Friday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/070612.cfm

While he was at table in his house,
many tax collectors and sinners came
and sat with Jesus and his disciples.
The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples,
"Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

In our first reading today we have heard the Prophet Amos speak of that day, and he foretells a dreadful day:

Yes, days are coming, says the Lord GOD,when I will send famine upon the land: Not a famine of bread, or thirst for water,but for hearing the word of the LORD.

The famine of which he speaks will be a day when religion fails, when no one hears the word of God. It might be the day of which Saint Paul warns Timothy (2 Tim 4:3)

For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths

That is indeed a terrible day and many of our neighbors and friends are already enduring the horror. They have divorced themselves from faith and taken shelter from the gales of judgment behind the pathetic walls of delusion. How many times do I hear former Catholics tell me they still pray, though they don’t go to church anymore? Yeah, right! something mutters within me. I don't want to judge and I don't ask about their schedule of prayer or what prayers they say, but I must invite them to know the Lord through the prayers and sacraments of the church. 

In today’s gospel we hear that the DAY has come for the tax collectors and sinners who flock to Jesus. In Saint Luke’s Gospel Zechariah sings of the coming daybreak, (the KJV uses a lovely word, dayspring):

because of the tender mercy of our God by which the daybreak from on high will visit us to shine on those who sit in darkness and death’s shadow,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.” 

Jesus is the Day that shine over us. So long as we gather with him – comfortably seated among the tax collectors and sinners -- we will not suffer the famine which Amos spread over the northern kingdom of Israel.