Daily Scripture

Scripture:
Genesis 3:1-8
Mark 7:31-37

Reflection:
We continue with the pairing of primeval history situated at the beginning of the book of Genesis and the gospel of Mark. Here the senses of sight, speech, and hearing are highlighted with movements rich in symbolism telling the story of salvation.

We have a talking serpent that the Lord God had made who most translations label as “cunning.” Later scripture will identify the serpent with Satan or evil but for now the text simply states the facts above. It is clear that he has mischief on his mind as he addresses the unsuspecting woman, who had been living in harmony, feeling no shame. She observed the tree was good, pleasing, and desirable and she acted upon those thoughts certain that she was right. And she had her eyes opened, as did the man who was with her.

This isn’t just a story about Adam and Eve acting on their desire for more than God had given them; more than they needed; more that could hurt them-for life! Even in Eden they wanted more!

I act this out every time I deliberately choose to sin. Certainty can be turned upside down when my eyes are opened to the emptiness of what looked good, pleasing and desirable. I too, am tempted to cover my shame and disobedience by hiding from God.

In the gospel, Jesus lays his hand on the deaf man whose ears and eyes are immediately opened. Recognizing the prophet, Isaiah, who spoke of Israel’s deliverance when God would open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf (Is. 35:5-6), the people were exceedingly astonished at the significance of Jesus actions. Salvation had come to them-and us!

“Lord, probe me and know my heart…then lead me in the ancient paths.” (Ps 139:23-24) …And we are invited to be healed of our shame so that we may once again walk with the Lord God at the breezy time of the day.

Jean Bowler is a retreatant at Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center in Sierra Madre, and a member of the Office of Mission Effectiveness Board of Holy Cross Province.

Scripture:

Genesis 2:18-25
Mark 7:24-30

Reflection:

“Let the children be filled first, for it is not appropriate to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”  These words of Jesus are shocking, if not cruel.  These words are arguably among the most troubling in the New Testament.  These are the words of Jesus to a mother who is begging him to heal her daughter.  What are we to make of these words?  How can this passage be redemptive?

Some Scripture scholars try to soften Jesus’ words by suggesting that when he refers to Gentiles as “dogs” he actually means to express an affectionate tone by using the diminutive Greek kynariois, which refers to household pets.  But who wants to be compared with dogs, even if they are cuddly pets?  Others explain that Jesus simply wanted to test the woman’s faith with his provocative words.  These scholars may be right.  But I respectfully disagree.

Let us look at the historical context to help us better understand this gospel passage.  When Mark wrote his Gospel, sometime in 60-70 CE, the church included many Gentiles, along with Jewish Christians.  This Jewish church community was still uncomfortably struggling to determine its relationship to these once impure pagan Gentiles.  In his letter to the Romans, which was written earlier than Mark’s Gospel, the Apostle Paul writes: “for the Jews first and also for the Greeks” (Rom. 1:16).  The Gospel must first be preached to the Jews, followed later to the Gentiles.

Mark’s Jewish Christian community needed to know how they were to relate to the Gentile Christian members.  In his Gospel, Mark showed his community that even Jesus, like them, needed to grow in his in his relationship with Gentiles.

Jesus clearly felt it necessary to focus his mission on the Jews.  But here in the Gentile region of Tyre, Jesus was confronted by the urgent need of a Gentile mother.  She approached Jesus in desperation and yet in deference with her plea: “She begged him to drive the demon out of her daughter.”  Jesus, however, rebuffed the woman: “Let the children be fed first.  For it is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”  This mother will not be put off: “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.”  The Jews saw themselves as God’s children, and Gentiles derisively as dogs.  Because of her persistent pleading, Jesus could no longer ignore her: “For saying this, you may go.  The demon has gone out of your daughter.”

Jesus did not accompany the woman to her home.  He did not touch the child.  He did not even issue a healing command.  He simply informed the woman that her daughter had already been healed.  The emphasis in this passage is not on the healing, but on Jesus’ relationship with the Gentile woman.  The woman began her relationship with Jesus by first expressing a simple but profound faith by coming to Jesus.  Then, she expresses her profound faith by going home.  Just as Jesus grew in respect of and relationship with the Gentile woman, so too, Mark is saying, his community too, must learn to respect and relate to one another.

And what of us today?  What might we learn from this passage?  Just this: The woman is a compelling example of persistent prayer that refuses to be discouraged by difficult circumstances when prayer is not immediately answered, or in the way we expect.  This remarkable woman also shows us how to engage God fully and passionately in prayer.  God honors and hears such prayer.

We are no different than Mark’s community.  Human relations can be difficult.  Because of our cultural upbringing, we may hold conscious or unconscious prejudice against others.  Like Jesus, we too are challenged to be open to others who may not look like us, dress like us, believe like us, or act like us.  We can also learn from Jesus.  Yes, he was fully divine.  But he also was fully human.  And in his humanity, his growing self-awareness, he “grew in wisdom and maturity” (Lk 2:52).  He learned that no one should ever be called a “dog.”  Jew or Gentile, all are children of God.  This is what it means to be Christ-like, to grow in wisdom and maturity.

In this month of February, we celebrate Black History Month.  This is a time to reflect on the history of black Americans, their experience, and what it means to all Americans.  However, this is not just a time to celebrate.  This is also a time to consider how we can create greater understanding and respect for one another, to treat one another with the dignity and respect we all deserve – no exceptions.  Why? Because we all are created in the imago Dei, in “the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:27).  No one is a dog.  All are “children” of God – no exceptions.  

Deacon Manuel Valencia is on the staff at Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center, Sierra Madre, California.

Scripture:

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17
Mark 7:14-23

Reflection:

As I grew up in my very large family, we honored a lot of traditions, sometimes creating new ones that stuck, and other times carrying on those that had survived generations, sustaining and bonding those who participated. Yet over time we also let go of traditions, even some that had long held. Why? They didn’t accomplish the purpose for which they were created, or we outgrew them, or they had become burdensome, or they just didn’t work anymore. I learned that doing things “the way they’d always been done” wasn’t sufficient.

My experience as an adult reinforces that holding onto things for the sake of tradition is often not only unwise; it can be close-minded, destructive, and unjust. If we had never reversed “tradition”, women could not vote, schools wouldn’t be integrated, and slavery would still be allowed.  In fact, Jesus warns against abiding by traditions that were built for human purposes, and he broke with many traditions himself, including things like purity rituals that were deeply embedded in his culture and religion.

Our Church has likewise seen fit to abandon various traditions, such as fasting three hours before receiving Communion or fasting from fish every Friday, considering suicide a mortal sin, forbidding lay people from reading the Bible, and more. There is no doubt that as we continue to discern the movement of the Spirit and God’s present-day revelation, more changes will be made in the practices of the Church. Some will be welcomed; some met with resistance. Yet our Church must be open so that Jesus does not say of us, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts”.

The call to examine traditions goes beyond the Church, too. I also need to look at my personal life. Which of my personal traditions, beliefs, and set ways of doing things are of God, and which are human constructions that need to be held up to the light? In what ways am I, like the Pharisees, caught up in obeying the rules instead of doing the hard work of spiritual growth? What practices have I outgrown as I mature in my faith? Are there some that are not only unhelpful to me, but actually harmful to others? More importantly, are there some that I find comforting and wish to continue, but which are actually harmful to others and need to end?

My challenge this week is to examine traditions in every sphere of my life, work, and faith in order to discern what is of God, and what needs to be released. May we all have the courage to honestly do so, the wisdom to know what is right, and the strength to let go of even treasured practices in greater service to God’s will.

Amy Florian is a teacher and consultant working in Chicago.  For many years she has partnered with the Passionists.  Visit Amy’s website: http://www.corgenius.com/.

Scripture:

Genesis 1:20-2:4a
Mark 7:1-13

Reflection:

Imagination and Creation

With a beautiful imagination the author of Genesis shows us God creating. The author of Psalm 139 puts words of praise on our lips as we express our feelings to God as we see ourselves, ‘I thank you that I am fearfully, wonderfully made; wonderful are your works.’ Another poet takes a deep breath and challenges us, saying, ‘God scatters beauty before us like a gambler who throws dice, only we do not see, we do not see.’ So beautiful all of it.

Imaginations work before our understanding, they are fed by the world that surrounds us. A glance can tell us what we like or don’t like. In the pronounced divisions that are becoming part of our lives today, it seems we are not very successful at building bridges. It is awful to think of living as if we were on the Western Front during WW I, unable to move forward in a lifeless, unfriendly world. We need new visions that are created and nourished by our imaginations.

A good example, appropriate during this Black History month, are the works of the author James Baldwin. He reverently opens the lives of our black brothers and sisters, revealing holiness, struggle and love. Our imaginations become portals into a beautiful world kept closed by racial prejudice. Or on your computer visit the Museum of Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. You will enter a new world as you are surrounded by an environment meant to affect our imaginations. These examples of imaginations drawing from what is read or seen to create new visions, are at the same time de-creating of other visions that divide and do not move us to praise and wonder.

The sacredness of imagination is present when our children turn the kitchen into a wing of an art museum, showing their artwork on the refrigerator door. How symbolic is that, displayed on the place we go to for nourishment? The little ones labor with the crayons, paint or pencils until they know it is just right, it is done. It is good. Can we see something of God looking at the finished work of creation and saying, ‘so good.’

All creation is sacred. I stood on a corner with a few people waiting to cross a New York avenue. As the traffic went by a friendly sized rat made a dash across the street. There were oohs and ohs as it dogged and darted and disappeared under the opposite curb. We laughed, we checked to see if we were part of a Disney movie, we were happy it made it to safety to live its life. Creation is good, good even for those alive on the lower rungs of life’s ladder.

Today in the gospel Jesus challenges the vision of the Pharisees. Their vision is not the vision of God’s love revealed to Israel. What is the vision of the Pharisees or anyone whose imagination does not value loved ones perhaps humbled by the burden their years? Does that vision merit praise, or give the feeling of, ‘it is good’?

The imagination that allows us to create our visions is a gift of the Creator. Does the great mystery of creation flows from God’s imagination? This gift of imagination is greater than we can imagine! Praise and wonder lead us to it.

Fr. William Murphy, CP is the pastor of Immaculate Conception parish in Jamaica, New York.

Scripture:

Genesis 1:1-19
Mark 6:53-56

Reflection:

Hope in Jesus

To come to know God, the true God, means to receive hope. To come to know Jesus the true Son of God means to receive hope. St Josephine Bakhita was kidnapped into slavery and sold over 5 times to different masters who beat her severely, but in the end received hope. She got to know God and his Son Jesus the true source of hope. In today’s Gospel the people of land around Gennesaret received hope when they recognized that it was Jesus who was getting off the boat. They had hope that He could heal them of all their sickness, if only they could touch the tassel on his cloak. The hope was so great that in every town or village he entered the people would lay down their sick in the marketplace and beg Him to heal them or to just touch the tassel on his cloak.

Today is the memorial of St. Josephine Bakhita, an African slave from Sudan, who was illegally kidnapped and sold into slavery at the age of 9. St. Josephine was beaten and treated cruelly almost her entire life as a slave. She like the people in the Gospel today found her hope in Jesus Christ. She found out that there is a God mightier than her owners. There is a God who loves her. There is a God who has a Son who was treated just as bad as she was. This Son even gave his life for us. She had a God who was waiting for her in heaven. She was so overwhelmed with hope that she couldn’t tell enough people about God she had found and wanted to show them the Hope she found in Him. St. Josephine Bakhita pray for us and let all the enslaved and suppressed in the world today, during this Black History month in America, remember you, the daughter of Sudan, and the hope you found in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen

Deacon Peter Smith serves at St. Mary’s/Holy Family Parish in Alabama, a religion teacher at Holy Family Cristo Rey Catholic High School in Birmingham, and a member of our Passionist Family.

Scripture:

Job 7:1-4, 6-7
1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23
Mark 1:29-39

Reflection:

He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I come.” So he went into their synagogues, preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole of Galilee.

-Mark 1: 38-39

Each February, I am reminded of my demon, ignorance. Ignorance especially of my role in the family, community and world in which I live. I’m reminded that as smart and experienced as I am or think I am, I still have a lot to learn. The world and life are much bigger than the little boxes I want to put them in so I can think I know what it’s all about.

Yesterday, I was privileged to listen to a friend, an African-American friend, tell me and the group gathered on Zoom about his ethnic family’s contributions to the country we both share, the United States of America. Some of what he said, I knew. I knew the first citizen of the city I live in, Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable was African.  Some I didn’t know. I did not know that Africans helped found the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine Florida. I did not know the landscape artist Benjamin Banneker, a free African-American helped survey and map out the lands of the new United State Capitol of Washington DC. in the early 1800’s.

Last month on this site, I shared my early experiences with bread, that simple, and oh so controversial addition or subtraction, depending on where you get your facts, to what is considered a good diet today. As much as I loved that bread my grandmother, my aunts and some good friends made, I’m learning that the ingredients they used left something to be desired. I’ve been trying to add those ingredients back in, well, actually not taking them out in the first place, by milling my own flour and making bread from that. It’s been an adventure, dying to my expectations of what bread “should” be and accepting what it actually turns out to be when I engage with some the basic gifts of the earth, like wheat, salt, water and yeast.

Then I’m told that COVID-19, is the enemy. I wonder is it really? COVID-19 has forced me to take another look at my life, from the food I eat to the history I think I understand. While it has taken away my ability to meet with others face to face, it has introduced me to a new way of gathering, allowing me to gather with family and friends that to this point in my life, have been distant and rarely seen.

Jesus come into my life today and drive out the demons you find here. Please give me the grace to say thanks and amen to the gifts you shower upon me even when they look like they are the enemy.

Dan O’Donnell is a Passionist Partner and a longtime friend of the Passionists.  He lives in Chicago.  

Scripture:

Hebrews 13:15-17, 20-21
Mark 6:30-34

Reflection:

In my late 20’s, while in graduate school to become a psychotherapist, I worked in an outpatient mental health clinic to practice the theory and techniques I learned in the classroom.

I still remember my first client. After meeting with her several times, I scheduled a time with my clinical training supervisor to process my experience.

“I feel I need to know so much more even to begin working with this struggling woman,” I said.

The wise supervisor responded, “Sometimes years of book learning and experience are more than made up by young therapists with enthusiasm and compassion.” She gave me a positive way of looking at my experiences I had not considered.

I recount her words as I read today’s Gospel. The Apostles, earlier in this chapter in Mark’s Gospel, had been sent to their “training sites” after receiving instructions from Jesus. Returning, they reported “all they had done and taught.” As a good supervisor he responded, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.”

In that deserted place I imagine Jesus wanted them to gain perspective on what they had just witnessed in their ministries and to let their minds and bodies rest, to be restored so they would be open to seeing things in a fresh light.

There will never be enough hours in a day or years in one’s life to address all the pressing needs of people we hold dear as well as the lost and forgotten who ask for help. Just like the crowds who pressed the Apostles as they tried to get away, by boat, to a deserted place, the cries for help are unending.

During this world-wide pandemic, we look around to see the sick, the grieving, the unemployed, emotionally distraught, addicted, homeless and hungry trying to survive and to heal.

We, as twenty-first century apostles, are, in our unique ways, called by Christ to respond.

To understand exactly what the Lord wants from each of us we must go away to a deserted place, even if it is in our room with the door closed. The discipline of stepping back is as essential to our life with Christ as the discipline of ongoing clinical supervision for even the most seasoned psychotherapist. We all have blind spots and can easily lose our way. Reflection, prayer, rest, a second opinion regarding our decisions…perhaps from a regular spiritual director…are all necessary to grow in our awareness of God’s will for us.

It is easy, whether we are optometrists, teachers, health and mental health care workers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, farmers, parents, spouses, students, priests, lawyers, housekeepers, restaurant workers, religious, grave diggers or sanitary workers, to get stuck in a rut, to lose perspective and develop soul-deadening routines.

Going away to a deserted place each day is the antidote Jesus prescribes today, even if the effort is sometimes sabotaged by the cries of the needy crowd around us. Sitting with the Lord in quiet reflection and speaking to the Lord from the deepest parts of our hearts will give us what we need to face our responsibilities  afresh and with the grace needed to be joyful and hopeful, even in our limitations.

The Lord is waiting for us to get in the boat and sail with on quiet water. Will you accept the invitation today?

Jim Wayne is a board member of the Passionist Solidarity Network (PSN), and author of The Unfinished Man. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Scripture:

Hebrews 13:1-8
Mark 6:14-29

Reflection:

The centrality of today feels like a double tragedy.  The Gospel retells the details of the tragic murder of John the Baptist and that is framed in the feast of  St. Agatha.  

We aren’t sure if Agatha was born in Catania or Palermo. The trivial details have long been forgotten. What is remembered is her single-heartedness. What has been passed down and written about is how highly she was venerated in Christian antiquity. She was put to death during the persecution of Decius for her unwavering belief in God.

From her very early years Agatha dedicated her life to God as a consecrated virgin. She desired to give herself totally to Jesus and the Church in a life of prayer and service. A high diplomat named Quintianus thought he could get her to turn away from her vow to God and force her to marry him. Polite proposals escalated to harassment, arrests, imprisonment, and hideous torture. Through all of it Agatha continued her simple prayer of single-heartedness to Christ. Even the prayer attributed to her death, was a single-heart devotion. “Lord, my Creator, you have ever protected me from the cradle; you have taken me from the love of the world, and given me patience to suffer: receive now my soul.”

Agatha’s example is her perseverance in running the race and keeping her eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfector of faith. She embraced the joy found in the presence of Christ,  understanding it as the fullness and completeness of life.

We don’t have the last words of John the Baptist’s life.  Yet as I read this gospel today, I’m mostly hearing the guilt and the lack of peace in Herod was facing.  Not being able to put the event behind him, Herod was haunted by its memory.  So much so that he is starting his own conspiracy theory,  “It is John whom I beheaded. He has been raised up.”  One of the truths of Mark’s writings is that he is direct, short and to the point.  For him to include this detail means it was quite significant.      

Today’s first reading from Hebrews concludes with these words.  “Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you.  Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.  Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

That is quite a request given the fact that today we look at two people who were put to death because of their belief in Jesus.    

Fr. David Colhour, C.P. is the local superior of St. Vincent Strambi Community in Chicago, Illinois.