We should share the people’s astonishment about Jesus, writes Father Vincent Hawkswell: “He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!”
Fourth
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First
Reading: Dt 18:
15-20
Second
Reading: 1 Cor
7:17, 32-35
Gospel
Reading: Mk
1:21-28
Only Christians acknowledge a God who has become man. As Pope St. John Paul II said in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, neither Jews nor Muslims believe in a God who is so human: so near, so approachable, so lovable. To them, God is “absolutely transcendent,” “pure majesty.”
“In a certain sense,” the Pope said, “God has gone too far.” Like those who heard Christ reveal his father “in himself,” we cannot “tolerate the closeness.” Like the Israelites at Mount Horeb, we exclaim, “If I hear the voice of the Lord my God any more, or ever again see this great fire, I will die!”
In his humanity, God has come very close. Accordingly, we tend to forget his transcendence, his majesty, his power. At Mass, he looks like a piece of bread, but he is also “maker of all things, visible and invisible.” We hear his whispered forgiveness in the confessional, but the one we have offended is “the Holy One of God.”
We should feel the apostles’ awe as they gradually recognized Jesus, the son of a Nazarene carpenter, as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” We should appreciate Peter’s amazement after the miraculous catch of fish when he fell at Jesus’ feet and said, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man!” We should share Thomas’s wonder at Jesus’ Resurrection: “My Lord and my God!”
Jesus is God.
Meditate on what we hear in this Sunday’s liturgy: Jesus’ confident command to the devil, and the devil’s recognition of Jesus and submission to his power. We should share the people’s astonishment: “He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!”
Consider the authority Jesus claimed. The scribes taught the people by appealing to the law of Moses, but Jesus taught things like, “Moses said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ but I say even lust is sinful.” We should marvel with the Jews: “A new teaching, with authority!”
The Gospels are full of examples. In denouncing unbelievers, Jesus claimed to be the one who had sent the “prophets and wise men” to them over the centuries. In the Nazareth synagogue, he read Isaiah’s prophecy and then announced, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
When he was asked why his disciples did not fast, as the law commanded, he said no one had to fast while he was on earth. When he was accused of breaking the Sabbath, he compared himself to the temple priests and added, “I assure you, there is something greater than the temple here.” The queen of the south, he said, had come from the ends of the earth to hear Solomon, “but you have a greater than Solomon here.” On the cross, he promised the thief, “This day you will be with me in paradise.”
Before curing a paralyzed man, he forgave the man’s sins, thus claiming to be the one they had offended. “He commits blasphemy!” the Jews exclaimed. “Who can forgive sins except God alone?”
He said his disciples would “never see death.” When the Jews retorted, “Are you greater than our father Abraham?” He replied, “I solemnly declare it: before Abraham came to be, I AM.”
Now that was the name of God. When Moses, about 1,400 years before, had asked God for his name, God had said, “I am who am ... This is my name forever; this is my title for all generations.” Jesus was calling himself by God’s name, and the Jews understood him, for they picked up rocks to stone him. In fact, that claim is what brought Jesus to his death.
Let us turn from “the affairs of the world,” as St. Paul urges, especially in church. Both before and after Mass, let us be silent and meditate on Jesus. As the psalmist says, “Let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.”