Saturday of the Second Week in Course 2023
The Lord Jesus, in His Galilean ministry, was at the center of ongoing controversies. The authorities, both Jewish and Roman, probably said something like “chaos follows Him.” The Pharisees hated Christ because He taught that doing just and charitable actions were more important than following the minutest prescriptions invented to surround Torah. The Romans feared any populist movement for fear that it would turn into an insurrection. Rumors persisted that this Galilean prophet was the Messiah, and everybody misunderstood what that meant. Roman and Jew alike thought that the Messiah would be a military leader leading a rebellion. The people were so oppressed that Jesus’s healing prowess meant He would also lead an army to throw off the power of Rome and elite alike. But, of course, Jesus was to be a Messiah almost nobody expected, a leader who would go to His death in order to defeat sin and death and in His Resurrection, open up eternal joy to all who would repent and believe and live as He did.
That explains this two-line Gospel. St. Mark is writing about the hangers-on who followed Jesus with the wrong expectations, who wanted Christ to proclaim a political insurgency. His family worried about Him, unable even to eat, and tried to spirit Him off to safety. But that was not the Lord’s mission given by the Father.
Much earlier, as we read in the books of Samuel, Israel was convulsed with all kinds of bands of criminal gangs engaged in rapine and plunder. The Amalekites had survived a losing battle with Saul’s army years earlier, and now a band was roaming southern Israel and Gaza, killing and looting. They even were able to kidnap David’s wives while he and his men were off on another mission. David found an Egyptian slave of an Amalek leader, who led him and his band to the enemy encampment, where they slaughtered the bad guys and recaptured the people and loot that had been lost. Read the story at the end of First Samuel. We pick up the tale at that point, when a survivor soldier came to David with a tragic report: in battle with the Philistines, Israel’s army had been defeated. Saul and his sons, including friend Jonathan, were dead.
David laments over the loss of his people and especially of his bosom buddy. It is one of the most beautiful tragic poems in all of literature, and I commend it to you for your meditation and study. What can we take away from these readings? First, we should not think that our understanding of the Scriptures is wonderful because we hear these snippets at daily Mass. We should read ourselves these stories in the context of the OT and NT readings they are taken from. We don’t all need to be Scripture scholars, but if this is all we get, we are not even minimally knowledgeable about the Bible.
Second, when the political and cultural situation surrounding us is chaotic, how do we react? How should we respond? God does not call us to mirror the confusion around us by creating a photograph of it in our own minds. In the Gospels, even in Mark, we see an image of Jesus as a calm and healing island in the midst of a tsunami of conflicting human opinions and emotions. That is what Jesus wants to be in our own lives. Turn off the radio and take off the earphones. In silence and reduced glare meditate on some Scripture or liturgical words that can focus your attention on Christ our benevolent Lord. Only after thirty or forty minutes of that will you be able to craft a plan to deal with the maelstrom around you and your family. And bless God all the time you are doing it.
