The commentary on today's Gospel 20 January 2021 by Don Luigi Maria Epicoco

The scene recounted in today's Gospel is truly significant. Jesus enters the synagogue. The controversial confrontation with the writers and the Pharisees is now evident. This time, however, the diatribe does not concern theological discourses or interpretations, but the concrete suffering of a person:

“There was a man who had a withered hand, and they watched him to see if he healed him on the Sabbath and then accused him. He said to the man who had a withered hand: "Get in the middle!"

Only Jesus seems to take this man's suffering seriously. The others are all just worried about being right. A bit like it also happens to us who lose sight of what matters due to the urge to be right. Jesus establishes that the starting point must always be the concreteness of the other's face. There is something greater than any Law and it is man. If you forget this, you risk becoming religious fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is not only harmful when it concerns other religions, but it is also dangerous when it concerns ours. And we become a fundamentalist when we lose sight of people's concrete lives, their concrete suffering, their concrete existence in a precise history and in a specific condition. Jesus puts people at the center, and in today's Gospel he does not limit himself only to doing so but to questioning others starting from this gesture:

“Then he asked them: 'Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or evil, to save a life or to take it away?' But they were silent. And looking around them with indignation, saddened by the hardness of their hearts, he said to that man: "Stretch out your hand!" He stretched it out and his hand was healed. And the Pharisees immediately went out with the Herodians and held council against him to put him to death ”.

It would be nice to think where we are in this story. Do we reason like Jesus or like the scribes and Pharisees? And above all we realize that Jesus does all this because the man with the withered hand is not a stranger, but it is me, is it you?