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)
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.
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