Third Sunday In Ordinary Time - 2025

Good morning. It is a pleasure to be with you this morning and how are you?

“Good morning – how are you?”. This is a very common greeting and more often than not the answer is, “fine and you”? We will often respond this way even if the answer is not even close to being true. For example, once when I went to my doctor with very bad sinus infection and was asked how I was doing without thinking I replied “fine”. The doctor replied with a smile, “Then why are you here?” I laughed an embarrassed little laugh and preceded to tell him how I was really feeling. This morning, I thought we might make a visit to the doctor, the Great Physician himself and in doing so I want us all to think about how we are when He ask, “How are you”?

Like any visit to the doctor, it seems we all must start by answering some preliminary questions, filling out some forms, having our vital signs checked, and asked if we have been taking our medications, following our diet, getting exercise, and other basic questions to arrive at a diagnosis, a prognosis, and a treatment. We do all this even if only for a checkup. If we are ill the treatment might be minor if the diagnosis is not very serious. However, if the diagnosis is more serious, more tests may be required, and the illness is serious then serious treatment will be the outcome. Some illnesses are chronic and require lifelong treatment to keep the illness under control.

Guess what? Our health as a Christian is the same as our physical health is. We need regular visits for checkups, recommendations for ways to stay healthy, treatments for conditions, and perhaps even more serious treatment.

Let’s look at the lessons today for a comparison.

In the first lesson the Priest Ezra led a group of Judean exiles to their home city of Jerusalem where he [Ezra] taught and enforced the observance of the Laws of the Torah. The lesson today comes several years after Ezra had been in Jerusalem and in the presence Nehamiah, the newly appointed Governor of Jerusalem, Ezra read from the Torah until midday and the people listened and wept and raised their hands and shouted amen. They all understood they had been living a spiritually unclean and unhealthy life and desired once again desired to be strong and healthy before God. That God was and is the source of life. This was truly a long checkup – a visit which lasted for hours. But the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment were spot on. And the patients followed the treatment plan.

In the Gospel we read what is perhaps the shortest sermon of all time. (You might be wishing mine was the same). After reading this one short passage from the prophet Isiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord." Jesus provided this very short homily, "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”

It would be sort of like going to the doctor, knowing all the existing conditions which you or a loved one may have which to this day has been at best controlled, and being told all these things shall be cured. Can you even begin to image how you might react? Relief, joy, doubt, how?

When the doctor proceeds to tell you the treatment plan which needs to be followed to be set free from a lifelong illness, regaining your sight, to be no longer restricted in your life. Would you follow the treatment plan? What if the plan provided an immediate cure? What if the plan also involved a lifetime therapy to prevent a relapse?

Embracing a spiritual approach, it becomes clear that the proclamation of the Lord Jesus was to announce the arrival of the Kingdom of God on earth. The Kingdom of God was the good news that Jesus was proclaiming. It meant that those who were spiritually blind would be enlightened, now being able to see the way, the truth and the life. It meant that those who were spiritually poor would finally have a living hope in Christ. Before our new birth in Christ through the Sacrament of Baptism, we were poor; now, we are spiritually rich.

Jesus also kept the core part of the long-term treatment plan short. No long readings as did Ezra. Instead, he summed up all Ezra taught and summarized the Ten Commandments and the law of Moses into two simple Commandments for us. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first Commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two Commandments hang all the law and the prophets." [Mt. 22:37-40]