14 June 2025 (Saturday)
Saturday of week 10 in Ordinary Time or Saturday memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
First Reading : 2 Corinthians 5:14‐21
The love of Christ overwhelms us when we reflect that if one man has died for all, then all men should be dead; and the reason he died for all was so that living men should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised to life for them. From now onwards, therefore, we do not judge anyone by the standards of the flesh. Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now. And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God’s work. It was God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the work of handing on this reconciliation. In other words, God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them, and he has entrusted to us the news that they are reconciled. So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God.
Responsive Psalm : Psalm 102(103):1‐4,9‐12
The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy.
My soul, give thanks to the Lord all my being, bless his holy name. My soul, give thanks to the Lord and never forget all his blessings.
The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy.
It is he who forgives all your guilt, who heals every one of your ills, who redeems your life from the grave, who crowns you with love and compassion.
The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy.
His wrath will come to an end; he will not be angry for ever. He does not treat us according to our sins nor repay us according to our faults.
The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy.
For as the heavens are high above the earth so strong is his love for those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west so far does he remove our sins.
The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy.
Gospel : Matthew 5:33‐37
Jesus said to his disciples: ‘You have learnt how it was said to our ancestors: You must not break your oath, but must fulfil your oaths to the Lord. But I say this to you: do not swear at all, either by heaven, since that is God’s throne; or by the earth, since that is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, since that is the city of the great king. Do not swear by your own head either, since you cannot turn a single hair white or black. All you need say is “Yes” if you mean yes, “No” if you mean no; anything more than this comes from the evil one.’
For our reflection today:
Being free - according to the programme of Christ and his Kingdom - does not mean enjoyment but toil: the toil of freedom. At the price of this toil man ‘does not disperse’, but together with Christ “gathers” and ‘accumulates’. At the price of this toil, man also obtains in himself that unity, which is proper to the Kingdom of God. My dear friends! This unity is your special task, if you do not want to give in, if you do not want to surrender to the unity of that other agenda, the one that seeks to realise in the world, in mankind, in our generation and in each one of us, the one whom the Holy Scripture also calls ‘the father of lies’ (Jn 8:44). Learn to think, speak and act according to the principles of simplicity and evangelical clarity: ‘Yes, yes, no, no’. Learn to call white white, and black black - evil evil, and good good. Learn to call sin sin, and not to call it liberation and progress, even if all the fashion and propaganda were against it. Through such simplicity and clarity, the unity of the Kingdom of God is built - and this unity is at the same time a mature inner unity of every man, it is the foundation of the unity of spouses and families, it is the strength of societies: of societies that perhaps already feel, and feel better and better, how you try to destroy and break them down from within, calling good evil, and sin the manifestation of progress and liberation. (St. John Paul II, Homily, 26 March 1981)
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