Daily Gospel Reflection for January 26, 2025

Join us as we reflect, ponder, and pray together inspired by today's Gospel.

Reflection by Leslie Lynch

Today's Gospel: Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21

I’ve always loved the Gospel of Luke, perhaps because when I first read it, I unconsciously identified with the women he included in his account of Jesus’s life. This reflection is not the place for a study of the strong women with widely varied backgrounds in this Gospel, but Luke shows us Jesus’s concern and care for women.

Luke’s account also focuses on Jesus’s mercy and compassion, epitomized in today’s reading. Jesus Himself announces the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: bringing glad tidings to the poor, proclaiming liberty to captives, recovering sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free. 

As mothers, we encounter many opportunities to exercise those virtues daily: feeding and bathing and dressing and cleaning—always cleaning!—and refereeing and bandaging scraped knees.

And nightly: nursing an infant, comforting a toddler during a storm, checking for monsters under the bed, cuddling a child after a nightmare, or waiting up for a teen driver who is late.

Yet Jesus speaks to us today, too. Not simply regarding the performance of our roles and duties, but in our deepest needs.

In His compassion, He is with me when my child is in the ICU or oncology unit.

In His mercy, He helps me leave an abusive relationship.

I need to hear His glad tidings when I get breast cancer or a debilitating autoimmune syndrome, or when aging brings frailty and ailments.

When stress and depression weigh my family down (because it’s never just one member who’s affected), I lean on Jesus’s promises of liberty and sight and freedom.

Luke addresses his Gospel to Theophilus—literally, friend of God. Today, I remember that I, too, am a friend of God. And I remember that Jesus has an abundance of mercy and compassion for me.

Jesus, I trust in You.

Ponder:

In what ways do I need Jesus’s mercy and compassion in my life today? How can He free me to see the needs around me and bring glad tidings to the world in which He has placed me?

Pray:

Jesus, please open my eyes to Your infinite and gracious mercy in my life. Help me to respond to Your mercy by sharing Your compassion with all those around me.

Copyright 2025 Leslie Lynch

Leslie Lynch lives near Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband and a rescued, feral-turned-sweetheart cat. She’s written three full-length novels: Hijacked, Unholy Bonds, and Opal’s Jubilee; and two novellas: Christmas Hope and Christmas Grace. She is an occasional contributor to the Archdiocese of Indianapolis’s newspaper, The Criterion, and holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University. Learn more at www.leslielynch.com/.