4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deuteronomy 18:15-20 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 Mark 1:21-28
It doesn’t take long for Mark to get to the essentials of the ministry of Jesus on earth! Today’s Gospel passage is only 20 verses into Mark’s account of the life and ministry of Jesus and already Mark reports on how much of an influence Jesus is having on the people of Galilee. Those who encountered Jesus in these first days of His ministry must have had the words of Deuteronomy (1st Reading today) ringing in their ears for centuries. These were a people waiting and waiting. They were expecting the fulfilment of the Old Covenant, the Old Covenant which Moses, their lawgiver, leader, teacher and liberator had made real for them. They had been faithful to it and their lives had been ordered by it.
For centuries they waited and were encouraged by these words of Moses ‘Your God will raise up for you a prophet like myself, from among yourselves, from your own brother; to him you must listen - I will put my words into his mouth’. And down through the following centuries they prayed the Psalms; “O that today you listen to my voice!’. And now they had waited long enough! Mark, that evangelist who was the first to recount the Mission and words of Jesus underlines the urgency of what he calls the Good News – ‘ … as soon as the Sabbath came he went to the synagogue and began to teach’.
We can almost feel the haste with which Jesus begins to teach, to heal and to drive out evil. It made an instant impression; ‘Here is a teaching that is new, they said’.
But Mark needed to underline the other aspect of the life of Jesus – He, Jesus, would be opposed and rejected, He would have to battle the forces of evil. So, it was not all a story of acceptance. The condition of the poor man possessed by an unclean spirit was a symptom of how the world at large was, under the enforced possession of alien, occupying powers. Mark regards any illness as being caused directly or indirectly by a hostile power which is anti-God. Jesus, the Messiah has come to do away with such evil powers and already at this early stage of his Ministry, Mark shows that Jesus even has the power to “give orders to unclean spirits and they submit to him”.
Today we can perhaps identify with many of the issues which Mark has Jesus address. Our world is struggling with what seem like evil forces and hostile powers. We need to identify and recognise these ills of our society and our world. So often complacency, compliance and indifference can allow wrong and evil to thrive. There is an urgency today to listen to God’s word, and, the Lord may be saying again to us ‘Oh that today you would listen to my voice! Harden not your hearts’.
Pope Francis has called on us to dedicate the coming year to prayer in preparation for the Jubilee Year 2025. As always Pope Francis emphasises Unity in our prayer;
“As we pray together Christians must never forget to pray for an end to wars, especially in Ukraine and the Holy Land. Let us get up in the name of Christ from our tired routine and set out anew, for He wills it ‘so that the world may believe’”