In today’s First Reading Amos warns those who’d cheat Israel for their own benefit that they’ll incur the greatest famine of all: a lack of the word of God in their lives. That may seem on the surface to be fine if the food and drink keep coming, but not having the word of God in your life is basically having no true or lasting meaning to call your own.\u00a0Eventually the Old Testament prophets fell silent in the few centuries preceding the coming of Christ; Israel had to await its savior with no more prophets until John the Baptist.<\/p>\n
In today’s Gospel we see the Word of God coming into Matthew’s life in a simple but powerful way. The fast from God’s word is over for Matthew and he eagerly accepts the word of God by following Our Lord and becoming not only his apostle, but one of his evangelists. In turn he brings the Word of God to his friends, who also have the opportunity to break the fast of their distance\u00a0from God.<\/p>\n
Fasting from the Word of God is never a good thing. If you’re feeling the emptiness, ask him to feed you with his Word and his sacraments again.<\/p>\n
Readings:\u00a0Amos 8:4\u20136, 9\u201312;\u00a0Psalm 119:2, 10, 20, 30, 40, 131;\u00a0Matthew 9:9\u201313.<\/em> See also Saturday after Ash Wednesday<\/a>,\u00a01st Week in Ordinary Time, Saturday<\/a>, and \u00a0St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In today’s First Reading Amos warns those who’d cheat Israel for their own benefit that they’ll incur the greatest famine of all: a lack of the word of God in their lives. That may seem on the surface to be fine if the food and drink keep coming, but not having the word of God … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,45,56,146],"class_list":["post-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-friday","tag-ordinary-time","tag-thirteenth-week","tag-year-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p65qtw-nr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1455,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions\/1455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}