Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for September 6, 2025
Here is the video of today’s reflection.
The YouTube generated transcript for today’s reflection is:
I’m Monsignor Roger Landry, National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies, looking at the southern coast of Sicily behind me. Today in the Gospel for September 6th, the disciples of Jesus were picking heads of grain as they were walking along the fields. That’s how hungry they were. They were literally starving such that they were going to pick those heads of grain, thresh the grain in their hands, and then try to eat it. But the Pharisees complained saying that that was unlawful to do on the Sabbath day that you couldn’t even do that minimal amount of work as if God wanted his sons to starve on the day we called the Lords’. It was idiotic. But that was the religious myopia that Jesus was confronting in the scribes and the Pharisees. And so Jesus said, “You remember what David did when he and his soldiers were hungry? How they went into God’s own house, the temple, and they ate the bread that only the priests were lawfully permitted to eat because they were God’s soldiers, and God wanted them to be fed.
If that was the case for David and his soldiers, how much more for Jesus and his apostles, his missionaries, to be able to be cared for in this way, to be prioritized in this way. And Jesus finished the whole episode by saying, “Remember that the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” That Jesus is Lord of every day, that he’s the one who ultimately teaches us how to behave appropriately. That’s what he did with the disciples as he was preparing them to be apostles, to be truly free, not to be bound up and tied like the Pharisees, but to take that freedom for which we were made out to the ends of the earth.
We can’t love like God wants us to love unless we’re free. That’s why Jesus always defended that principle of freedom and taught in this episode in today’s gospel the disciples and apostles about that same gift. Today we pray for Pope Leo who’s trying to help the whole church become free to love so that we can use our freedom to take the gospel of freedom and love to the ends of the earth. Let’s get down to work.
The Gospel reading on which the reflection was based was:
Gospel
While Jesus was going through a field of grain on a sabbath,
his disciples were picking the heads of grain,
rubbing them in their hands, and eating them.
Some Pharisees said,
“Why are you doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?”
Jesus said to them in reply,
“Have you not read what David did
when he and those who were with him were hungry?
How he went into the house of God, took the bread of offering,
which only the priests could lawfully eat,
ate of it, and shared it with his companions?”
Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”