Homily – Saturday of the Twenty-Second Week in Ordinary Time
By Fr. Williams Onyilo, CSSp
Readings: Colossians 1:21-23; Luke 6:1-5
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “religiosity” is understood as the voluntary submission of a person to God. It embraces both an inward orientation-striving for personal holiness and union with God-and outward expressions of this devotion through action and worship.
In today’s first reading, St. Paul exhorts the Christians in Colossae to embrace true religiosity: a life that is holy, blameless, and faithful (Colossians 1:22–23). In contrast, the Gospel presents the Pharisees, who were more concerned with external observance. They criticized the disciples for plucking heads of grain to satisfy their hunger, placing ritual above compassion. Jesus corrected them, reminding us that God’s law is meant to sustain life, not to suffocate it.
This same tension is echoed in Matthew 23:23, where Jesus condemns the Pharisees for their hypocrisy: “Woe to you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! You hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint, dill, and cumin, but you neglect the weightier matters of the Law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.”
Today, the question before us is this: when we look at ourselves, our families, our communities, and even our churches-what do we see? Do we see justice, mercy, love, holiness, faithfulness, and truth? Or do we find hunger, oppression, deceit, greed, and a spirit of mere business-mindedness?
May the Holy Spirit open our eyes and hearts, so that we may live out true religiosity: a faith that is not only professed in words and rituals, but also practiced in justice, love, and compassion. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
