Monday, October 26, 2026

Monday of the Thirtieth week in Ordinary Time

Luke 13:10-17

Listen to the whole reading — MP3

First reading

Ephesians 4:32,5:1-8

And be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God also in Christ forgave you. Be therefore imitators of God, as beloved children. Walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling fragrance. But sexual immorality, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not even be mentioned among you, as becomes saints; nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not appropriate; but rather giving of thanks. Know this for sure, that no sexually immoral person, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words. For because of these things, the wrath of God comes on the children of disobedience. Therefore don’t be partakers with them. For you were once darkness, but are now light in the Lord. Walk as children of light,

Responsorial psalm

Psalms 1:1-2,3,4,6

Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand on the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the Lord’s law. On his law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, that produces its fruit in its season, whose leaf also does not wither. Whatever he does shall prosper. The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish.

Gospel

Luke 13:10-17

He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath day. Behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and she was bent over, and could in no way straighten herself up. When Jesus saw her, he called her, and said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity.” He laid his hands on her, and immediately she stood up straight, and glorified God. The ruler of the synagogue, being indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the multitude, “There are six days in which men ought to work. Therefore come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day!” Therefore the Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each one of you free his ox or his donkey from the stall on the Sabbath, and lead him away to water? Ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan had bound eighteen long years, be freed from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” As he said these things, all his adversaries were disappointed, and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him.

Lectio

For eighteen years the woman had been bent over, unable to straighten. Notice that Jesus sees her before she asks. She has not cried out, has not pushed through the crowd — she simply came to worship as she always did, carrying a body that would not obey her. And in the midst of the teaching, he stops. He calls her forward. He touches her, and for the first time in nearly two decades she looks up and sees faces instead of feet, sky instead of dust. To be a "daughter of Abraham," Jesus says, is not to be forgotten in your bondage but to be worthy of interruption. God's own law, the psalm reminds us, is meant to make us flourish like a tree by living water — not to become the very thing that keeps someone bent.

The tragedy of the synagogue ruler is that he had the law and lost the point of it. He could see the ox led to water but could not see the woman standing straight. Paul's plea to the Ephesians runs underneath all of this: be kind, be tenderhearted, imitate the God who does not count the days before he heals. There is a kind of religious life that hardens us, that turns even our reverence into a reason to withhold mercy. And there is a kind that softens us into "beloved children," able to rejoice, as the crowd did, when someone we did not even notice is suddenly set free.

Some things stay bent so long we stop believing they can straighten. What is the burden you have quietly carried for years, the one you no longer even bring to God because you have made peace with the ache — and could you name it to him today?

Is there someone whose freedom or joy you have resented because it came on the "wrong day" or in the "wrong way," and what would it cost you to simply rejoice with them instead?

Saint of the day

St. Evaristus, Pope and Martyr († 112)

Ora reads this aloud, every morning, free. Ora