July 1, 2026
Wednesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 379
Reading 1
Seek good and not evil,
that you may live;
Then truly will the LORD, the God of hosts,
be with you as you claim!
Hate evil and love good,
and let justice prevail at the gate;
Then it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts,
will have pity on the remnant of Joseph.I hate, I spurn your feasts, says the
LORD,
I take no pleasure in your solemnities;
Your cereal offerings I will not accept,
nor consider your stall-fed peace offerings.
Away with your noisy songs!
I will not listen to the melodies of your harps.
But if you would offer me burnt offerings,
then let justice surge like water,
and goodness like an unfailing stream.
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 50:7,
8-9, 10-11, 12-13, 16bc-17
R. (23b) To the upright I will show the saving power
of God.
“Hear, my people, and I will speak;
Israel, I will testify against you;
God, your God, am I.”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
“Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you,
for your burnt offerings are before me always.
I take from your house no bullock,
no goats out of your fold.”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
“For mine are all the animals of the forests,
beasts by the thousand on my mountains.
I know all the birds of the air,
and whatever stirs in the plains, belongs to me.”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
“If I were hungry, I should not tell you,
for mine are the world and its fullness.
Do I eat the flesh of strong bulls,
or is the blood of goats my drink?”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
“Why do you recite my statutes,
and profess my covenant with your mouth,
Though you hate discipline
and cast my words behind you?”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Father willed to give us birth by the word of truth
that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
When Jesus came to the territory of the Gadarenes,
two demoniacs who were coming from the tombs met him.
They were so savage that no one could travel by that road.
They cried out, “What have you to do with us, Son of God?
Have you come here to torment us before the appointed time?”
Some distance away a herd of many swine was feeding.
The demons pleaded with him,
“If you drive us out, send us into the herd of swine.”
And he said to them, “Go then!”
They came out and entered the swine,
and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea
where they drowned.
The swineherds ran away,
and when they came to the town they reported everything,
including what had happened to the demoniacs.
Thereupon the whole town came out to meet Jesus,
and when they saw him they begged him to leave their district.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070126.cfm
Commentary on Amos
5:14-15,21-24
Today we have another appeal for people to act with a sense
of justice. The passage begins with a rather generalised exhortation to “seek
good and not evil”. To “seek good” is, of course, to seek the source of all
Good, God himself and to stay away from everything that is contrary to his
nature.
Then we can truly claim that “the Lord, the God of hosts” is
with us. We believe that God is everywhere—in and through everything. But for
him to be fully in me, my heart must be fully open for him to enter and for me
to experience the power of his love. And if we do genuinely try to seek him,
then he will truly be with us. But how that is to be done is yet to be spelt
out by the prophet.
That spelling out begins when Amos says that to “hate evil
and love good” means, among other things, to “establish justice in the gate”.
In the cities of the time, local government functioned in the large open space
inside the city’s gate. The implication is that justice does not always
prevail. But only if the “remnant of Joseph” can behave consistently with justice
will they experience the Lord’s compassion. The ‘remnant of Joseph’ refers to
those from the tribe of Joseph who are still remaining in the Northern Kingdom
after it has been depleted by successive punishments from Yahweh, through the
instrumentation of various invaders. This is the first mention of the ‘remnant’
of Israel in the prophets.
There is an implication that a change even now would benefit
the individual survivors of the disaster, though the nation as a whole was
doomed to perish.
In the second half of the reading, to make sure that there
is no misunderstanding about what seeking good and seeking God entails, “the
Lord” (Yahweh), through the prophet, denounces the plethora of feasts and
liturgical festivals scattered throughout the year.
It is an attack against identifying religion with mere
rituals and liturgical practices. The prophets often attack religious
hypocrisy—the conviction that all is well, provided external forms like
sacrifice and fasting are observed—even when the most elementary principles of
social justice and neighbourly love are neglected. The Psalms lay emphasis on
the inner dispositions that must lie behind acceptable sacrifice: obedience,
gratitude and contrition. As well, the Books of Chronicles, too, insist on the
part played in sacrificial worship by the liturgical chant as an expression of
inward sentiments; these authors also protest against a religion of mere form.
The Christian (New) Testament will formulate the distinction
even more definitively. In attacking the Pharisees who laid great emphasis on
external ritual and the cleanliness of vessels used even in ordinary eating,
Jesus had said:
…you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the
dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness…So give as alms those
things that are within and then everything will be clean for you. (Luke
11:39,41)
As well:
Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the
kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. (Matt
7:21)
And Jesus, in speaking with the Samaritan woman, tells her
that true worship is not in a particular place, but only in “spirit and truth.”
(see John 4:21-24).
Amos puts it in even stronger language:
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
These verses summarise and reject the current practice of
religion in Israel. The institutions were not wrong in themselves; it was the
worshippers and the way they worshipped that were wrong. The people had no
basis on which to come to God, because their behaviour reflected disobedience
of his law. What value then could be given to empty ritualistic practices?
Examples given are “grain offerings”, samples of the harvest
offered in thanksgiving; and “offerings of well-being of your fatted animals”,
i.e. specially fattened cattle also offered as thanksgiving for good herds and
flocks. Rejected as well were “the noise of your songs” and “the melody of your
harps” accompanying the liturgical rites. On their own, these are of little
value although there are many who believe that participation in these
activities is equivalent to holiness and union with God.
But the only real holocaust the Lord wants is that:
…justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
These are the prerequisites for acceptance by God, but they
are what Israel is rejecting. Justice is to flow like “an ever-flowing stream”
in contrast to river beds that are dry much of the year. As plant and animal
life flourishes where there is water, so human life flourishes where justice
and righteousness are constantly practised.
On the one hand, it would be quite wrong to deduce from this
reading that we go to the other extreme and to think that, provided we are
engaged in acts of love and justice, we can dispense with all liturgical rites,
or that we can forget about our Sunday Eucharistic celebration.
On the other hand, there is a real danger that we can
measure our service to God by our regular attendance at Mass, even daily Mass,
and the regular saying of certain prayers or involvement in certain devotions
and novenas. The thinking that he or she is a ‘very good Catholic’ will only be
true if, first of all, there is a genuine participation in a community-centred
liturgy, and second, if church attendance is part of a life totally dedicated
to the living of the gospel—especially those parts of the gospel which call for
personal involvement in serving the needs of those around us and, indeed, of
people in other parts of the world too, who are in need of any kind.
The sacramental liturgy plays an absolutely central role in
our Christian lives, but only when it is in close dialogue with lives based on
love, justice and compassion. Each one reinforces the other.
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Commentary on
Matthew 8:28-34
Matthew’s version of this strange story is quite different
from and much shorter than that told in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 5:1-20). It is
usual for Matthew to pare down stories to just the essential details, while
Mark tends to give a more dramatic presentation. In Matthew’s version, there
are two possessed people instead of just one (as in Mark’s Gospel). This is
similar to the version of the Bartimaeus story told by Mark (10:46-52) where
Matthew (20:29-34) also has two blind men instead of one.
In the previous story about the calming of the storm, we saw
that Jesus and his disciples were crossing the lake. They now come to their
destination, a place known as the Gadarenes. It got its name from the town of
Gadara on the south-east side of the lake.
Here Jesus was met by two people possessed by demons who
completely controlled them. Unlike many of the ordinary people, the demons in
these two men have an insight into Jesus’ identity although they may not
recognise it fully:
What have you to do with us, Son of God?
Jesus usually refers to himself as Son of Man and never as
Son of God.
The two men continue shouting:
Have you come here to torment us before the time?
There was a belief that demons would be free to roam the
earth until the Judgment Day came. They did this by taking possession of
people. This possession was often associated with disease, because disease was
the consequence of sin and a sign of being in Satan’s power. That is why when
Jesus expels a demon there is often a cure as well. By driving out these evil
spirits, Jesus inaugurates the Messianic age which many of the people do not
recognise, but which the demons do. Later Jesus will hand over this exorcising
power, together with the ability to effect cures, to his disciples. We will see
that in the discourse in chapter 10.
The demons then begged Jesus to let them go into a nearby
herd of pigs. Jesus consented to this. As soon as they had entered the pigs,
the whole herd rushed headlong over a cliff and into the water below. The
swineherds rushed off to the nearest town to tell what had happened.
The townspeople immediately came out in search of Jesus and,
not surprisingly, begged him to go somewhere else. It might seem rather
high-handed of Jesus to destroy a whole herd of pigs in this way. We have to
remember, however, that in Jewish eyes these pigs were abominably unclean.
There was not a better place to put demons, and it was they who really brought about
the destruction of the animals. But understandably, the owners of the pigs
found it difficult to see things in the same way.
The purpose of the story, of course, is to focus on Jesus’
power to liberate people from evil influences which were destroying their
lives. What these men were suffering could not be compared to the loss of the
pigs’ lives and the pigs would have ended up in a cooking pot anyway! We, too,
need to ask Jesus to liberate us from any evil influences or addictions which
enslave us and prevent us from being the kind of persons he wants us to be.
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https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/o2134g/
LECTIO DIVINA: MATTHEW 8,28-34
Lectio Divina:
Wednesday,
July 1, 2026
Ordinary Time
1) Opening prayer
Father,
you call your children
to walk in the light of Christ.
Free us from darkness
and keep us in the radiance of your truth.
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.
2) Gospel Reading - Matthew 8,28-34
When Jesus
reached the territory of the Gadarenes on the other side, two demoniacs came
towards him out of the tombs -- they were so dangerously violent that nobody
could use that path. Suddenly they shouted, 'What do you want with us, Son of
God? Have you come here to torture us before the time?'
Now some distance away there was a large herd of pigs feeding, and the devils
pleaded with Jesus, 'If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.'
And he said to them, 'Go then,' and they came out and made for the pigs; and at
that the whole herd charged down the cliff into the lake and perished in the
water. The herdsmen ran off and made for the city, where they told the whole
story, including what had happened to the demoniacs. Suddenly the whole city
set out to meet Jesus; and as soon as they saw him they implored him to leave
their neighbourhood.
3) Reflection
• Today’s Gospel
stresses the power of Jesus over the devil. In our text, the devil or the power
of evil is associated to three things: 1) To the cemetery, the
place of the dead. To death which kills life! 2) To the pig, that was
considered an impure animal. The impurity which separates from God! 3)
With the sea, which was considered like the symbol of chaos
before creation? The chaos which destroys nature. The Gospel of
Mark, from which Matthew takes his information, associates the power of evil to
a fourth element which is the word Legion, (Mc 5, 9), the name
of the army of the Roman Empire. The Empire oppressed and exploited the
people. Thus, it is understood that the victory of Jesus over the Devil
had an enormous importance for the life of the communities of the years 70’s,
the time when Matthew wrote his Gospel. The communities lived oppressed and
marginalized, because of the official ideology of the Roman Empire and of the
Pharisees which was renewed. The same significance and the same importance
continue to be valid today.
• Matthew 8, 28: The force of evil oppresses, ill-treats and alienates
persons. This first verse describes the situation of the people before
the coming of Jesus. In describing the behaviour of the two possessed
persons, the Evangelist associates the force of evil to the cemetery and to
death. It is a mortal power, without a goal, without direction, without
control and a destructing power, which causes everyone to fear. It
deprives the persons from their conscience, from self control and autonomy.
• Matthew 8, 29: Before the simple presence of Jesus the force of evil
breaks up and disintegrates. Here is described the first contact
between Jesus and the two possessed men. We see that there is total
disproportion. The power, that at first seemed to be so strong, melts and
disintegrates before Jesus. They shouted: “What do you want with
us, Son of God? Have you come to torture us before the time?” they
become aware that they are loosing their power.
• Matthew 8, 30-32: The power of evil is impure and has no autonomy,
nor consistency. The Devil does not have power over his
movements. It only obtains the power to enter into the pigs with the
permission of Jesus! Once they enter into the pigs, the whole herd charged down
the cliff into the sea and perished in the water. According to the opinion of
the people, the pig was a symbol of impurity which prevented the human being to
relate with God and of feeling accepted by him. The sea was the symbol of
the existing chaos before creation and which according to the belief of that
time, continued to threatened life. This episode of the pigs which threw
themselves into the sea is strange and difficult to understand. But the message
is very clear: before Jesus, the power of evil has no autonomy, no consistency.
Anyone who believes in Jesus has already conquered the power of evil and should
not fear!
• Matthew 8, 33-34: The reaction of the people of that place. The
herdsmen of the pigs went to the city and told the story to the people, and
they all set out to go and meet Jesus. Mark says that they saw the “possessed”
man sitting down, dressed and with perfect judgment” (Mk 5, 15). But they
remained without the pigs. This is why they asked Jesus to leave from
their neighbourhood. For them the pigs were more important than the person who
recovered his senses.
• The expulsion of the demons. At the time of Jesus, the
words Devil or Satan were used to indicate the power of evil
which drew persons away from the right path. For example, when Peter tried to
deviate Jesus, he was Satan for Jesus (Mk 8, 33). Other times, those same
words were used to indicate the political power of the Roman Empire which
oppressed and exploited people. For example, in the Apocalypse, the Roman
Empire is identified with “Devil or Satan” (Ap 12, 9). While other times,
people used the same words to indicate the evils and the illnesses. It
was spoken about devil, dumb spirit, deaf spirit, impure or unclean spirit,
etc. There was great fear! In the time of Matthew, in the second half of
the first century, the fear of demons increased. Some religions, from the
East diffused worship toward the spirits. They taught that some of our
mistaken gestures could irritate the spirits, and these, in order to revenge,
could prevent us from having access to God and deprived us from divine
benefits. For this reason, through rites and writings, intense prayer and
complicated ceremonies, people sought to calm down these spirits or demons, in
such a way that they would not cause harm to life. These religions,
instead of liberating people, nourished fear and anguish. Now, one of the
objectives of the Good News of Jesus was to help people to liberate themselves
from this fear. The coming of the Kingdom of God meant the coming of
a stronger power. Jesus is “the strongest
man” who can conquer Satan, the power of evil, snatching away from its
hands, humanity imprisoned by fear (cf. Mk 3, 27). For this reason the
Gospels insist very much on the victory of Jesus over the power of evil, over
the devil, over Satan, over sin and over death. It was in order to
encourage the communities to overcome this fear of the devil! And today,
who can say: “I am completely free?” Nobody! Then, if I am not totally
free, there is some part in me which is possessed by other powers. How
can these forces be cast away? The message of today’s Gospel continues to
be valid for us.
4) Personal questions
• What oppresses
and ill-treats people today? Why is it that today in certain places so much is
spoken about casting out the devil? Is it good to insist so much on the
devil? What do you think?
• Who can say that he/she is completely free or liberated? Nobody! And then, we
are all somewhat possessed by other forces which occupy some space within us.
What can we do to expel this power from within us and from society?
5) Concluding Prayer
Yahweh is
tenderness and pity,
slow to anger, full of faithful love.
Yahweh is generous to all,
his tenderness embraces all his creatures. (Ps 145,8-9)
