Verbum Diei
2026-01-08Vatican NewsLatestArchive
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Season Christmas
Cycle Year A
Psalter Week II
Reading

A reeading from the Letter of 1 John

1 John 4:19–5:4
Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition — Public Domain

4:19Let us therefore love God: because God first hath loved us.

4:20If any man say: I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar. For he that loveth not his brother whom he seeth, how can he love God whom he seeth not?

4:21And this commandment we have from God, that he who loveth God love also his brother.

5:1Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God. And every one that loveth him who begot, loveth him also who is born of him. Is born of God... That is, is justified, and become a child of God by baptism: which is also to be understood; provided the belief of this fundamental article of the Christian faith be accompanied with all the other conditions, which, by the word of God, and his appointment, are also required to justification; such as a general belief of all that God has revealed and promised: hope, love, repentance, and a sincere disposition to keep God's holy law and commandments.

5:2In this we know that we love the children of God: when we love God and keep his commandments.

5:3For this is the charity of God: That we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not heavy.

5:4For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world. And this is the victory which overcameth the world: Our faith. Our faith... Not a bare, speculative, or dead faith; but a faith that worketh by charity. Gal. 5.6

Gospel

From the Gospel according to Luke

Luke 4:14-22
Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition — Public Domain

14And Jesus returned in the power of the spirit, into Galilee: and the fame of him went out through the whole country.

15And he taught in their synagogues and was magnified by all.

16And he came to Nazareth, where he was brought up: and he went into the synagogue, according to his custom, on the sabbath day: and he rose up to read.

17And the book of Isaias the prophet was delivered unto him. And as he unfolded the book, he found the place where it was written:

18The spirit of the Lord is upon me. Wherefore he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the contrite of heart,

19To preach deliverance to the captives and sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of reward.

20And when he had folded the book, he restored it to the minister and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.

21And he began to say to them: This day is fulfilled this scripture in your ears.

22And all gave testimony to him. And they wondered at the words of grace that proceeded from his mouth. And they said: Is not this the son of Joseph?

Gloss

Commentary

On the Reading
  • R 5:1,5:2The passage tightens the circle of belonging: faith in “Jesus is the Christ” generates a new kinship in which love is not sentiment but family-duty, verified by obedience. The inserted gloss exposes the danger the text provokes—reducing “belief” to a single proposition—and counters by reattaching justification to a full moral and theological habitus.
On the Gospel
  • G 18,19,21Luke frames Jesus’ mission statement as a public legal claim: anointing authorizes proclamation, proclamation creates a reordered social field (poor, captives, blind, bruised), and “today” collapses promise into event. The juxtaposition of “acceptable year” with “day of reward” binds mercy to judgment; liberation is not mere relief but the inbreaking of a reign that evaluates.

DoctrinalGod’s prior love establishes a new birth that is proven by obedient charity toward the visible brother. Christ’s proclaimed fulfillment inaugurates liberation that simultaneously constitutes judgment in the present.”

Heterodox Reading
John’s “love” reads like a loyalty test disguised as tenderness. God loved first, so you are already in debt; the interest is your brother. If you fail to love the one you can see, you are not merely cold, you are counterfeit, a liar. The text doesn’t soothe; it surveils. It presses the private claim “I love God” into public proof, as if the only way to touch the invisible is by handling the nearest body without flinching. “His commandments are not heavy” is the most chilling line. It denies your experience of weight, implying the burden is not the law but you. The world to be “overcome” is not some pagan outside; it is the ordinary resistance in you that wants love to stay abstract, clean, and uncostly. Faith wins by becoming a kind of appetite that makes obedience feel natural, even when it humiliates you. In Nazareth, Jesus stages fulfillment like a performance of intimacy: he chooses the passage, reads it, sits, and lets their stare ripen. “This day” is desire made immediate, the poor and captive promised relief now, not later. And then the room curdles into recognition: “Is not this the son of Joseph?” They crave a savior, but not one with a hometown, not one who brings the claim too close to their faces. The gospel offers liberation, but it begins by trapping the hearer in a gaze: you wanted good news; here it is, in your ears, in your street, in someone you think you already understand.
Semina Verbi
John strips “love of God” of its perfume and makes it falsifiable. If you can’t love the brother in front of you, your God-talk is self-flattery. The unseen is tested by the seen. The psyche here is allergic to spiritual abstraction: it treats contempt as a diagnostic sign. Hatred isn’t a mere moral failure; it’s evidence the inner story is counterfeit. “Commandments are not heavy” is not sentimental. It’s a claim about desire. When you’re “born of God,” the weight shifts from white-knuckled compliance to a new appetite; the world’s seductions lose their glamour because a deeper attachment has taken root. Faith “overcomes” precisely because it is not a private opinion but a re-trained loyalty that expresses itself as concrete charity. Luke shows how that interior re-ordering turns outward. Jesus reads Isaiah as autobiography and then, with one sentence, detonates the room: the text isn’t about some later hero; it’s happening now. The poor, the captives, the bruised are not props for piety but the chosen theater of God’s action. The Nazareth line, “Is not this the son of Joseph?”, is the reflex of familiarity: we prefer the divine at a safe distance, not wearing the face we already think we understand. Speculation: the test “love the one you see” echoes Confucian ren, where virtue is proven in relational duty, and Buddhist metta, where awakening is measured by unforced goodwill toward beings. The “light burden” of commandments resembles the Daoist sense that alignment makes action effortless. The manifesto for the poor and captive parallels the Hebrew jubilee and also the Stoic idea that philosophy’s proof is liberation, not rhetoric. Here, liberation is not escape from the world but a new way of inhabiting it, beginning with the people nearest, least impressive, and most inconvenient.