Friday of the Third
Week in Ordinary Time
(Hebrews 10:32-39; Mark 4:26-34)
Peter Maurin co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper along
with Dorothy Day. He had a genius for
reducing the formal language of Catholic social doctrine into pithy statements exuding
common sense. He called these reductions
“easy essays” which readers of the newspaper cherished. A typical essay reads,
The world would be better off
if people tried to become better.
And people would become better
if they stopped trying to become
better off.
Maurin’s Easy Essays
are much like Jesus’ parables in today’s gospel. Mark the Evangelist tells us that Jesus uses parables
so that ordinary people might grasp his teaching. For example, Jesus describes God’s kingdom as
seeds growing in a field and a mustard seed – common realities in the Palestinian
countryside. To be sure, the dynamic of God’s
kingdom is more complicated so Jesus gives a fuller explanation to his
disciples in private.
We have a problem in appreciating Jesus’ parables because we
do not live in first-century Palestine.
But we have an advantage over the people who heard Jesus preach. We have been taught to see Jesus himself as a
kind of parable. We recognize him as a
man who reveals to us all the love of a transcendent God.
