AeinSshi's Fantasies: Gospel Reflections [feb13&14]

Gospel Reflections [feb13&14]

February 13 Friday: Mark 7:31-37

The people brought a deaf mute man to Jesus for the reason that they knew that He is a great healer and He will certainly be able to heal the man—so they begged Him to lay His hand on him. Their knowledge of Jesus as a healer was limited because they didn’t know that Jesus also heals emotional sickness.

If only they knew it they could have also begged Jesus to lay His hands on them and heal them of their interior sickness as well. We may not be aware of it but we too are oftentimes interiorly sick. From within our hearts and minds originate lustful and evil thoughts, greed, deceit, envy, our judgemental attitudes and many more. All of these negative emotions emanate within us and this makes us sick too.

Let us pause for a while and sincerely ask Jesus to heal us also of our interior sickness....

February 14 Saturday Mark 8:1-10

Having nothing to eat is an indescribable feeling of being weak; I’ve felt it countless times in my life. You cannot do the things that you want to do. You are so frail and you just want to limit your movement because the more you move the more that you feel the pain of hunger.

There are those who said that the feeling of hunger is all in the mind, you will not feel hunger the moment you deflect your mind to other things. But that is easier said than done.

In the gospel reading; Jesus speaks about the crowd without anything to eat: “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will collapse on the way, and some of them have come a great distance."

Then, He asked them, "How many loaves do you have?" They replied, "Seven." He ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground. Afterwards He gave thanks, broke them and gave them to the disciples to give to the crowd. The same happened to the few fish that they have; the four thousand people were able to eat and they still have seven basketfuls of excess bread and fish.

What lesson does Jesus wants us to learn form the second miracle of the loaves? He simply wants us to learn how to give to the great number of people today going hungry by the day. Let us not give what we have in surplus because we will not truly feel the true joy of giving.

Let us give out of the food that we are about to eat, by doing so we will feel the great joy that Jesus felt when He feed the crowd with only seven loaves and a few fish—this is giving in its purest sense...