Saturday August 9, 2025

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“The LORD is our God, the LORD alone!
Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God,
with all your heart,
and with all your soul,
and with all your strength.”
(From today’s first reading)

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Good News Reflection for:

Saturday of the 18th Week of Ordinary Time
August 9, 2025

Today’s Readings:

Deuteronomy 6:4-13
Psalm 18:2-4, 47, 51
Matthew 17:14-20
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080925.cfm
Podcast:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-august-12-2023

The surprising connection between extravagance and the Eucharist

Pope Saint John Paul II taught that one of the original influences that helped shape the way we celebrate our liturgies is the experience of the woman in the Bible who anointed Jesus with her expensive perfume. The gift was extravagant! (Ecclesia de Eucharistia paragraphs 47-48.)

Christ’s gift to us — his life sacrificed on the Cross — is the most extravagant gift. His gift deserves a response that is far from mediocre. Like the woman at Bethany, our gestures of love for Jesus should be outrageously extravagant. It’s quite impossible to over-do it when showing Jesus how much we love him.

In those days, people made their own perfumes using aromatic herbs. The longer a perfume fermented in the jar, the more valuable it became because of the cost of time. The gift of this anointing was the generous “wasting” of something that had taken a long time to make. Remember, she poured it on Jesus, she didn’t dab on a few drops. It was all gone in a few seconds.

Are we that extravagant in our love for Jesus? The world is full of Judases who try to make us feel guilty about being so enthusiastic in our faith: “Why spend so much money to buy a genuine gold tabernacle? That money would have been used more wisely on the poor!”

While the Church does have a responsibility to help the poor, it’s not extravagance that prevents us from coming to their aid, it’s stinginess. Far, far too many Catholics donate very little in the Church’s various collections.

If we truly are excited about the gift the Lord has given us, we should let nothing hold us back from being extravagant in our gifts to both the church’s building fund and to the needy and to the faraway mission fields. We should never force our pastors to choose between beautiful artwork for the church and food for the poor.

Read Ecclesia de Eucharistia (The Church of the Eucharist) to find more pearls of wisdom from Saint John Paul II. Download it from gnm.org/terry-modica-author/my-soul-shall-be-healed. To make it super-easy to understand and enjoy more deeply, get my book My Soul Shall Be Healed. It’s designed for small study groups to unpack this important encyclical; what’s your parish doing to increase devotion to the Eucharist? Bulk discounts are available. Please share this link with your Pastor or Director of Religious Education. (This book is also great for individual learners and for home study groups.)

© 2025 by Terry A. Modica

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