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Today's Readings and Meditation
Saturday 4th September, 2010
1 Corinthians 4:6-15. The Lord is near to all who call him—Ps 144(145):17-21. Luke 6:1-5.
Link to Readings
They say to err is human, but to foul things up thoroughly requires a computer.
In much the same way, the divinely simple command to love one another, processed by the super computer of the human brain, had spawned thirty-nine different prohibitions in order to ‘keep holy the Sabbath day’. John McKenzie in his Dictionary of the Bible mentions a few: lighting a fire, clapping hands, jumping, slapping the thigh, even visiting the sick!
What the disciples were doing here was ‘threshing wheat’ in their hands—utterly verboten on the Sabbath. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side did so not from callous indifference, but to avoid ritual uncleanness from touching what might have been a corpse.
Sometimes our piety is similarly riddled with spurious practices. We need to examine our devotions and heed Paul’s cry to be ‘fools for Christ’s sake’.
Courtesy  the magazine of prayer and spirituality for today's Christian, © 2005 Jesuit Publications.
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