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Mark 1:29-39 Friends, in the Gospel of Mark today, we see Jesus in action. We are reading from the section of Mark’s first chapter that gives us a sort of “day in the life” of Jesus. And it is quite a day! Our Gospel opens just after the dramatic expulsion of a demon in the Capernaum synagogue. After entering the house of Simon, Jesus cures Peter’s mother-in-law.Notice that he takes her by the hand and brings her to her feet so that she can be of service. What does sickness do to us? It draws us in around ourselves. Once...

Mark 6:7-13 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus sends the Twelve on their mission to announce the nearness of the kingdom. I want to say a few things about our embracing our mission and being equipped for it.What do you need for your mission? You need a keen sense of God as the absolute center of your life. In a word, you require the spiritual gifts of piety and fear of the Lord. I realize that these terms can sound fussy and puritanical, but they are actually naming something strong and essential.You need fear of the Lord, which does not mean...

Mark 6:1–6Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is rejected by the people of his own town. For as he says, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place.” But he astounded crowds throughout Galilee because he taught with authority.As far as we can determine, Jesus was not formally trained in a rabbinic school, nor was he educated to be a temple priest or a scribe, nor was he a devotee of the Pharisees, the Saduccees, or the Essenes. He was, if I can use a somewhat anachronistic term, a layman. And this made his arrival on the public...

Mark 5:1–20Friends, today’s Gospel shows Jesus driving the unclean spirit from the Gerasene demoniac. What we see here on vivid display is Jesus the miracle worker.Modern thinkers tend to be wary of this dimension. For instance, Thomas Jefferson took a straight razor to the pages of the Gospels and cut out everything that smacked of the supernatural—miracles, exorcisms, and so on. The problem, of course, is that he had to make an absolute mess of Mark’s Gospel, which is positively chock-a-block with such things.Jefferson’s contemporary, the great modern philosopher David Hume, wrote a powerfully influential text against miracles. He claimed...

Mark 16:15–18 Friends, today in our Gospel, Jesus commissions the Apostles to evangelize all people: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” To evangelize is to proclaim Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. When this kerygma, this Paschal Mystery, is not at the heart of the project, Christian evangelization effectively disappears, devolving into a summons to bland religiosity or generic spirituality. When Jesus crucified and risen is not proclaimed, a beige and unthreatening Catholicism emerges, a thought system that is, at best, an echo of the environing culture. Peter Maurin, one of the...

Mark 3:31-35 Friends, in today’s Gospel,Jesus identifies as his mother and brothers those who do the will of God.The proper attitude in the presence of the saving God is obedience and acquiescence, imitating his moves, responding to his commands, doing whatever he tells us. To live the good life is not finally a matter of autonomy but of obeying commandments: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”Mind you, listening to commands is tied closely to love on the part of the one who...

Mark 3:22-30 Friends, in today’s Gospel, scribes accuse Jesus of driving out demons by Beelzebul—by Satan.The two great names of the devil in the Bible are “the accuser” and “the scatterer.” Both are operative and visible in this story. And this helps us immensely to understand Jesus and his work. We see in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus is known as an exorcist, someone who drives out the demonic. Jesus specifies that his work is in driving out Satan—which is to say, the accuser. The false way of organizing ourselves—present from the beginning—is through accusation, scapegoating, the establishment of...

Mark 3:7-12 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus cures so many people that he has to climb into a boat to escape the press of the crowd. To this day, the Church carries on his gracious healing ministry. We recall that the Apostles of Jesus simply continued what the Master did. And one of the principal marks of the Lord’s ministry was clearly healing. There was, of course, a deep biblical conviction that when the day of the Lord arrives, creation would be set right. What we witness in the healings of Jesus is just this repairing of creation.If you doubt...

Mark 3:1-6 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus withstands the opposition of the Pharisees to heal a man with a withered hand. His healings like this one signified the arrival of the kingdom of God.When Jesus began to preach, his theme was that the kingdom of God is at hand. In his own person an entirely new way of ordering things was on offer. Then—in his love and nonviolence, in his mocking of the Pharisees and religious establishment, in his healing and teaching—Jesus was demonstrating precisely what the reign of the God of Israel looks like.This way of life inevitably awakened...

Mark 2:23-28 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus acknowledges that he is “lord even of the sabbath.”And the claim of the first Christians was Iesous Kyrios—Jesus is Lord.The Jews would be massively put off by the use of the term Kyrios in describing an ordinary human being. Moreover, the implication that this man was the Messiah of Israel—when he had died at the hands of Israel’s enemies—was simply blasphemous.And for the Greeks, this claim was subversive, for a watchword of the time was Kaiser Kyrios—the Emperor is Lord. A new system of allegiance was being proposed, a new type of ordering...

Mark 2:18-22 Friends, in today’s Gospel, the Lord says his disciples do not fast because God is holding a great wedding banquet.You find the theme of the wedding throughout the Old Testament as a motif to express God’s covenant with his people. We’ve fallen apart in sin. We’ve gone into exile. And what does God want? He wants to call us back to a great wedding banquet.Throughout the ministry of Jesus you find that same motif: he will gather the scattered tribes—yes, the elite, but also the sinners and the outcasts. All are welcome around the table of the Lord,...

Mark 2:1-12 Friends, in our Gospel today, Jesus says matter-of-factly before healing the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” Shocked, the Pharisees respond, “He is blaspheming. Who but God alone can forgive sins?”They were quite right, of course, which is the whole point. If you had hurt me, I could with some legitimacy offer you my personal forgiveness of your offense. But if someone else had harmed you, I could scarcely offer that person my forgiveness for his sin. The only way that such a statement could be anything but blasphemous would be if I were the one who is...

Mark 1:40-45 Friends, our Gospel today gives us one of the great scenes of Jesus healing a leper. And as is usually the case, it becomes an icon of the spiritual life in general.Once in the Lord’s presence, the leper kneels down and begs him. The suffering man realizes who Jesus is: not one prophet among many but the incarnation of the God of Israel, the only one before whom worship is the appropriate attitude.In our sickness, our weakness, our shame, our sin, our oddness—lots of us feel like this leper. Whatever trouble we are in, we have to come...

Mark 1:29-39 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus heals many of the townspeople of Capernaum. His healing of physical ailments points to his spiritual healing—to his being the doctor of the soul.The Gospels are filled with accounts of Jesus’ healing encounters with those whose spiritual energies are unable to flow. Much of Jesus’ ministry consisted in teaching people how to see (the kingdom of God), how to hear (the voice of the Spirit), how to walk (overcoming the paralysis of the heart), and how to be free of themselves so as to discover God.Jesus was referred to in the early Church...

Mark 1:7-11 Friends, on this Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, let us meditate on John the Baptist. Young John, the son of the priest Zechariah, grew up in and around the temple, acquainted with its rituals. And he sensed that the true Messiah was on the horizon. And so he went away from the old temple, but he continued to act as a priest of a new Temple.John was baptizing people in the Jordan. Why this ritual? Well, in the Jerusalem temple, a pilgrim would cleanse himself in a mikvah, a ritual bath, before he entered to make...

Mark 1:7-11 Friends, today’s Gospel tells the story of the baptism of Jesus. The first thing we must keep in mind about the baptism of Jesus was that it was embarrassing. Here is the one that the first Christians maintained was the Son of God, the sinless lamb who takes away the sins of the world, the Word made flesh. So why is he seeking a baptism of repentance?There is no way around it: John was working in the country north of Jerusalem, along the banks of the Jordan river. And his theme was unambiguous: repent. Those who came to...

John 1:43-51 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Nathaniel recognizes Jesus as the Son of God and King of Israel. Like Nathaniel, once we make the decision for Jesus, once we determine that he is the supreme good, then every other claimant to supremacy must fall away.As I’ve argued many times before, every one of us has something or some set of values that we consider greatest. There is some center of gravity around which everything else turns.Perhaps it is money and material things. Perhaps it is power and position.Perhaps it is your country or your political party or your ethnic identity....

John 1:35-42 Friends, in today’s Gospel, two of John the Baptist’s disciples follow Jesus and encounter him.Jesus’ question to the two young men—“What are you looking for?”—is an indispensably important one. Many people go through life not really knowing what they most fundamentally want, and accordingly, they drift.The correct answer to Jesus’ question is “eternal life” or “friendship with God” or “holiness.” This is the simple, clear, unambiguous articulation of the end goal that any believer should have as he endeavors to lead his life.Now, other people may know more or less what they want spiritually, but they lack the...

John 1:29-34 Friends, today’s Gospel reports John the Baptist’s testimony about Jesus.One of the earliest descriptions of Baptism is vitae spiritualis ianua, which means “the door to the spiritual life.” To grasp the full meaning of this is to understand something really decisive about Christianity. For Christianity is not primarily about “becoming a good person” or “doing the right thing” or, in Flannery O’Connor’s famous phrase, “having a heart of gold.” Let’s face it: anyone—pagan, Muslim, Jew, nonbeliever—can be any of those things.To be a Christian is to be grafted on to Christ and hence drawn into the very dynamics...

John 1:19-28 Friends, in today’s Gospel, John the Baptist declares that he is the forerunner of Christ.Why, when we first hear of the adult John the Baptist, is he out in the desert and not in the temple, where you would expect the son of a priest to be? Well, in John’s time, the temple was mired in very messy politics.What is drawing people into the desert to see him? He is offering what the temple ought to be offering but wasn’t: the forgiveness of sins. This was the importance of John’s baptism.But here’s the odd thing: he did not...