It seems clear from our Gospel reading that Jesus is the prophet about whom Moses spoke in our first reading, taken from Deuteronomy. As the Son of God and as Messiah, Jesus is priest, prophet, and king. As such, he doesn’t just speak the words of God, he is himself the Word of God eternally spoken by the Father.
As the Word of God, Jesus doesn’t do anything but speak God’s words. As the founder of the French Oratorians, Pierre de Berulle observed: in and through Jesus,
God incomprehensible makes Himself comprehended…God ineffable makes Himself heard in the voice of His Word incarnate, and God invisible makes Himself seen in the flesh that he has united with the essence of eternity, and” above all, through Christ, “God terrible in the magnificence of his grandeur makes Himself felt in His gentleness, in His kindness and in his humanity1In Jesus Christ, one might say, referencing our reading from 1 Corinthians, divinity and humanity are married, not only becoming flesh of one’s flesh and bone of one’s bone but united in the single person of Jesus, as we pray in one the Eucharistic Prayers, "become one body" and "one spirit.”2
What is interesting in our Gospel reading is that the inspired author of Mark does not describe what Jesus taught, only that “he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.”3 His teaching did provoke an unclean spirit. This provocation allowed Jesus to cast this spirit from the man through whom it spoke. Hence, his authority and the power derived from it is manifested by what he does and not just by what he says- though the latter (speaking) preceded the former (casting out the unclean spirit) and flows from it.
According to Saint Mark’s chronology, our passage today is the first day of Jesus’ public ministry. Looking back a few verses, the Lord’s public ministry began when he emerged from forty days in the wilderness after his baptism by John. His message, as Mark hands it on is: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”4
In the section of the very dense first chapter of Saint Mark’s Gospel from which our reading is taken, we are familiarized with the kind of things that the proclamation of God’s kingdom consists of- teaching with authority, demonstrations of the power of this authority, which is “opposition to Satan,” a bit further on, physical healing, and fervent prayer.5
Because the world is complex and complicated, the coming of God’s kingdom is similarly so. How else can it be established? What this means for us, those who claim Christ’s name, is the recognition of our ongoing need to repent and believe the Gospel. By “repent,” I mean believing it to the point that it shapes, forms, and continually reforms how you live your life.
Though it is often reduced to contrition (i.e., being sorry for one’s sins), to repent is to change, to commit to changing or at least be open to change. Saint John Henry Newman, in his essay on how Christian doctrine develops, wrote: “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”6 Commenting on this, Pope Francis accurately noted: “For Newman change was conversion, in other words, interior transformation. Christian life is a journey, a pilgrimage.”7
What is interesting in Mark’s Gospel is that this spirit who opposes Jesus recognizes him as “the Holy One of God,” while, despite his “new teaching with authority” accompanied by powerful deeds, his disciples do not, at least fully or finally.8
Companion is a compound word derived from two Latin words: com=with + panis= bread. Companions are, literally, those who share bread. By our gathering here together week after week, we are companions, fellow pilgrims, making our way together to what the Letter to the Hebrews calls our sabbath rest.9 At least during her earthly sojourn, a Christian is one who never completely arrives. Like the Israelites of old, she, too, is a pilgrim, a member of the pilgrim people of God.
The Eucharist is both our cloud by day and our pillar of fire by night.10 As the fathers of the Second Vatican Council put it:
On earth, still as pilgrims in a strange land, tracing in trial and in oppression the paths He trod, we are made one with His sufferings like the body is one with the Head, suffering with Him, that with Him we may be glorified11Jesus invites us to journey with him. Following Christ does not mean nothing bad will ever happen to you. How could it? Following him means he is with you, accomanying you through life’s difficulties, hardships, and heartbreaks. To follow Jesus is not just to follow him to the cross (though it is that) but beyond the cross, from death into life, as the hymn goes. But the only way beyond is through.
“If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”
1 From Works of Berulle cited Hans Urs Von Balthasar in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol V, “The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age.” Trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, CRV, John Saward, & Rowan Williams. 120-121.↩
2 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass. Eucharistic Prayer III, sec. 113.↩
3 Mark 1:22.↩
4 Mark 1:15.↩
5 Raymond E. Brown. An Introduction to the New Testament, 129.↩
6 John Henry Newman, “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” Chapter 1, Section 1, Part 7.↩
7 Pope Francis. Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia. 21 December 2019.↩
8 Mark 1:24.27.↩
9 See Hebrews 4:1-13.↩
10 Exodus 13:21-22.↩
11 Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church [Lumen Gentium], sec. 7.↩
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