Is It Lawful to Save Life Rather Than To Destroy It?, Second Wednesday in Ordinary Time (I), January 22, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Pontifical Mission Societies, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children
January 22, 2025
Heb 7:1-3.15-17, Ps 110, Mk 3:1-6

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as the Church in the United States prays for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children on this 52nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, conscious that even though that execrable decision was overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson the lives of so many unborn children are still threatened in various states through surgical and chemical abortions, the readings help us to focus on the life Christ gives us and has come to save. In the Gospel, Jesus asks the question, “Is it lawful to save life rather than to destroy it” and “to do good … rather than evil?” He came to show us that it is not just permitted to do so but that God summons us to do so by creating us, as we hear in today’s first reading, “to resemble the Son of God” who has a “life that cannot be destroyed.” Let’s delve together into the powerful message the Word of God gives us today on this Day of Prayer.
• In the first reading, we make a shift in our three-week study of the beautiful Letter to the Hebrews. Until now, the sacred author has introduced us to Christ’s priesthood as God the Father’s ultimate word, who through compassionate obedience in suffering and death, seeks to lead us through our suffering and death to perfection, if only we respond with eagerness and allow his living and effective word to profit us as it ought. Today we begin to look more deeply at Jesus’ high priesthood and its characteristics, a priesthood in which he offers himself as the Victim and seeks to transform us to make of our lives a loving sacrifice for God and others. The Letter to the Hebrews does so by focusing on the mysterious figure of Melchizedek. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us — a sentence of striking importance! —  that he was “made to resemble the Son of God.” When we say of Jesus, as we did at the end of the first reading and during today’s Responsorial Psalm, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek,” we need to understand that, yes, Jesus is a priest like Melchizedek and not like the Aaronic and levitical cohens, but that Melchizedek was made to be a particular type of priest in anticipation of Jesus. And so what are the qualities of Melchizedek’s priesthood that were made to resemble the priesthood of the Son of God? The first is in his name, which means “King of Righteousness.” Righteousness means being right with God and with others. The second is “King of Salem,” which means “King of Peace.” When we are right with God and others, peace comes as a fruit; when we’re not right with God and others, there will be no real, lasting peace. The third is that he is a “priest of God Most High,” who finds his lineage in God, since he is “without father, mother, ancestry.” This is in contrast to the Jewish priesthood that is based on blood descent from Aaron. Fourth, he was superior to Abraham, shown in the fact that Abraham tithed to him and he blessed Abraham. Christ would say later, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58). Fifth, he was “without beginning of days or end of life,” meaning that his priesthood, resembling that of Christ, was eternal. Based on all of these criteria, the Letter to the Hebrews says, referring to Jesus, that he is “another priest… raised up after the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become so, not by a law expressed in a commandment concerning physical descent but by the power of a life that cannot be destroyed. For it is testified: ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’” Jesus’ priesthood is one of righteousness, peace, God, superior to Abraham and eternal life. We could also add one other detail that is not in today’s passage: that Melchizedek offered a sacrifice of bread and wine, not animals, which is a clear allusion to Christ’s making his own definitive sacrifice under the appearance of bread and wine during the Last Supper — the “living Bread come down from heaven” — and taking us from sign to signified the following afternoon on Calvary.
• We see Jesus the High Priest carrying out his priesthood of righteousness, peace and eternal life in the Gospel. He returned to the Synagogue as a controversial figure because he had healed the paralyzed man’s sins (a divine action that was considered blasphemous by those unwilling to consider that he might be divine), ate with tax collectors and sinners, allowed his apostles to pluck heads of grain on the sabbath and more. In the synagogue, there was a man with a crushed hand who probably couldn’t work and support himself and his family. Jesus called him forward and asked what would on the surface seem to be a silly question, but one that was key to understanding the righteousness with God and others that Jesus had come to reestablish. “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil,” Jesus asked, “to save life rather than to destroy it?” Jesus was asking if it was possible to love someone in deeds on the Lord’s day. He was querying whether it was possible to save or redeem. Jesus’ opponents didn’t respond because they knew how ridiculous their response would seem, but after Jesus was gone, the Pharisees went out on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s day, and began to conspire with the Herodians (with whom they would ordinarily not interact at all because of the Herodians’ licentiousness and relations with the Romans) about how to put Jesus to death. They apparently thought nothing was wrong in using the sabbath to “do evil” and to “destroy” life, but they homicidally objected to Jesus’ trying to do good and save life. Even though the Pharisees were distinguished by their trying to live the Law in all its minutiae, many of them had ceased to be “righteous,” because they were no longer living the Law as a Covenant of Love. They were so obsessed about smaller details that they failed to live the main point of it. Rather than forming them to be God-like, they thought that the law required murdering Jesus. It’s key for us to grasp what was happening behind the scenes. If the devil can’t get us to reject God’s law, he’s going to try to get us to misunderstand it and live according to a distorted notion of it. That’s what had happened with so many of the Pharisees, Scribes and others. Jesus had come to reestablish God’s people in righteousness and in the peace that flows from it. He had come to save us. He had come to give us life to the full. But not everyone would accept this priestly work and they would become participants in his priestly sacrifice not through their cooperation but through their conspiratorial plotting. What happened to them is a warning to us and to people of every generation. Sin draws us, consciously or unconsciously, to destroy not just our lives but the lives of others. And it can lead us — like in so many states and countries today — to make laws that promote the destruction of life and laws against those who seek to protect life. That’s why we pray today. We ask God for the grace not just to protect those whose lives are in danger, especially in the sanctuary of their mothers’ wombs, but to make us truly resemble Jesus the Son of God in his desire to save life even at the risk or gift of our own.
• The question for us at Mass this morning is whether we have sincerely come to Church today to meet Christ and allow him to incorporate us into his priesthood more deeply, the common priesthood we received on the day of our baptism, the priesthood that offers not just sacrifices for sin but ourselves together with him in expiation for our sins and those of the world. It’s whether we, unlike the Pharisees in the Capernaum synagogue, have come to receive our life from him and to commit ourselves to doing “this” in memory of him. Today we want Christ from the Holy Eucharist not to look at us with “anger” or “grief” at our hardness of heart — like he looked at those in the synagogue — but with love, consolation and gratitude for our desire and commitment to pray and work for the protection of every little boy or girl made in his image and likeness, made to resemble him. As we prepare now to receive the fulfillment of Melchizedek’s sacrifice, we ask Jesus to fill us with his life and life so that today and every day the Lord has made we might do good and with him save life!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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