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Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time Mk 4:35-41 |
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| Background: For almost a century, the miracles of Jesus have been a torment to many theologians and scripture scholars and to ordinary folk, tempted by rationalist skepticism. Most people, of course, continue to believe in miracles and are not bothered by the miracle stories. Indeed if anything the problem today (as always) is that people are likely to see miracles where there are not any. More recently scripture scholars and historians have argued that Jesus’s reputation for wondrous deeds is so ancient and so powerful that it dates to his own time and indicates a strong belief among those who knew him that he did astonishing things. However, the "signs" in St. Mark’s Gospel are not proofs or arguments about miracles (Mark in fact was writing against those who wished to reduce Jesus to a mere wonder worker.) but signs the presence of the kingdom of God’s overwhelming love, which as the woman from County Kerry remarked, is only a foot and a half above the height of a human. |
read the padre |
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Story: Once upon a time, a group of children went for a hike in the woods near the summer village in which they were spending their vacation. The woods were not all that deep or thick or even scary. But city kids who haven’t spent much time in even a tiny forest can turn even small groves into something like Sherwood Forest (in the movies about Robin and his gang). You know what happened? WELL, the path became very narrow, and trees became thicker, and the sky turned darker, and there were lots of funny noises in the forest. And the kids were scared. Let’s get out of here said a boy. Let’s run said a girl. Where can we run? They ran anyway. Then a boy said where are we? We’re lost wailed a girl. Then they ran some more. Finally a young woman named Fiona – who was kind of a bossy matriarch in training – said, this panic stops right now. I know the way out of the forest. If we just walk this way, we’ll come to Highway 12 (which as we all know runs by every summer village in the whole world). So she set out through the woods just like she was John Wayne in a movie about the United States Marines. Everyone else followed her. Sure enough, in five minutes they came to the railway track and to U.S. 12. None of the kids told their parents that they had been lost. Some of them even told one another that they were never lost. All Fiona said was you only are really lost when you panic. |
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