Message of Abbot Paul - Friday 16th July

Message from Fr Paul for Friday, 16th July 2021

           Today the Church keeps the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, so it’s a good day to remember and pray for our Carmelite brothers and sisters, nuns, friars, priests and lay associates and all those who follow the Carmelite way of prayer. We think of the great Carmelite saints such as Saint Teresa of Jesus, St Thérèse of the Child Jesus and St John of the Cross, all three of them Doctors of the Church and, of course, Edith Stein the martyr, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. We have so much to learn and to be grateful for in the lives and writings of these great saints. 

           Our Gospel story from Matthew, (Mt 12: 1-8), is the well-known account of Jesus and his disciples walking through the cornfields and picking ears of corn to eat as they were hungry, What the Pharisees were doing in the cornfields at the same time is hard to say, but they were there and they saw it and it was, of all days, the sabbath. This was bound to lead to criticism. “Look, your disciples are doing something that is forbidden on the sabbath,” say the Pharisees to Jesus, who appears to have his answer ready. He replies, “Have you not read what David did when he and his followers were hungry – how he went into the house of God and how they ate the loaves of offering which neither he nor his followers were allowed to eat, but which were for the priests alone? Or again, have you not read in the Law that on the sabbath day the Temple priests break the sabbath without being blamed for it? Now here, I tell you, is something greater than the Temple. And if you had understood the meaning of the words: What I want is mercy, not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the blameless. For the Son of Man is master of the sabbath.” With two examples from the Scriptures, King David and the priests in the Temple, he demonstrates that when hunger calls, the Law can be broken, and he quotes from the Prophet Hosea to prove it, with the famous verse, What I want is mercy, not sacrifice (Hos 6: 6). He ends by referring to himself as the Son of Man, who is lord of the sabbath. Jesus emphasises that the purpose of the Law is to help people draw nearer to God and not separate them from him through guilt and fear. The problem with the Pharisees is that they exaggeratedly overinterpret the Law to such an extent that it becomes a burden that stifles faith rather than the aid it’s supposed to be. Let us pray that the spirit of the Pharisees does not find its way into the Church today, but rather that in Christ we may come to experience the freedom of the sons and daughters of God.