Friday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
(Tobit 11:5-17; Mark 12:35-37)
Remember when people changed their way of describing a really
good object? Instead of saying that it
was “good enough to die for,” they started saying that the object was “good
enough to kill for.” Of course, they
wouldn’t do either, no matter how good the thing was. Perhaps this apparent change of motivation may
help us understand today’s gospel.
One Scripture scholar calls the passage “a puzzle.” It seems
that Jesus wants to distance himself from David here although he responded to
Bartimaeus who called him “son of David.”
David was a warrior king with much blood on his hands. Jesus is anything but that. Jesus seems to be saying here that he is the
Messiah or Christ in a different way. He
comes not to kill for God but to die in obedience to Him. Significantly, after he dies on the cross,
the centurion calls him the “son of God” -- a way of saying “Christ.”
As Jesus’ followers, we want to imitate his ways. We should never seek to oppress anyone. Rather we want to give ourselves, like Jesus,
in obedience to God and in true service to others.
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