We are indeed a wounded people in need of the healing grace, mercy and love of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!
For we love with our heads not our hearts! With an emotion, not with acts of mercy and love put into action! Do we think we can buy our way into heaven? Use money to pay for our sins? Including those we have omitted? In other words for what we have done and for what we have failed to do. The latter is more often than not, the many times when we were blind and deaf to the needs of others.
It is not too late to realise that we can only become new creations in Him NOT by our own efforts but through Jesus Christ our Lord who waits to transform us from within. He does not ignore our sins but removes our guilt so that can be fully reconciled to live fully in His love through His once for all act of love in which He died on the Cross for us. So let us acknowledge our prideful ways and in humble contrition turn to Him to set us free. For He loves us with an everlasting love. Amen
First reading
Hosea 5:15-6:6 ·
What I want is love, not sacrifice and holocausts
The Lord says this:
They will search for me in their misery.
‘Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces, but he will heal us;
he has struck us down, but he will bandage our wounds;
after a day or two he will bring us back to life,
on the third day he will raise us
and we shall live in his presence.
Let us set ourselves to know the Lord;
that he will come is as certain as the dawn
his judgement will rise like the light,
he will come to us as showers come,
like spring rains watering the earth.’
What am I to do with you, Ephraim?
What am I to do with you, Judah?
This love of yours is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that quickly disappears.
This is why I have torn them to pieces by the prophets,
why I slaughtered them with the words from my mouth,
since what I want is love, not sacrifice;
knowledge of God, not holocausts.
Gospel
Luke 18:9-14
The tax collector, not the Pharisee, went home justified.
Jesus spoke the following parable to some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else: ‘Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself, “I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get.” The tax collector stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his breast and said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” This man, I tell you, went home again at rights with God; the other did not. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the man who humbles himself will be exalted.’
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