Dear Friends,
Last week I highlighted several important dates and events that occur in this month of January. It is a busy month indeed. As we have brought the Christmas season to an end and begun Ordinary time, the Church brings us in our daily Mass readings to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. During this past week, our Gospel readings came from the first and second chapters of Saint Mark.
In these chapters, Mark shares multiple examples of Jesus’ persuasive teaching, His healings, and His driving out demons. Jesus is surely Savior, not simply a good man, a wise teacher, someone worthy of imitation. He is much, much more. He is the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Son of God become flesh and blood. Simply and directly, He is our Savior, our Redeemer.
Mark shows early on that Jesus’ real enemy is not the leadership of God’s people ~ the Pharisees and Scribes but the devil. In the synagogue at Capernaum, while teaching, a man possessed by many demons interrupts, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are–the Holy One of God!” The demons know that Jesus is God and yet they will not bend their knee to adore Him. They insist and persist in their autonomy, their own self will which estranges them from God to their own deprivation.
Real freedom is not autonomy, doing as I wish, believing what I consider true. True freedom comes from surrendering our wills to God, acknowledging that I am not God and seeking God humbly through prayer and self-sacrifice. That is the path all the Saints have travelled. The path that brings fulfillment and peace even if we experience suffering. Holding onto autonomy like the demons leads to death.
So let us come to Jesus, let us humbly surrender our wills through Him to the Father, let us ask the Holy Spirit to lead us, guide us and fill us as disciples of the Lord Jesus and as children of an ever loving and merciful Father. Only when Jesus is first and foremost in our thoughts and actions, can the rest of our lives find their proper place and fulfillment. Or as Bishop Barron puts it, “When Jesus becomes the clear center of your life, then your mind, your will, your emotions, your private life, your public life – all of it – finds its harmonious place around that center.”
God bless you, God love you,
Monsignor McCulken
