June 17, 2017 Saturday, 10th Week in Ordinary Time1st Reading:
2 Cor 5:14-21
Gospel: Mt 5:33–37
Jesus said to his disciples, “You have also heard that people were told in the past: Do not break your oath; an oath sworn to the Lord must be kept. But I tell you this: do not take oaths. Do not swear by the heavens, for they are God’s throne, nor by the earth, because it is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem because it is the city of the great king. Do not even swear by your head, because you cannot make a single hair white or black. Say yes when you mean yes and say no when you mean no. Anything else you say comes from the devil.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
The readings starting Thursday until Tuesday next week are part of a single discourse of Jesus. The discourse is about some six Christian behaviors required under different provisions of law that Jesus wanted to revise. He couches his discourse in the following format: “You have heard that it was said… but now I tell you…”
In today’s Gospel Jesus says, “You have also heard that people were told in the past: Do not break your oath; an oath sworn to the Lord must be kept. But I tell you this: do not take oaths.” By this revision did Jesus really mean to abolish the practice of swearing? No! Swearing is important to society with people’s limping adherence to truth – limping because we love to embrace truth but only half of it. If people only love to embrace the whole truth, then there would be no need for swearing or for making oaths. So that there won’t be any need for it anymore, the Lord urges us to say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no.
‘Yes’ is a simple three-letter word but it can save the world when written by the stylus of truth. It did when the Blessed Virgin Mary said “yes” to the Angel at the Annunciation. The Angel took Mary’s “Yes” without requiring her to swear notwithstanding how crucial her reply was to the plan of salvation.
Because Mary had the habit for truth, the angel saw genuineness shining in her reply.
Like Mary let us form the habit of truthfulness till truth becomes our identity. Steven Covey wrote: “sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap destiny”. When we sow nothing in our minds but the truth, what ripens into action is truth itself.
Jesus has in effect enlarged the law prohibiting the breaking of an oath by calling for an establishment of a social order that would warrant the repeal of the law on making oaths. This social order will rise when truth will become part of everyone’s identity. – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM
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