Fourth Saturday in Ordinary Time
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Fourth Week of the Year
Feast of Saint Jerome Emiliani; Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin; BVM
Mark 6:30-34; Hebrews 13:15-21; Psalm 23:1-6 (Lectionary 328)
When the apostles returned from their mission they were really keyed up. They “gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught.” So he told them to take a break: “Come away to an out-of-the-way place and rest a little.”
The good news here is that Jesus tried to give his hard-working disciples a rest. The bad news is that the crowds made it impossible. “People were coming and going in great numbers, making it impossible for them to so much as eat.” When Jesus and the disciples tried to get away in a boat, “many saw them going and hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them.” So much for the day off!
As they went ashore, they found “a vast crowd” waiting for them. Stop the camera: What would most people do in a situation like that? Ask the folks to come back during office hours? Give a short token speech to be polite and then dismiss them? Mark says Jesus “had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” And he began to teach them “at great length.”
Jesus didn’t make token gestures. He didn’t give himself half way.
Part of the reason for this is that Jesus, being God, was whole and entire in everything he did. He couldn’t love half-heartedly or give himself with reserves.
But another part is that the Good News Jesus was proclaiming is so good — so healing, so life-integrating, life-extending, life-fulfilling — that those who have been evangelized can’t stop evangelizing others. If this was true of Paul (2Corinthians 5:14), it was certainly true of Jesus. And when we have sufficiently heard the Good News, it is true of every one of us. If we are like God we will act like God. To live God’s life is to give God’s life. That is what Jesus did. If we are his body on earth, and if his Spirit is within us, that is what we will do.
We don’t have to change jobs or give up our family life. We all have to “leave boat and father” as those did whom Jesus called (Mark 4:22) but this is an interior change, a change of focus and direction. It means that, whatever we are doing, we are intent on doing it in a way that establishes the “reign of God.” This becomes our priority at home, at work, in our social and political life, in everything we do. When enough Christians accept this, the “new evangelization” will have begun!
Initiative: Be an evangelizer. In everything you do, ask yourself, “How should the Good News of Jesus change this? Change the way I see it? The way I do it?
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