Thursday,
October 13, 2016
28th Week in
Ordinary Time
1st Reading: Eph 1: 1-10
Gospel: Lk 11:47-54
Jesus said to the Pharisees, “A curse is on you, for you build memorials to the prophets your ancestors killed. So you approve and agree with what your ancestors did. Is it not so? They got rid of the prophets, and now you can build!”
(The Wisdom of God also said,) “I will send prophets and apostles and this people will kill and persecute some of them. But the present generation will have to answer for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was murdered between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, the people of this time will have to answer for them all.
“A curse is on you, teachers of the Law, for you have taken the key of knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you prevented others from entering.”
As Jesus left that place, the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees began to harass him, asking him endless questions, setting traps to catch him in something he might say.
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Jesus continued attacking the Scribes, Pharisees and the Teachers of the Law by tracing back their hypocrisy to the hypocrisy of their forefathers. Jesus pointed out that their forefathers killed the prophets and buried them, and now they were building sepulchers of honor over these graves to exculpate themselves. The best way to exculpate themselves and to dissociate themselves from what their forefathers did would have been to obey the words of the prophets. But they were more elaborate and lavish in adorning those sepulchers than in putting their words into practice.
In seeking to entrap Jesus and even to kill him, they also showed the same blood -thirsty disposition to God’s messengers. Yet there was someone greater than all the prophets of old in their midst, for Jesus was the foretold Messiah. There were many occasions when they tried to entrap Jesus. In many other cases they even tried to kill him. They did so, at least in two instances, in John’s Gospel. “Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am.” Therefore they picked up stones to throw at Him (John 8:58-59). The Jews also took up stones to stone him when he said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30-31).
In linking their hypocrisy to the hypocrisy of their forefathers, Jesus did not intend to establish intergenerational punishment for sins. He simply pointed out that they were behaving exactly like their forefathers. – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM, MMExM, MAPM, REB. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.
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