evangeli.net

A team of 200 priests comment on daily Gospel

200 priests comment on daily Gospel

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Today's Gospel + short theological explanation

Tuesday 7th inOrdinary Time

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Gospel text (Mk 9,30-37): Jesus and his disciples made their way through Galilee (…). And He told them, «The Son of Man will be delivered into human hands. They will kill him, but three days after he has been killed, He will rise». The disciples, however, did not understand these words and they were afraid to ask him what He meant.

They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house, Jesus asked them, «What were you discussing on the way?». But they did not answer because they had been arguing about who was the greatest. Then he sat down, called the Twelve and said to them, «If someone wants to be first, let him be last of all and servant of all» (…).

Jesus, "the Servant of God", predicts His Passion

EDITORIAL TEAM evangeli.net (based on texts by Benedict XVI) (Città del Vaticano, Vatican)

Today, we reach the second one of the three predictions of the Passion that stand for Jesus’ journey up to Jerusalem. To this teaching of the Lord, as usual, it follows the disciples defiance. Jesus fixes (us) them: The ascent of God occurs precisely in the descent to humble service, in the descent of love.

In Jesus Christ, God has revealed himself in His descending: He did not boast of His divine condition, but emptied Himself by taking on the nature of a slave until surrendering to the "death on a Cross" (cf. Phil 2,6-9). The Passion predictions reach their culmination in the statement that follows the third prediction: "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mk 10,45).

—Jesus is the "servant" of God who suffers and dies, whom the Prophet Isaiah had foretold in his songs. "Service" is the true form of rule, and it gives us an insight into God’s way of being "Lord".