Wednesday of the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time
Brothers, I couldn't speak to you as to spiritual, but as to fleshly, as to babies in Christ. I fed you with milk, not with solid food, for you weren't yet ready. Indeed, you aren't ready even now, For you are still fleshly. For insofar as there is jealousy, strife, and factions among you, aren't you fleshly, and don't you walk in the ways of men? For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," aren't you fleshly?
Who then is Apollos, and who is Paul, but servants through whom you believed, and each as the Lord gave to him? I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. Now he who plants and he who waters are the same, but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's farming, God's building.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people whom he has chosen for his own inheritance. The Lord looks from heaven. He sees all the sons of men.
From the place of his habitation he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, He who fashions all of their hearts; And he considers all of their works.
Our soul has waited for the Lord. He is our help and our shield. For our heart rejoices in him, Because we have trusted in his holy name.
He rose up from the synagogue and entered into Simon's house. Simon's mother-in-law was afflicted with a great fever, and they begged him to help her. He stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. Immediately she rose up and served them. When the sun was setting, all those who had any sick with various diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them. Demons also came out of many, crying out and saying, "You are the Christ, the Son of God!" Rebuking them, he didn't allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Christ.
When it was day, he departed and went into an uninhabited place and the multitudes looked for him, and came to him, and held on to him, so that he wouldn't go away from them. But he said to them, "I must preach the good news of God's Kingdom to the other cities also. For this reason I have been sent." He was preaching in the synagogues of Galilee.
There's something almost uncomfortably honest about Paul's letter to the Corinthians. He's essentially telling a community of believers: you're not as mature as you think you are. The evidence? Look at how you're treating each other. Factions. Rivalries. People planting their flag behind one leader or another. Sound familiar?
We do this constantly. We attach ourselves to movements, personalities, podcasts, theological camps — and somewhere along the way, the thing we were following becomes more important than the One we were supposed to be following. Paul cuts through all of it with a single clarifying image: we are gardeners, not the sun. We can plant, we can water, but we cannot make anything grow. That belongs to God alone.
Notice how the Gospel holds this same truth from a different angle. Jesus heals Simon's mother-in-law, and by evening, the whole town is at his door. The crowds find him the next morning and, Luke says, they "held on to him" — they wanted to keep him there, in their town, available to them. But Jesus moves on. Not because he doesn't care, but because the mission is larger than any one community's comfort or possession.
The paradox is that God's abundance — healing, growth, presence — cannot be owned or contained. The moment we try to franchise it, to say "our group has the real thing," we've already lost the thread.
What this Wednesday invites us to consider is the quality of our own attachments. Not whether we have them — we always will — but whether they're drawing us deeper into God or subtly replacing God.
A few questions to carry through the day:
Where are we watering seeds we didn't plant, and can we trust God with the outcome?
Who or what are we "holding on to" in a way that might be limiting where God wants to move?
What would it look like to serve today — like Simon's mother-in-law, immediately and without fanfare — simply because we've been healed?