Preference for the Poor

Gospel: Mark 5: 21-43

In today's Gospel portion an influential person named Jairus in the community comes to Jesus asking him to heal his ailing daughter.  Jesus agrees to do so.  As they were making their way to his house, a poor unnamed woman gets the idea that if she but touch Jesus's garments, she will be healed of her infirmity of many years that has left her destitute and utterly desperate.  Being in a large crowd she can maintain her anonymity too.  

Jesus senses that someone touched his garments in an intentional way.  He stops and wants to meet this person.  His disciples and the crowd are annoyed.  He is holding up an important person! How can he stop to talk with someone so insignificant! But to Jesus no one is insignificant.  This woman matters.  It is not enough that she be healed.  She must also have a personal encounter with the Lord that provides meaning and compassion for her.  

This important man Jairus will have his daughter healed, but he had to wait so that this poor woman could be healed.  Jesus in this scene and in many others shows the preference for the poor that should mark our own lives and the ministry of the Church.  If we think the borders of a wealthy nation are more important than the needs of starving immigrants, refugees, and migrants, then we are a long way off from the kingdom of God.  

Presenting the Lord

Gospel: Luke 2: 22-40

If we have been paying attention, we come to the realization that reconciling the various stories of Jesus' infancy from a historical point of view is utterly impossible.   Fleeing into Egypt and going through the rituals of Jewish presentation and returning to Nazareth are mutually exclusive options, especially given the fact that Luke does not reference the Magi or the flight into Egypt in any way.  There is simply no way to reconcile the two accounts.

But that is not the point.  As with all things in Scripture our goal is not to put together a history but to derive the religious truths of the story for our own spiritual life.  In today's feast the parents of Jesus scrupulously follow the prescriptions of Jewish law in going to the Temple to present Jesus as first born to the Lord, offering the required sacrifice of the poor, and in Mary being purified after giving birth.  Along the way they encounter Simeon and Anna, two unknown figures awaiting the Messiah of God. 

Todays' feast invites us to consider our own presentation of the Lord within us to the world, to our own dedication to the Lord, and our own purification before God.  Today we light candles signifying the light of the world present in the person of Jesus, present within each one of us.  We are to let that light shine before the world just as in the Temple of Jerusalem and beyond where Jesus brought that light wherever he went healing, liberating, and nourishing others.

The Eightfold Noble Path

Gospel: Matthew 5: 1-12

Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with the giving of the New Law - the eight Beatitudes.  Rather than a set of rules to follow, Jesus provides us with ways of being in the world - poor in spirit, meek, pure of heart, peacemaking, long-suffering, merciful.  These ways of being become the lens through which Jesus sets about the reinterpret the entire Mosaic law in the rest of the Sermon.  They become the path through which the Christian is to navigate in the world.

The Beatitudes are to be our daily examination in our path through life.  Some days we will find ourselves connected to a particular Beatitude, while similarly finding another one particularly challenging.  Each day of examination of our lives with these Beatitudes reveals to us more about ourselves, and more about how Jesus embodied each of these ways of being in his own life.  These maxims become our measure of progress in the spiritual life.

That we Christians have somehow neglected these precepts of the Lord Jesus and focused instead on the ten commandments is somewhat telling.  The Beatitudes are a great challenge to live, for they encompass the whole person.  They are not about merely external actions as the commandments proscribe, but more importantly they are about internal dispositions that inform our entire way of being, thinking, and acting.  Would that we had monuments for the Beatitudes instead of the commandments!