June 27, 2026
Saturday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 376
Reading 1
Lamentations
2:2, 10-14, 18-19
The Lord has consumed without pity
all the dwellings of Jacob;
He has torn down in his anger
the fortresses of daughter Judah;
He has brought to the ground in dishonor
her king and her princes.On the ground in silence sit
the old men of daughter Zion;
They strew dust on their heads
and gird themselves with sackcloth;
The maidens of Jerusalem
bow their heads to the ground.Worn out from weeping are my eyes,
within me all is in ferment;
My gall is poured out on the ground
because of the downfall of the daughter of my people,
As child and infant faint away
in the open spaces of the town.In vain they ask their mothers,
“Where is the grain?”
As they faint away like the wounded
in the streets of the city,
And breathe their last
in their mothers’ arms.To what can I liken or compare you,
O daughter Jerusalem?
What example can I show you for your comfort,
virgin daughter Zion?
For great as the sea is your downfall;
who can heal you?Your prophets had for you
false and specious visions;
They did not lay bare your guilt,
to avert your fate;
They beheld for you in vision
false and misleading portents.Cry out to the Lord;
moan, O daughter Zion!
Let your tears flow like a torrent
day and night;
Let there be no respite for you,
no repose for your eyes.Rise up, shrill in the night,
at the beginning of every watch;
Pour out your heart like water
in the presence of the Lord;
Lift up your hands to him
for the lives of your little ones
Who faint from hunger
at the corner of every street.
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 74:1b-2,
3-5, 6-7, 20-21
R. (19b) Lord, forget not the souls of your poor
ones.
Why, O God, have you cast us off forever?
Why does your anger smolder against the sheep of your pasture?
Remember your flock which you built up of old,
the tribe you redeemed as your inheritance,
Mount Zion, where you took up your abode.
R. Lord, forget not the souls of your poor ones.
Turn your steps toward the utter ruins;
toward all the damage the enemy has done in the sanctuary.
Your foes roar triumphantly in your shrine;
they have set up their tokens of victory.
They are like men coming up with axes to a clump of trees.
R. Lord, forget not the souls of your poor ones.
With chisel and hammer they hack at all the paneling of the sanctuary.
They set your sanctuary on fire;
the place where your name abides they have razed and profaned.
R. Lord, forget not the souls of your poor ones.
Look to your covenant,
for the hiding places in the land and the plains are full of violence.
May the humble not retire in confusion;
may the afflicted and the poor praise your name.
R. Lord, forget not the souls of your poor ones.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Christ took away our infirmities
and bore our diseases.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
When Jesus entered Capernaum,
a centurion approached him and appealed to him, saying,
“Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, suffering dreadfully.”
He said to him, “I will come and cure him.”
The centurion said in reply,
“Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof;
only say the word and my servant will be healed.
For I too am a man subject to authority,
with soldiers subject to me.
And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes;
and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes;
and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him,
“Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.
I say to you, many will come from the east and the west,
and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
at the banquet in the Kingdom of heaven,
but the children of the Kingdom
will be driven out into the outer darkness,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
And Jesus said to the centurion,
“You may go; as you have believed, let it be done for you.”
And at that very hour his servant was healed. Jesus entered the house of Peter,
and saw his mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever.
He touched her hand, the fever left her,
and she rose and waited on him. When it was evening, they brought him many
who were possessed by demons,
and he drove out the spirits by a word and cured all the sick,
to fulfill what had been said by Isaiah the prophet: He took away our
infirmities and bore our diseases.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062726.cfm
Commentary on
Lamentations 2:2,10-14,18-19
Today’s reading is from the Book of Lamentations. We have
come to the end of our readings about the history of the Kings, contained in
the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings and the books of Chronicles. We
began with Saul and finished with Zedekiah, a puppet king installed by the
Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.
According to the Vatican II Missal:
“The Book of Lamentations contains five poems of sorrow over
the destroyed Jerusalem. Written probably by an eyewitness, these words express
a poignant grief that the chants of Tenebrae [in Holy Week] put to music.”
Our reading today is taken from chapter 2 which speaks of
the Lord’s anger against Zion, i.e. Jerusalem. In this chapter the author
describes the wretched fate of kings, priests, prophets, elders and children.
Then, addressing Zion, he reminds her how the false prophets have lied, and
urges her to bewail her fate before God.
The passage reflects the bitterness and suffering of the
people in Jerusalem who are undergoing the effects of a terrible siege. The
buildings of the city have all been torn down. The king and his family have
been humiliated and take into exile. The men of the city, in penitential
sackcloth and ashes, sit in silent misery on the ground. The women:
…have bowed their heads to the ground.
The author is overcome with bitterness as he sees children
and babies die of starvation. Piteously they ask their mothers for food. But
there is none. Eventually they die in their helpless mothers’ arms.
There are harsh words for false prophets, the propagandists
of their day. They denied the reality with idealistic and misleading or
specious visions, instead of pointing to the real cause of the people’s
sufferings—their infidelity to their God, to the true and the good. Jeremiah
frequently denounces false prophets. The word ‘misleading, specious’ in the
Hebrew comes from the same root as that underlying the words “to drive out”
(‘banish’ in some translations; see Jeremiah 27:10,15). In other words, the
lies of false prophets mislead the people with “false and deceptive visions”
and thus lead to banishment by the Lord—so they are ‘banishing’ in their
effect.
There is a personification of Jerusalem and its inhabitants:
Cry aloud to the Lord!
O wall of daughter Zion!
The people indeed have much to weep for, both for their present
miseries and the reason for them. Their only remedy is to turn to their God in
prayer:
Arise, cry out in the night,
at the beginning of the watches!
There were three watches in every night, so the whole night
could be spent profitably in prayer.
The passage continues:
Pour out your heart like water
before the presence of the Lord!
That is, let them pour out their hearts in prayer and
petition. Let them lift up their hands in supplication, especially for the
lives of their little ones, the victims of their parents’ wrongdoing.
It is a sober reflection that there are still so many places
and times in our contemporary and supposedly technologically ‘sophisticated’
world where people are in similar and even worse circumstances, where children
walk around naked and in a daze, so long deprived of food that they do not even
know they are hungry.
And the causes are still the same: the sins of people, the
sins of greed and neglect and a failure to see each other as brothers and
sisters and to accept responsibility for them. Cain’s question is still being
cynically asked:
…am I my brother’s [and sister’s] keeper? (Gen
4:9)
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Commentary on
Matthew 8:5-17
Today we read about the second of the ten miracles of Jesus
described by Matthew after the Sermon on the Mount. It is a story also found in
Luke and John, but strangely enough, not in Mark.
The significant element in this story is the fact that the
person asking for help is a centurion, a soldier and presumably not a Jew. Yet
he has this great faith in Jesus. It is a sign of the future role of Gentiles
in the originally all-Jewish Christian community.
The centurion asks Jesus to cure a servant who has become
paralysed. Jesus immediately responds that he will go and cure him. The
centurion replies:
Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but
only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.
These words should be very familiar to us from the
paraphrase used in the prayers before sharing in Communion. And the centurion
goes on to say that as an army officer, he just has to give commands and they
are carried out on the spot. When it comes to healing, he knows that Jesus can
do the same.
Jesus is astonished at the faith of this pagan:
Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such
faith.
And he foretells that this is a sign of what is going to
happen in the future when Gentiles from all over the world will enter the
Kingdom while many of Jesus’ own people will be left outside. What is more,
they will become God’s people sharing glory with the Jewish ancestors: Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. It is a sad theme running through the whole of this Gospel:
the rejection of Jesus by so many of his own people and their self-chosen
exclusion from the Kingdom.
The faith that Jesus expects is not an acceptance of
religious doctrines. It is rather an act of total trust and surrender by which
people commit themselves to the power of God—in this case, the power of God in
Jesus.
Paraphrasing from the Jerusalem Bible:
Christ asks for this faith especially when he works his
miracles, which are not so much acts of mercy as signs attesting his mission and
witnessing to the kingdom; hence he cannot work miracles unless he finds the
faith without which the miracles lose their true significance. (edited)
For this reason this faith was not easy to give, especially
for many of Jesus’ hearers who could not see the presence of God in Jesus and
hence could not commit themselves to him. Even the disciples were slow to
believe. We see this especially in Mark’s Gospel. But once present, such a
faith can bring about the transformation of a person’s life, as many converts
to Christianity can attest.
Turning to the centurion, Jesus says,
Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.
And we are told:
…the servant was healed in that hour.
What is clear from this story and from many other healings
by Jesus is the crucial element of faith in the one approaching Jesus. It is
the only condition necessary—all other characteristics are irrelevant. Luke
will tell us that Jesus was restricted in the help he could give to the people
in his home town of Nazareth because they simply did not have faith in him.
Let us pray that we may never lose that gift of faith which
has, in the mysterious ways of divine Providence, been given to us. And let us
remember that, without that faith, God will be hampered in reaching out his
healing love to us.
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https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/o2127g/
Saturday,
June 27, 2026
12th Week of Ordinary Time
Opening Prayer
Father,
guide and protector of your people,
grant us an unfailing respect for your name, and keep us always in your love.
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 - Matthew 8: 5-17
When Jesus went into Capernaum a
centurion came up and pleaded with him. 'Sir,' he said, 'my servant is lying at
home paralysed and in great pain.' Jesus said to him, 'I will come myself and
cure him.' The centurion replied, 'Sir, I am not worthy to have you under my
roof; just give the word and my servant will be cured. For I am under authority
myself and have soldiers under me; and I say to one man, "Go," and he
goes; to another, "Come here," and he comes; to my servant, "Do
this," and he does it.'
When Jesus heard this he was astonished and
said to those following him, 'In truth I tell you, in no one in Israel have I
found faith as great as this. And I tell you that many will come from east and
west and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom
of Heaven; but the children of the kingdom will be thrown out into the darkness
outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.' And to the
centurion Jesus said, 'Go back, then; let this be done for you, as your faith
demands.' And the servant was cured at that moment.
And going into Peter's house
Jesus found Peter's mother-in-law in bed and feverish. He touched her hand and
the fever left her, and she got up and began to serve him.
That evening they brought him many who were possessed by
devils. He drove out the spirits with a command and cured all who were sick.
This was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: He himself bore our
sicknesses away and carried our diseases.
Reflection
The Gospel today continues the
description of the activity of Jesus to indicate how he put into practice the
Law of God, proclaimed on the Mountain of the Beatitudes. After the cure of the
leper in the Gospel of yesterday (Mt 8: 1-4), now follows the description of
other cures:
•
Matthew 8: 5-7: The petition of the centurion
and the answer of Jesus. When analyzing the texts of the Gospel, it is always
good to be attentive to small details. The centurion is a pagan, a foreigner.
He does no ask for anything, he only informs Jesus telling him that his servant
is sick and suffers terribly. Behind this attitude of people in regard to
Jesus, there is the conviction that it was not necessary to ask things to
Jesus. It was sufficient to communicate the problem to him. And Jesus would
have done the rest. An attitude of unlimited trust! In fact, the reaction of
Jesus is immediate: “I will come myself and cure him!”
•
Matthew 8: 8: The reaction of the centurion. The
centurion did not expect such an immediate gesture and so generous. He did not
expect that Jesus would go to his house. And beginning by his own experience of
‘head’ he gives an example to express his faith and the trust that he had in
Jesus. He tells him: “Lord, am not worthy to have you under my roof, just say a
word and my servant will be cured. For I am under authority myself and have
soldiers under me; and I say to one man, ‘Go’ and he goes, to another, ‘Come
here’ and he comes, to my servant, ‘Do this and he does it”. This reaction of a
foreigner before Jesus reveals that which was the opinion of the people in
regard to Jesus. Jesus was a person who could be trusted and that he would not
have driven away those who would go to him to tell him their problems. This is
the image of Jesus which the Gospel of Matthew communicates to us even now that
we read it in the XXI century.
•
Matthew 8: 10-13: Jesus’ comment. The official
was admired of the reaction of Jesus and Jesus was admired of the reaction of
the official: “In truth I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found faith as
great as this”. And Jesus already foresaw what was happening when Matthew wrote
the Gospel: “And I tell you many will come from east and west and sit down with
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the Kingdom of Heaven, but the
children of the Kingdom will be thrown out into the darkness outside where
there will be weeping and grinding of teeth”. The message of Jesus, the New Law
of God proclaimed from the top of the Mountain of the Beatitudes is a response
to the deepest desires of the human heart. The sincere and honest pagans like
the centurion and so many others coming from the East and the West, perceived
in Jesus the response to their yearning and accept it. The message of Jesus is
not, in the first place, a doctrine or morals, nor a rite or a series of norms,
but a deep experience of God which responds to what the human heart desires. If
today many go away from the Church or seek other religions, it is not always
their fault, but it could be ours, because we do not know how to live nor
radiate God’s message.
•
Matthew 8: 14-15: The cure of Peter’s
mother-in-law. Jesus goes to Peter’s house and cures his mother-in-law. She was
sick. In the second half of the first century, when Matthew writes, the
expression: “Peter’s House” evoked the Church, constructed on the rock which
was Peter. Jesus enters into this house and cures Peter’s mother-in-law: “He
touched her hand and the fever left her and she got up and began to serve him”.
In Greek word used is diakonew, to serve. A woman becomes deaconess in Peter’s
House. This is what was happening in the communities of that time. In the
letter to the Romans, Paul mentions the deaconess Phoebe of the community of
Cenchreae (Rm 16: 1). We have much to learn from the first Christians.
•
Matthew 8: 16-17: The fulfilment of the prophecy
of Isaiah. Matthew says that “when evening came”, they brought many persons to
Jesus who were possessed by the devil. Why only at night? Because in Mark’s
Gospel, from where Matthew takes his information, it was a Saturday (Mk 1: 21),
and Saturday ended at the moment when the first star appeared in the sky. Then
people could go out of the house, carry a burden and take the sick to the place
where Jesus was. And “Jesus with his word cast out the evil spirits and cured
all the sick! Using a text of Isaiah, Matthew throws light on the meaning of
this gesture of Jesus: “So that what Isaiah had said would be fulfilled”. Ours
were the sufferings he was bearing, ours sorrows he was carrying”. In this way,
Matthew teaches that Jesus was the Messiah-Servant, announced by Isaiah (Is 53:
4; cf. Is 42: 1-9; 49: 1-6; 50: 4-9; 52: 13-53: 12). Matthew was doing what our
communities do today: to use the Bible to enlighten and interpret the events
and discover the presence of the creative word of God.
Personal Questions
•
Compare the image of God that you have with that
of the centurion and of the people, who followed Jesus.
•
The Good News of Jesus is not, in the first
place, a doctrine or morals, nor a rite or a series of norms, but it is a
profound experience of God that responds to what the human heart yearns for.
How do the Good News strike you, in your life and in your heart?
Concluding Prayer
Proclaim with me the greatness of Yahweh, let us
acclaim his name together. I seek Yahweh and he answers me, frees me from all
my fears. (Ps 34: 3-4)
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