How to Read the Sunday Gospel

I wanted to share a practice that I mentioned at two of the Masses that I preached two weeks ago. As we traverse with our Lord and his disciples during this Ordinary Time in Year C, it can help us to not read just the Sunday reading, but the preceding and next Sunday Gospel from our Bible. We are working our way through the Gospel of Luke. However, there are times in which a handful of verses are left out. It’s one thing to read the Sunday Gospel and try to understand what it means on its own, but it’s a beautiful thing to read it in light of its grander context. This also means that we will read each Sunday Gospel three times over the period of three weeks, unpacking what we’ve heard before, preparing ourselves for what is coming on Sunday, and anticipating the next Sunday when we will gather again and sit at the Teacher’s feet.

Today’s Gospel is the famous passage about Jesus visiting the home of Martha and Mary. Martha is the one carrying out all the domestic work to welcome their guest and Mary is soaking in the teachings of Jesus and visiting with him in conversation. When Martha demands Mary’s help and asks Our Lord to intervene, he gently rebukes her to make the point that in his presence, she must quiet herself. “Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” Obviously, Our Lord wants his disciples to quiet their hearts in his presence, converse with him alone, and forget the material concerns of life. While this can mean different things for different walks of life, in a parish community, the Lord is inviting us to visit him periodically in the Blessed Sacrament for quiet prayer in the church and to forget the cares of the world. There in his Sacred Presence, he desires to give a peace that only he can give.

Moreover, when read in the context of the previous Sunday’s reading and next Sunday’s reading, we see a long narrative of how Christ is forming a “school of discipleship.” Last Sunday was the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In that parable, the Samaritan is Christ who responds to our fallen human nature which has been left beaten and bruised on the side of the road, an image of original sin. The Samaritan/Christ, responds through the sacraments of Initiation (water, wine, and oil) in order to place the man in the inn (the Church) run by the innkeeper (St. Peter and the popes), who receives two coins for his wellbeing (Scripture and Tradition). Next week, the Lord will teach his disciples how to pray (the Our Father), and speak to them of how they are to treat fairly the good and bad alike, just as God treats all alike. In this context, our Lord lays out the beauty of His response to our woundedness in the sacraments, teaches his disciples through Martha and Mary that after rescued they must spend time contemplating God’s Word, and then originating in a spirit of prayer, go out and equally bring the good and the bad to the same communion with the Father that each one of us has found.