Wednesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

What is Daily Mass Readings with Homily and Saint of the Day?

Hear the Mass readings of the day, followed by a homily grounded in the writings of the Church Fathers, Doctors, and master theologians. Every episode concludes with a brief reflection on the heroic virtue of the Saint of the Day and a practical spiritual resolution to carry into your daily life.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is October the fourteenth, Wednesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time. The Spirit of God calls us away from the slavery of the flesh and the hypocrisy of hollow religion, toward the fruitful life of one crucified with Christ — rooted, living, and bearing fruit that endures.

A reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Galatians.

Brothers and sisters: If you are guided by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God. In contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also follow the Spirit.

The Word of the Lord.

Psalm one: Blessed the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked, nor walks in the way of sinners, nor sits in the company of the insolent, but delights in the law of the LORD and meditates on his law day and night. He is like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade. Whatever he does, prospers. Not so the wicked, not so; they are like chaff which the wind drives away. For the LORD watches over the way of the just, but the way of the wicked vanishes.

Alleluia. My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord; I know them, and they follow me. Alleluia.

A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke.

The Lord said: "Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb, but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done, without overlooking the others. Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces. Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk." Then one of the scholars of the law said to him in reply, "Teacher, by saying this you are insulting us too." And he said, "Woe also to you scholars of the law! You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them."

The Gospel of the Lord.

Three woes. Three surgical incisions made by the Word of God Himself into the diseased tissue of religious pretense. Our Lord does not speak these words with the cold detachment of a critic. He speaks them with the anguish of a physician watching patients refuse the cure. And Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, has already diagnosed the illness from its roots: the flesh, left ungoverned, produces a bitter and predictable harvest.

Notice that Paul's catalog of the works of the flesh is not merely a list of scandalous vices. He places alongside immorality and drunkenness the sins of rivalry, factions, dissensions, and selfishness. Saint Augustine, meditating on this very passage, observes that these interior disorders of pride and division are, in their own way, more spiritually lethal than the grosser carnal sins, because they wear the disguise of zeal. A man caught in drunkenness knows he has fallen. A man consumed by rivalry and faction-building often believes he is serving God. This is precisely the condition of the Pharisees in the Gospel. They are not lazy men. They are extraordinarily diligent men — tithing to the last leaf of rue and mint — yet they have mistaken the scaffolding for the building, the ceremonial hedges for the temple itself.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the virtue of justice, teaches that love of God and love of neighbor constitute the very soul of the law, the forma legis, the form which gives every external precept its life. Without this form, the law becomes a corpse — and a corpse, as our Lord devastatingly says, is precisely what the Pharisees resemble: hidden tombs, outwardly unmarked, inwardly full of death, contaminating all who brush against them without knowing it. The image is drawn from Jewish purity law — contact with a grave rendered one ritually unclean — and Christ turns it against those who presumed themselves to be the very guardians of purity.

This is the allegorical depth of the passage. The Pharisees are a figure of every age's temptation to substitute the exterior form of religion for its living substance. The Church has always recognized this danger within herself. Not merely outside in the world, but within her own walls. Cornelius a Lapide, the great Flemish commentator, notes that Christ does not abolish the tithe of mint and rue — He says, "these you should have done." External discipline retains its proper place. The sacraments, the fasts, the structured prayers of the liturgy — these are not rejected. They are ordered. They are ordered beneath judgment and love for God, not placed above them.

Now hear Paul's counter-image: the fruit of the Spirit. He does not say the works of the Spirit, as he said the works of the flesh. He says fruit. This is deliberate. Works are manufactured by effort and will. Fruit grows. It emerges organically from a living union with the vine — and here Psalm One amplifies the image with the tree planted near running water, whose leaves never fade, whose fruit comes in due season. The soul that is genuinely crucified with Christ — not merely performing crucifixion as a spiritual exercise, but truly dead to the ego's claims — that soul becomes a conduit for a life that is not its own.

The anagogical horizon opens here into eternity. Paul warns that those who live according to the flesh will not inherit the Kingdom. Inherit — it is the language of sonship, of filial participation in what the Father possesses. The Kingdom is not earned by the diligent accumulation of religious credentials. It is received by those who, having died with Christ in baptism, walk now by the breath of His Spirit. The Pharisee in each of us — the one who counts his tithed herbs and anticipates the seat of honor — must be crucified daily, so that the living tree may draw its life from the running water of grace.

This day, examine not the exterior ledger of your religious practice, but its animating intention. Before your next prayer, before your next act of devotion, pause and ask: is this love, or is this performance? Bring one act of genuine charity — patient, hidden, costly — to someone who cannot repay you, and offer it in the silence of the Spirit rather than the noise of self-approval.

May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. Amen.
EPISODE_TITLE: Fruit of the Spirit, Not the Flesh
IMAGE_PROMPT: A luminous olive tree planted beside a flowing stream under a golden Galilean sky, its roots deep and branches heavy with fruit, while dry chaff scatters in the wind across a barren field in the background, rendered in the style of classical sacred oil painting.