Dear friends in Christ Jesus,
Today, Jesus is in fact inviting us to listen to Him and act accordingly. Thus, we will be able to do the Will of God on this earth. As we glance through the first reading from the Book of Genesis. We could comprehend that sin comes into the world by not listening to God but by listening to evil and acting upon it. Sin creates conflict in the world and it will never end until we choose to follow the Lord Jesus. It is the Lord Jesus who can restore to us the loving relationship with God. The devil is never as powerful as the Lord Jesus and His Spirit. It is Jesus Himself who invites us to follow him and to be His family.
The second reading comes from the Second Letter to the Corinthians. Today this letter tells us: “he who raised the Lord Jesus to life will raise us with Jesus in our turn, and put us by his side and you with us”. God will place us with Christ Jesus. This earthly life for all of us is a matter of allowing God to remake us. But we need to be patient and faithful to Him until the day it is going to happen.
The Gospel according to Saint Mark today is a delight. Because, it seemed the people who followed Jesus tended to believe that Jesus has truly lost His mind. We could understand that the family of Jesus and the people who followed Jesus didn’t understand Him because Jesus behaved so radically by having a close relationship with God the Almighty Father. Jesus is completely caught up in doing the work of His Father and pays no attention to anything else. Therefore, they began to say that Jesus has gone out of mind and was possessed with Beelzebul. Even the family began to restrain Him from what He was doing. But Jesus went about fulfilling the Will of the Heavenly Father. Scribes and people wanted indeed to challenge Jesus, but they couldn’t because Jesus was well accepted by the ordinary people. For us all, this is a call to follow the Lord, not matter what our families or other religious people think about us. We are challenged to do the works of God, to recognise that the fight between good and evil is still going on in our own time. We must also recognise that it is God who is at work so we can trust that we are being remade in the image of God.
Amen.