Today the Lord tells us a parable, that of the sower and the seed. He points out the importance of checking what kind of place these seeds fall onto. Depending on the quality of the reception will the seed bear fruit. We are responsible for taking care that we are receptive, open, attentive, focused and so forth to God’s Word. He looks for the fruits of his investment of seeds in our souls.
The Gospel today reminds us of the instructions of our Lord Jesus Christ just prior to his ascending to Heaven to sit at the right hand of his Father from where he shall come to judge the living and the dead. This remind is for all of us, not that we are supposed to do exactly the same thing, but to evangelize through our different circumstances, talents, education, culture, etc.
Today’s Gospel introduces us into another show of envy by Our Lord’s enemies. This time they claim that Jesus casts out devils in the name of the devil himself. He discusses with the people the ludicrousness of this proposition. He tries to bring them to understand that such stance in looking at him is a sin against the Holy Spirit, i.e., they reject God and his overtures to bring us salvation and cure.
The Scriptures are what constitutes the written Word of God. This is what St. Luke started out to do culling content from their experiences with Jesus. He recorded in an orderly manner the events of our dear Lord’s life. So the New Testament did not just come out from thin air, made without a context or done without some supervision of some kind. Hence, Our Lord established a Church with his authority to gather these manuscripts of what would make up Sacred Scriptures and more accurately, the New Testament as we have it. He who hears you, hears me and he who hears me, hears him who sent me. Jesus shared his teaching authority with his ministers. And so the teachings of our Lord spread throughout the world.
The Gospel today presents the relatives of our dear Lord to be very concerned with him because he did not have any time to eat anymore because of the work he had, the crowds and sick needing his help and cures. This work included his preaching and teaching. No time to eat! They were convinced that Jesus was out of his mind.
We too have some madness for a creature on earth. There are those crazy about football, a girl, an actress, an actor, a movie, or something else. We might even miss meals because of our love for them. This should wake us up to the ability and potency we have to be crazy about our love for God. We have that energy. We have that strength to do something crazy for Him since He also did something crazy for us, i.e., He died on the Cross to save us from sin and death.
Today we see our dear Lord thronged by so many people. They recognized him as someone very special since he cured so many. But at the end of the Gospel he forbade them from making him known. This is understandable because he did not want the people to think that he was merely after becoming a king in the earthly sense. But also we may understand that the Lord wants to teach us to be aware of our wayward tendency to extol ourselves as paragons of something. Indeed we can be famous for a certain talent or skill. We may be recognized by society as an expert or authority or power. However, we should be careful about being vain and attribute all that to ourselves.
In the Gospel today we see a confrontation again between Jesus and the Pharisees who were on the lookout for Jesus first mistake, error or failure so that they could have something to accuse him with. This could remind us of how we sometimes look at the others with envy eager to find something to gossip about, talk badly about, accuse of, be judgmental about, etc. We should imitate Jesus who brought goodness to everybody. Their problems, sicknesses and sinfulness were just occasions for him to do good to them.
Jesus teaches us today that fasting needs to be done. He points out that there is no need of fasting when the bridegroom is around, i.e., Himself. But there comes a time when the bridegroom is taken away and then there will be the need to fast. This refers to the Passion and Death of Christ. We cannot expect not to fast because Our Lord himself undergoes his Passion and suffering for our salvation. We fast in union with Him. We fast in order to feast with Him when we resurrects.
We continue reading from St. Mark’s account of Our Lord’s life. After spending so much time with those physically sick, he pivots around the account about the paralytic. With this last case, he first forgives his sins and seeing his faith. Notice, these are invisible and spiritual realities that the Lord is dealing with now. His claim to be able to forgive his sins startled the Jews who know that only God can forgive sins. But Our Lord rose to the challenge. He clarified that he could forgive sins and proved it by curing the sick man of his paralysis. In today’s Gospel, Our Lord spends time with sick people again, but this time with spiritual ailing people like sinners and tax collectors. The other objected but our Lord brushed them aside since he was still concerned about the health of the people, albeit in the spiritual realm.
The Gospel today from Mark 2:1-12 confirms to us what we have been saying these past few days about the Gospels in the Masses. And that is that Jesus began performing physical cures to show his power over life and health. With that well established he goes to show his principal objective and that is to cure sin, the real evil in the world and the principal ailment of the soul. He shows he could forgive sins because he got the paralytic to walk again.