Tuesday, Second Week in Ordinary Time

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Second Week in Ordinary Time

Memorial of Saint Agnes, Virgin and Martyr

Heb 6:10-20/Mk 2:23-28 (Lectionary #312) 

 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012125.cfm

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For the second time Jesus is questioned about the behavior of his disciples. In response he gives a teaching about law and again says something about himself.

Jesus’ disciples were pulling heads of grain off the stalks and eating them as they walked through a field on the Sabbath. Some Pharisees said, “Look, they are working on the Sabbath! Jesus answered by reminding them that when in need David fed his hungry troops with the Temple bread “which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat.” Then he taught them how God thinks about his own laws: “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath!”

Phariseeism is defined as a religion whose focus and goal is law observance. Jesus teaches that laws are always just a means to an end, and we cannot keep any law as God desires unless we first ask what its purpose is. He goes further and teaches that the purpose of all laws is to help people. If we lose sight of this, we have lost contact with God’s mind and will. And that means we are misunderstanding God!

This is an important principle. We must always interpret laws in the light of what God reveals of himself. If we reverse the direction and form our idea of God from the way his laws are interpreted by people in our time and place, we can get a very distorted notion of God. Some have stopped believing in God because of this. And some have left the Church because they judged the Church by the blind way some Catholics, even priests, interpret her laws. God did not create people to keep his laws. He made laws to help people live “life to the full” (John 10:10). If we have a problem with some particular law of God, either we don’t understand the law or we don’t know God.

Jesus concluded from this, “so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Since Jesus was sent by God as Messiah and Savior of the human race, everything God created for human beings — including the Sabbath observance — is subject to him. Jesus is not just a limited human savior with a limited mission and authority. Paul will say later that “in him all things in heaven and on earth were created… all things have been created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). The bottom line is that anything Jesus says, God backs. This may sound obvious to us who know that Jesus is God. But it is still “Good News” — especially when we feel crushed by laws that are taught as if they were ends in themselves.

Initiative: Always ask what the goal of a law is so you will understand how to apply it to particular situations.

Monday, Second Week in Ordinary Time

Monday, January 20, 2025

Second Week in Ordinary Time

Saint Fabian, Pope and Martyr; Saint Sebastian, Martyr

Heb 5:1-10/Mk 2:18-22 (Lectionary #311)

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012025.cfm

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This is the first time Mark shows us Jesus teaching, and the third time he says something identifying about himself. It is in response to a question about the behavior of his disciples: “Why do the disciples of John the Baptizer and of the Pharisees fast, but yours do not?”

Jesus answered by re-defining “religion” as “spirituality.” He took the focus off of what people do and put it instead on the person for whom they do it. For people who think of “religion” as a system of doctrines, rules and observances, fasting is just one of the things “religious” people do. Jesus explained fasting as an act of “spirituality” — that is, as a conscious interaction with God as Person. And he went further. He identified himself as the Person! Jesus himself (with the Father and Spirit) is the focus of every religious act. He is the one we should consciously interact with. This is a radical statement. Essentially, Jesus is saying he is God!

His words were, “How can the guests at a wedding fast while the bridegroom is among them?” Fasting is physical hunger embraced as a symbolic expression and experience of spiritual hunger for God. Jesus uses the wedding banquet as an image of the union we enjoy with God in heaven (see Matthew 22 and 25, Revelation 19:9). And he says he himself is the bridegroom!

This is news! It is something so new and different that Jesus says a transformation has to take place within people before they can accept it. “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. The wine would burst the skins, and both wine and skins would be lost. One puts new wine into fresh wineskins.”

To accept the Good News we have to be given a new mind and a new heart. When the psalmist wrote, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; put a new and right spirit within me,” he was really asking for “grace”; that is, the “favor” of sharing in the divine life of God. We need to become “new wine skins” by sharing in God’s own life before we can receive the “new wine” Jesus came to give. To “love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind,” we have to know the Father as only Jesus knows him — which we can only do by “becoming Christ,” filii in Filio, “sons and daughters in the Son.” To accept Christ’s teaching we have to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” and put on the “mind of Christ” (Psalm 51, Matthew 11:27; 16:17-23; Romans 12:2; 1Corinthians 2:16; Philippians 2:5). The Good News is so good we have to be made new to hear it.

Initiative: Ask explicitly for the grace of divine faith, divine hope, divine love.

“Life To The Full!” — NOW

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Is 62:1-5/1 Cor 12:4-11/Jn 2:1-11 (Lectionary #66)

 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/011925.cfm

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How good is the Good News? Do you find the Gospel the most exciting thing in your life? Do you think you will find your greatest fulfillment in religion? Your greatest joy? At Mass, are you conscious of hearing “the death of the Lord” proclaimed? What does that mean to you? In Communion, we receive Jesus. How does that “fill us with his Spirit”? How does it “make us one”? Do you experience Communion as giving you “peace and love”?

The purpose of these questions is not to upset, but to make us realize there may be more thought-provoking content in the words of the liturgy than we have noticed. If we pay attention to the words we will never be bored at Mass. That will already be an experience of the Good News!

We “damn with faint — or no — praise”

The Responsorial Psalm (96: 1-10) invites us to “Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations” If we listen to these words as we repeat them, we may wonder whether we ourselves have enough personal appreciation of his “marvelous deeds” to do that.

Isaiah 62: 1-5 gives us an example of how to grow into this appreciation. Isaiah says, “I will not be silent.” It is a principle of human life that praise increases appreciation. What we do not praise we will not appreciate — at least not as much as we should. (Test this: how often do you praise your co-workers, friends, spouse, children? Does it affect your appreciation of them?)

Isaiah says, “For Jerusalem’s sake I will not be silent, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch.” Do you think so many people would be so “turned off” of the Church if we who go to Mass were not so silent about the good things we experience in dealing with God? In prayer? In the sacraments? At Mass itself? How many of your family and friends have ever told you what they feel about Jesus Christ? (Not what they think; that can be just a recital of the catechism). Who knows what you feel about him? Do your best friends? Your children? Or would they say that is something you keep to yourself, something you are “silent” about?

Isaiah tells us God’s feelings about his People: “My Delight,” “Espoused.” “As a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you.” Are you conscious that God feels this way about you? Is that your relationship with him?

If we “Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations,” perhaps the Church will be “vindicated,’ and the salvation she offers will “shine out like a burning torch.”

“They saw his glory”

In John 2: 1-12 the Cana story ends by saying that Jesus “revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

If they were his disciples, didn’t they believe in him already?

The answer is that they did, but not the way they did after they “saw his glory” in the changing of water into wine. 

Who knows what the disciples thought of Jesus at first? A good teacher? A man of God? A reformer? They obviously thought he would do some good, but how much good? (Like we think our religion is good, but how good?)

There could not have been even a hundred people at that little country wedding feast. And Jesus added 120 to 180 gallons of wine after they had drunk all that was originally provided. In Cana they are still talking about that wedding reception!

Jesus “revealed his glory” by pouring out “new wine” beyond all expectations and bounds. And he did it at a wedding feast, which was his favorite image of heaven (Matthew 22:2, 25:1; Mark 2:19; Luke 14:8). Jesus came to call all of humanity into a relationship of love with God as deep, as intimate, as passionate as the love of bridegroom and bride. It is meant to be intoxicating! If we haven’t experienced it that way, we have not yet experienced the Good News. We have not been properly evangelized.

Don’t be too shocked: four of the last popes have been calling for a “new evangelization.” That is something exciting for us to get into. It is up to us — all of us — to make it happen.

“To each person…”

1Corinthians 12: 4-11 tells us we can make it happen, and how: “To each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.”

Of ourselves we can do nothing. But having “become Christ” by Baptism, we can say, paraphrasing Paul, “It is no longer I who work, but it is Christ who works in me” (Galatians 2:20). Jesus wants to act with, in and through each one of us in everything we do. If we keep ourselves conscious of this by inviting him all day long (e.g. by using the WIT prayer: saying before every action: “Lord, do this with me, do this in me, do this through me”), we will find that he can and does guide us by his Spirit. This is a promise: “To each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.”

The “new evangelization” has to take place everywhere. The Good News must be proclaimed — and credibly — at home, at school, at work, in our social and professional milieus, in every area and activity of business and politics. Proclaimed credibly, not simplistically. It isn’t a matter of talking about Christianity, unless in some appropriate circumstances, but of making the Good News visible in the manner in which we speak to others, deal with others, care about others, put up with others and serve the needs of others — even some needs they are not aware they have!

Paul says, “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service and activities, but it is the same God at work in all of them and in everyone.” One and the same God, one and the same Jesus, acts in each one of us, wherever we are and whatever we are doing. He acts to “give life and give it to the full” to everyone who is open to receive it, and in every way it can be given (John 10:10). If we will pour the water, he will change it into wine, until the whole world is drawn into the wedding feast.

Christians are everywhere, and everywhere we are, we should be like “yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matthew 13:33). In everything we say and do we should “Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations.” There is no excuse not to: “To each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” We who have the Gift of the Spirit must use it to give life to the world.

Insight: What are the five best things you experience by being a Christian? 

Initiative: First resolve, “I will not be silent.” Then decide how you can best proclaim the Good News with your gifts and opportunities, in your situation.