions as they are in Luke:
Father:
To begin with, let us agree that ‘gender’ is a feature that belongs to humans,
and God is beyond gender. We can address God as either Father or Mother; the
basic meaning is that God is the source of life and the Creator of every living
thing. In addressing God as Father (or Mother) we are acknowledging that we are
children, sons and daughters, of God. But if we are children of the one God,
then we are brothers and sisters to each other. And there can be no exceptions
to this, not even one.
Is this what I
mean when I utter the word “Father”? Am I prepared to see every single person
on the face of this earth, irrespective of race, gender, nationality,
ethnicity, skin colour, class, occupation, age, religion or behaviour as my
brother and sister? If not, I have to stop praying at this first word. We can
begin to see now what teaching his disciples to pray meant to Jesus as well as to
them and us.
May your name
be revered as holy:
God’s name is already holy and nothing we can do can make it any more so. In
this petition we are rather asking that the whole world recognise the holiness
of God—that the whole world sing with the angels: “Holy, holy, holy…” God does
not need this, but we do. And when we sing like this in all sincerity, then we
are saying that we belong to him and recognise him as Lord. And it is, in fact,
another way of expressing the following petition.
May your
kingdom come:
We refer frequently in these reflections to the Kingdom. It is that world where
God’s reign prevails in people’s hearts and minds and relationships. It is a
world where people have submitted gladly to that reign and experience the truth
and love and beauty of God in their lives and in the way they interact with the
people around them. It produces a world of freedom, peace and justice for all.
Though, in praying
this petition, we are not just asking God to bring it about while we sit back
and wait. We are also committing ourselves to be partners with God in bringing
it about. Our co-operation in this work is of vital importance. To be a Christian,
to be a disciple of Jesus, is essentially to be involved in this task of making
the Kingdom a reality. And it has to begin right now; it is not just to be left
to a future existence. In Matthew’s version (Matt 6:5-15), we pray:
May your
kingdom come.
May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Like many of these
petitions, it is a prayer that God’s will be carried out through our
involvement. Again, it is a really challenging prayer.
Give us each
day our daily bread:
This is a prayer that we will be always provided with what we need for our
daily living. There is a highly dangerous word buried in the petition. That
word is “us”. To whom does “us” refer? My family? My friends? My work
companions? My village, town, city, country, nationality, race or gender?
Surely it refers to all God’s children without exception.
If that is the
case, then we are praying that every single person be supplied with their daily
needs. But that cannot happen unless we all get involved. The petition is not
simply passing the buck to God. The feeding of our brothers and sisters is the
responsibility of all.
Yet millions are
hungry and millions suffer from malnutrition as well as being deprived of many
of the other essentials of dignified living. Clearly, we are not doing all we
can to see that all of “us” have “our” daily bread. So again this is a
very dangerous prayer.
It is even more
dangerous when we say it in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the sacrament or
sign of a community that takes care of all its members and of others in need.
It is the sacrament of breaking bread with brothers and sisters. If we leave
the Eucharistic table and do nothing about this, then our sign has been a sham.
And forgive us
our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us:
How easily we say this again and again! Yet it is a very frightening thing to
do—to put God’s forgiving us conditional on our forgiving others. Forgiveness
and reconciliation must be part and parcel of Christian living, and we all know
that at times it can be very difficult. Yet, as we see in the book of Jonah
(read during Cycle I at this time), our God is so ready to forgive. To be like
him, to be ‘perfect’, is to have that same readiness to forgive. Our deepest
urge should be not to condemn and punish, but to rehabilitate and restore to
life.
And do not
bring us to the time of trial:
We are surrounded by forces which can draw us away from God and all that is
true, good and beautiful. We pray that we will not succumb permanently to
anything of the sort. We need constantly God’s liberating hand to lift us up as
he lifted the drowning Peter. This is the one petition where we depend totally
on God’s help.
The Lord’s
Prayer is beautiful. It is challenging. It needs to be taken slowly
and meditatively so that we have time to enter deeply into each petition.
Perhaps as we pray we can stop at just one petition which at this time is
particularly meaningful to us and leave the others for another time. It is
primarily not a formula to be recited, but themes for prayer. Any one petition
is enough to last a long time.
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Ordinary Time
Opening Prayer
Father, your love
for us
surpasses all our
hopes and desires. Forgive our failings, keep us in your peace
and lead us in the
way of salvation.
We ask this
through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the
Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Gospel Reading - Luke 11: 1-4
Now it happened
that Jesus was in a certain place praying, and when he had finished, one of his
disciples said, 'Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.'
He said to them,
'When you pray, this is what to say: Father, may your name be held holy, your
kingdom come;
give us each day
our daily bread, and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves
forgive each one who is in debt to us. And do not put us to the test.'
Reflection
In yesterday's
Gospel, we saw Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to his word. Anyone
who listens to the Word of God has to give a response in prayer. In this way,
today's Gospel continues with the Gospel of yesterday the narrating of the
account in which Jesus, because of his way of prayer, communicates to the
disciples the desire to pray, to learn to pray from him.
•
Luke
11: 1: Jesus, example of prayer. "One day, Jesus was in a certain place
praying and when he had finished one of his disciples said to him: Lord, teach
us to pray, as John taught his disciples.'" This petition of the disciples
is strange, because at that time people learnt to pray since they were small.
Everyone prayed three times a day, in the morning, at noon and in the evening.
They prayed very much using the Psalms. They had their devotional practices,
they had the Psalms, they had weekly meetings in the Synagogue and daily
encounters at home. But it seemed that this was not enough. The disciple wanted
more: "Teach us to pray!" In the attitude of Jesus he discovers that
he could still advance more, and that for this he needed some initiation. The
desire to pray was in all of them, but the way of praying needs a help. The way
of praying attains maturity throughout life and changes through the centuries.
Jesus was a good teacher: He taught how to pray with the words and with the
witness.
•
Luke
11: 2-4: The prayer of the Our Father. "Jesus answers: "When you pray
this is what you have to say: Father, may your name be held holy, your kingdom
come; give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we
ourselves forgive each one who is in debt with us. And do not put us to the
test." In the Gospel of Matthew, in quite a didactic way, Jesus summarizes
all his teaching in seven petitions addressed to the Father. Here in Luke's
Gospel the petitions are five. In these five requests, Jesus repeats the great
promises of the Old Testament and asks that the Father help us to fulfil them.
The first three (or two) speak to us about our relationship with God. The other
four (or three) speak to us about the relationship among us.
•
Mt/Lc:
Introduction: Our Father who are in heaven
•
Mt
/Lc: 1st request: Hallowed be your Name
•
Mt /
Lc: 2nd request: Your Kingdom come Mt: 3rd request: Your
will be done
•
Mt /
Lc: 4th request: Our daily bread
•
Mt /
Lc: 5th request: Forgive our offences
•
Mt /
Lc: 6th request: Lead us not into temptation
•
Mt: 7th
request: Deliver us from evil
•
Father
(Our): The title expresses the new relationship with God (Father). It is the
basis of fraternity.
•
To sanctify the Name: the Name of Yahweh I am with you! God with
us. God made himself known with this NAME (Ex 3: 11-15). The Name of God is
sanctified when it is used with faith and not with magic; when it is used
according to its true objective, that is, not for oppression, but for the
liberation of the people and for the construction of the Kingdom.
•
Your Kingdom come: The only Lord and King of human life is God
(Is 45: 21; 46: 9). The arrival of the Kingdom is the realization of all the
hopes and promises. It is the fullness of life, the overcoming of frustration
suffered with the kings and human governments. This Kingdom will come when the
will of God will be completely fulfilled.
•
The daily bread: In Exodus, the people every day received
the manna in the desert (Ex 16: 35). Divine Providence passed for the fraternal
organization, for sharing. Jesus invites us to fulfil a new Exodus, a new way
of sharing in a fraternal spirit which will guarantee the bread for all (Mt 6:
34-44; Jn 6: 48-
51).
•
Forgiveness of debts: Every 50 years, the Jubilee Year obliged
everybody to forgive the debts. It was a new beginning (Lev 25: 8-55). Jesus
announces a new Jubilee Year, "a year of grace from the Lord" (Lk 4:
19). The Gospel wants to begin everything new! Today, the external debt is not
forgiven! Luke changes "debts" for "sins."
•
Not to fall into temptation: In Exodus the people were tempted and fell
(Deut 9: 6- 12). They complained and wanted to go back. (Ex 16: 3; 17: 3). In
the new Exodus, the temptation was overcome thanks to the force that people
received from God (1Co 10: 12-13).
•
The
witness of the prayer of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:
•
At
twelve years old, he goes to the Temple, in the House of the Father (Lk 2:
46-50).
•
When
he was baptized and he assumes his mission, he prays (Lk 3: 21).
•
When
he begins his mission, he spends forty days in the desert (Lk 4: 1-2).
•
At the
hour of temptation, he faces the Devil with texts from Scripture (Lk 4:
3-12).
• Jesus usually participated in the
celebrations in the Synagogues, on Saturday (Lk 4: 16)
• He looks for the solitude of the desert to
pray (Lk 5: 16; 9: 18).
• On the day before he chose the twelve
Apostles, he spent the night in prayer (Lk 6: 12).
• He prays before meals (Lk 9: 16; 24: 30).
• He prays before presenting the reality and
before speaking about his Passion (Lk 9: 18).
• In time of crisis, he goes up to the
mountain to pray, is transfigured while he prays (Lk 9: 28).
• When the Gospel is revealed to the little
ones, he says: "Father I thank you!" (Lk 10: 21)
• By praying he awakens in the Apostles the
desire to pray (Lk 11: 1).
• He prays for Peter so that his faith will
not fail (Lk 22: 32).
• He celebrates the Paschal Supper with his
disciples (Lk 22: 7-14).
• In the Garden of Olives, he prays while his
sweat fell like drops of blood (Lk 22: 41- 42).
• In his anguish he asks his friends to pray
with him (Lk 22: 40, 46).
• When he was nailed to the cross, he asks
for pardon for the bandits (Lk 23:
34).
• At the hour of his death, he says:
"Into your hands I commit my spirit!" (Lk 23: 46; Ps 31: 6)
• Jesus dies sending out the cry of the poor
(Lk 23: 46).
Personal Questions
• Do I pray? How do I pray? What does prayer
mean for me?
• Our Father: I go over the five petitions
and examine how I live them in my life
Concluding Prayer
Praise Yahweh, all
nations, extol him, all peoples, for his faithful love is strong and his
constancy never-ending. (Ps 117: 1-2)
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