Saturday of the Twenty-SecondWeek in Ordinary Time
The integral liberation of the man
While he 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, 2 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.” Lk 6,1-5
“The Son of Man ( Jesus Christ ) is lord even of the sabbath.”, consequently “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mk 2,27”. He came on the earth not only to liberate the man from the sin, but also from the formality of the law and of the rules. The rituals, the cult and the formulas are expression of the faith, they are not bearing a meaning on their own. When it is not this way, the man is crushed, instrumented and he ends up to be to the service of the religious system; he is not any more an horse free to run in the prairie of the kingdom of the heaven, he is overwhelmed and everything can be done to him. It happen, then, that the instrumentation of the man, starting from the religion, is extended to the whole of the human activities. In the modern world it features the basis of the organization of the society, where the man is slave of the technological progress, of the economical system, of the consumerism, of the production for the production, of the wellbeing for the wellbeing and of the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy. Consequently, the man, who was the purpose of the economical-productive system, becomes the instrument of such system. Therefore, the need to use the faith as the opening key for the integral liberation of the man, to bring him back to be lord of the life and of the history, raises up into the Christian. The church has understood all of this since long time and, starting from the encyclic Rerum Novarum of the pope Leone XIII, has conducted one and half century of social battles for the liberation of the man. Essentially it has been the church to fight the capitalism and the communism to avoid that they reduce the man to an instrument of the system, lacking of every material and spiritual freedom. However, the battle is still running; moreover, it has been extended from the western countries to the entire world. It became a global battle, where the church fights, almost being alone, for the liberation of the man from every slavery. Certainly, the church will win, because Jesus Christ, who is “lord of the sabbath” has already won with his death and resurrection. Because of this victory, also the man will be back to be the lord of the Sabbath, of the economical progress and of the productive system.