June 4, 2010
Friday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
By Melanie Rigney
… (R)emain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. (2 Timothy 3:14-15)
Those who love your law have great peace; for them there is no stumbling block. (Psalms 119:165)
As Jesus was teaching in the temple area he said, “How do the scribes claim that the Christ is the son of David? David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said: The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet.’ David himself calls him ‘lord’; so how is he his son?” The great crowd heard this with delight. (Mark 12:35-37)
Piety
Lord, help me to share the Good News as Jesus did: with stories and questions rather than from a position of superiority, even when I might feel that taking that position is justified.
Study
Jesus’ intent in today’s Gospel reading, according to the New American Bible, is to “imply that he is more” than a descendant of David, which believers were told the Messiah would be.
We’re told the crowd heard it with delight. Could they have truly understood what Jesus was saying—that while David called God “the Lord,” Jesus refers to him as Father and calls himself the son of God, not only the son of David? Maybe. Or maybe they were simply entertained at the way Jesus parried with the scribes.
Here and in the parables and so many of Jesus’s teachings, the lesson doesn’t hit us over the head. Jesus didn’t lecture the people in the temple area with a lengthy discourse that would have put everyone to sleep and left no one changed. Instead, he addresses this concept of who he is in just fifty-one words, including two questions and a citation from Psalm 110 with which all of those present would have been familiar. And the crowd responds “with delight.”
Maybe they didn’t get the complete meaning; more than two thousand years later, scholars are still debating that (in far more than fifty-one words). But Jesus got them to think, and that’s the first step in any evangelist’s journey.
Action
Less is more, as Jesus showed us today. Identify an evangelization opportunity with a friend or relative, and do as Jesus did: ask questions instead of showing off your own intelligence.
