June 10, 2026
Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 361
Reading 1
Ahab sent to all the children of Israel
and had the prophets assemble on Mount Carmel.
Elijah appealed to all the people and said,
"How long will you straddle the issue?
If the LORD is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him."
The people, however, did not answer him.
So Elijah said to the people,
"I am the only surviving prophet of the LORD,
and there are four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal.
Give us two young bulls.
Let them choose one, cut it into pieces, and place it on the wood,
but start no fire.
I shall prepare the other and place it on the wood,
but shall start no fire.
You shall call on your gods, and I will call on the LORD.
The God who answers with fire is God."
All the people answered, "Agreed!"
Elijah then said to the prophets of Baal,
"Choose one young bull and prepare it first,
for there are more of you.
Call upon your gods, but do not start the fire."
Taking the young bull that was turned over to them, they prepared it
and called on Baal from morning to noon, saying,
"Answer us, Baal!"
But there was no sound, and no one answering.
And they hopped around the altar they had prepared.
When it was noon, Elijah taunted them:
"Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating,
or may have retired, or may be on a journey.
Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened."
They called out louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears,
as was their custom, until blood gushed over them.
Noon passed and they remained in a prophetic state
until the time for offering sacrifice.
But there was not a sound;
no one answered, and no one was listening.
Then Elijah said to all the people, "Come here to me."
When the people had done so, he repaired the altar of the LORD
that had been destroyed.
He took twelve stones, for the number of tribes of the sons of Jacob,
to whom the LORD had said, "Your name shall be Israel."
He built an altar in honor of the LORD with the stones,
and made a trench around the altar
large enough for two measures of grain.
When he had arranged the wood,
he cut up the young bull and laid it on the wood.
"Fill four jars with water," he said,
"and pour it over the burnt offering and over the wood."
"Do it again," he said, and they did it again.
"Do it a third time," he said,
and they did it a third time.
The water flowed around the altar,
and the trench was filled with the water.
At the time for offering sacrifice,
the prophet Elijah came forward and said,
"LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel,
let it be known this day that you are God in Israel
and that I am your servant
and have done all these things by your command.
Answer me, LORD!
Answer me, that this people may know that you, LORD, are God
and that you have brought them back to their senses."
The LORD's fire came down
and consumed the burnt offering, wood, stones, and dust,
and it lapped up the water in the trench.
Seeing this, all the people fell prostrate and said,
"The LORD is God! The LORD is God!"
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm
16:1b-2ab, 4, 5ab and 8, 11
R. (1b) Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
Keep me, O God, for in you I take refuge;
I say to the LORD, "My Lord are you."
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
They multiply their sorrows
who court other gods.
Blood libations to them I will not pour out,
nor will I take their names upon my lips.
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
O LORD, my allotted portion and cup,
you it is who hold fast my lot.
I set the LORD ever before me;
with him at my right hand I shall not be disturbed.
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
You will show me the path to life,
fullness of joys in your presence,
the delights at your right hand forever.
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Teach me your paths, my God,
and guide me in your truth.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jesus said to his disciples:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.
Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments
and teaches others to do so
will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.
But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments
will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven."
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/061026.cfm
Commentary on 1
Kings 18:20-39
Today we have the dramatic challenge that Elijah made to the
worshippers of Baal and to his own idolatrous fellow-Israelites. It will give
clinching proof of who the true God is and this will finally be confirmed by
the ending of the drought (tomorrow’s Ordinary Time First Reading—1 Kings
18:41-46).
The scene is on Mount Carmel, a mountain in northern
Palestine near the Mediterranean coast. King Ahab, in conformity with a request
from Elijah, has ordered all the Israelites to gather there together with the 450
prophets of Baal.
Elijah throws down the challenge to his people by asking
them how much longer they are going to continue hopping from one leg to the
other, alternating between their worship of God and of Baal and of trying to
have the best of both worlds. Elijah is speaking sarcastically. In her
religious ambivalence between her worship of Yahweh and of Baal, Israel is but
engaging in a wild and futile religious ‘dance’. Elijah tells them to
make up their minds and choose one or the other; they cannot follow two
antagonistic ways of worship. He draws a sharp contrast between the worship of
the Lord and that of Baal and puts out of their minds that both deities can be
worshipped in some combined rituals.
Elijah now throws down the challenge—himself against the 450
priests of Baal. He is the only true prophet in Israel to stand boldly and
publicly against the king and the prophets of Baal. In fact, we are told
earlier in the book that Elijah was on the run. Anyone who knew where he was
hiding would be executed.
The elements of the challenge are straightforward. The 450
priests of Baal will prepare an altar with a dismembered bull and Elijah will
do the same. Each side will call on the name of their divinity and the one who
answers by consuming the animal with fire is the true God. To this all agree.
It is not merely a matter of deciding whether Yahweh or Baal
is lord of the mountain or which is the stronger, but simply which is the one,
true God. Both the Lord and Baal were said to ride the thunderstorm as
their divine chariot:
The Lord also thundered in the heavens,
and the Most High uttered his voice.
And he sent out his arrows and scattered them;
he flashed forth lightnings and routed them. (Ps 18:13-14)
and
…you make the clouds your chariot;
you ride on the wings of the wind… (Ps 104:3)
Elijah’s challenge is direct. His own statement, his later
prayer and the people’s acclamation at the end of the reading make it clear:
the uniqueness of the God of Israel is at stake.
Because of their greater numbers, Elijah told the priests of
Baal to proceed first. They set up their bull on the altar and from morning to
midday they called on Baal to send down fire while they danced from leg to leg
(echoing the jibe against the Israelites “limping” between God and Baal). The
ecstatic cultic dance was part of the pagan ritual intended to arouse the deity
to perform some desired action. But nothing happened.
Elijah mocks them satirically:
Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating,
or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and
must be awakened.
In his mocking, Elijah also reveals he is aware of the myths
surrounding Baal.
The priests shout even louder and, as is common in such
religions, become wild and ecstatic, slashing themselves with knives and
pouring blood. Self-inflicted wounds causing blood to flow were symbolic of
self-sacrifice as an extreme method of arousing the deity to action, but such
mutilation of the body was strictly forbidden in the Mosaic law. As the
deadline of noon passed they continued with their ecstatic and trancelike
raving in which their ritual reached its climax at the time of the evening
sacrifice. But the god was silent and:
…there was no voice, no answer, and no response.
Their efforts had come to nothing; their god could do
nothing to help them.
It is now Elijah’s turn. He calls on the people to gather
round him. Using twelve stones to represent the 12 tribes of Israel he rebuilds
the altar. It is possible it had originally been built by the people of the
northern tribes after the division of the kingdom (Jerusalem and the Temple
were in the southern kingdom), but had been destroyed by the agents of Jezebel
and the worshippers of Baal. The 12 stones represented all the tribes of Israel
as God’s one people despite the political division into two kingdoms. What is
about to happen concerns the whole people and not just the 10 northern tribes.
The Lord had said to the people of all the tribes: “Israel shall be your name”.
Around the altar, Elijah had an enormous trench dug large
enough to hold two measures of grain. Wood was placed on top of the altar and
the dismembered bull on top of that. He then gave instructions for four jars of
water to be poured over the sacrificial victim and over the wood. This was done
three times altogether. By drenching the whole structure with water, Elijah was
making the subsequent happening all the more convincing.
Then Elijah prays. His prayer is in marked contrast to the
frenzied actions of the Baal priests. He calls simply on the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Israel, thus recalling the great covenants that had been made between
God and his people. In plain language, he calls on God to answer his prayer so
that people will know, not who is the more powerful, but who is the one and only
God. And he appeals to Israel to remember all that the Lord has done for her
since the days of her forefathers.
The coming manifestation will demonstrate:
to the prophets of
Baal and to Jezebel’s entourage of foreigners, that there is no place for them
in Israel where Yahweh is God; and
to the Israelites
that Yahweh is the only God, the God who wins back wayward hearts.
In immediate response to Elijah’s prayer, the Lord’s fire
comes down on the altar, consumes the holocaust offering (sodden though it is
with water) and totally evaporates the water in the surrounding trench. The
people’s reaction is to fall down in awe and worship, repeating over and over:
The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.
The end of the story—not recorded in our reading—is that the
priests of Baal were then seized and all of them executed by having their
throats cut. Hopefully, we might think now of other less drastic ways of dealing
with them.
Life with our God is, in the long run, a simple and
straightforward affair. There are people who try to make religion very
complicated. For many, superstition and idolatry are not far away. The idols
today, from which people expect great returns, are those of the consumer
society, of money, fame, power and ‘success’. The god of Mammon has taken over
the lives of many, and many Christians, like the Israelites in the story, try
to hop uncomfortably between the two. But Jesus said that we had to make a very
clear choice—it has to be one or the other:
No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either
hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other.
You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matt 6:24)
The God of the gospel simply invites us to become closely
united with him in prayer and love. That is the God of Elijah and should be
ours too.
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Commentary on
Matthew 5:17-19
We have said that Matthew’s Gospel is primarily directed at
a readership with a Jewish background. It is clear that their Jewish background
and traditions were things which were not easy for Christian converts to give
up. Both Paul and Matthew go out of their way to assure Jewish converts that
Christianity is not a rejection of Judaism, but its natural development. It is
everything that Judaism is and more.
So, in today’s passage, which continues the Sermon on the
Mount, Jesus solemnly assures his readers:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the
Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Jesus has come not to terminate the Law, but to bring it to
a higher level. In a very rough simile, it is like the upgrading of a computer
by upgrading its operating system. It is still the same computer doing the same
things, only better. The vision of Jesus helps us to see the Law in a new
light.
So Jesus says that the Law is still to be observed. Of
course, we will see very clearly in the following days exactly what Jesus
means. He is not saying that every single injunction of the Law (some of which
seem very strange to us) has to be literally observed, but rather that the
spirit behind those injunctions is still in force. His words are meant to console,
but they are also a challenge, as we shall see. The New Law does not mean
simply the addition of new elements. There is what we would call now a
‘paradigm shift’ to a Way which goes beyond laws to the Law of Love.
In our Church, too, we need to be ready to move forward
creatively to new ways of understanding our faith and living it out. The
traditions of the past are still valid, but we must never get bogged down in
them to the extent that we do not respond to the clear signs of the times.
Tradition can be understood in two ways: either as a fundamental belief
that has existed from the very beginning, or simply a way of doing or
understanding things which has been around for a long time.
“When will the Church stop changing?” we hear some people
ask. The answer is, hopefully never. The day we close ourselves to change is
the day we die, as Paul warns us in the Second Letter to the Corinthians. To
quote Cardinal John Newman:
To live is to change; to be perfect is to have changed
often.
Cardinal Newman knew about change. He made radical changes
in his own understanding of the Christian faith, changes which he saw as
unavoidable although they involved great sacrifices on his part, and led him
from the Anglican to the Catholic Church.
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https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/o2104g/
Wednesday,
June 10, 2026
10th Week in Ordinary Time
Opening Prayer
Lord our God,
your prophets remind us in season
and out of season of our responsibilities toward you and toward the world of
people. When they disturb and upset us, let it be a holy disturbance that makes
us restless, eager to do your will and to bring justice and love around us.
We ask you this through Christ our Lord.
Gospel Reading - Matthew 5: 17-19
'Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the
Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them. In truth I tell you,
till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, is to
disappear from the Law until all its purpose is achieved.
Therefore, anyone who infringes even one of the least of these
commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in
the kingdom of Heaven; but the person who keeps them and teaches them will be
considered great in the kingdom of Heaven.
Reflection
Today’s Gospel (Mt 5: 17-19)
teaches how to observe the law of God in such a way that its practice indicates
in what its complete fulfilment consists of (Mt 5: 17-19). Matthew writes to
help the communities of the converted Jews to overcome the criticism of the
brothers of their own race who accused them saying: You are unfaithful to the
Law of Moses”. Jesus himself had been accused of infidelity to the Law of God.
Matthew has the clarifying response of Jesus concerning his accusers. Thus, he
gives some light to help the communities solve their problems.
Using images of daily life, with
simple and direct words, Jesus had said that the mission of the community, its
reason for being, is that of being salt and light! He had given some advice
regarding each one of the two images. Then follow two or three brief verses of
today’s Gospel.
•
Matthew 5: 17-18: Not one dot, nor one stroke is
to disappear from the Law. There were several different tendencies in the
communities of the first Christians. Some thought that it was not necessary to
observe the laws of the Old Testament, because we are saved by faith in Jesus
and not by the observance of the Law (Rm 3: 21-26). Others accepted Jesus, the
Messiah, but they did not accept the liberty of spirit with which some of the
communities lived the presence of Jesus. They thought that being Jews they had
to continue to observe the laws of the Old Testament (Acts 15: 1, 5). But there
were Christians who lived so fully in the freedom of the Spirit, who no longer
looked at the life of Jesus of Nazareth, nor to the Old Testament and they even
went so far as to say: ”Anathema Jesus!” (1 Co 12: 3). Observing these
tensions, Matthew tries to find some balance between both extremes. The
community should be a space, where the balance can be attained and lived. The
answer given by Jesus to those who criticized him continued to be actual for
the communities: “I have not come to abolish the law, but to complete it!” The
communities could not be against the Law, nor could they close up themselves in
the observance of the law. Like Jesus, they should advance, and show, in
practice, which was the objective which the law wanted to attain in the life of
persons, that is, in the perfect practice of love.
•
Matthew 5: 19: Not one dot or stroke will
disappear from the Law. It is for those who wanted to get rid of all the law
that Matthew recalls the other parable of Jesus: “Anyone who infringes even one
of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be
considered the least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but the person who keeps them
and teaches them will be considered great in the Kingdom of Heaven”. The great
concern in Matthew’s Gospel is to show that the Old Testament, Jesus of
Nazareth and the life in the Spirit cannot be separated. The three of them form
part of the same and unique project of God and communicate to us the certainty
of faith: The God of Abraham and of Sarah is present in the midst of the
community by faith in Jesus of Nazareth who sends us his Spirit.
Personal Questions
•
How do I see and live the law of God: as a
growing horizon of light or as an imposition which limits my freedom?
•
What can we do today for our brothers and
sisters who consider all this type of discussion as obsolete and not actual?
What can we learn from them?
Concluding Prayer
Praise Yahweh, Jerusalem, Zion, praise your God.
For he gives strength to the bars of your gates, he blesses
your children within you. (Ps 145: 12-13)
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