Mark 12:28-34 – 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Mark 10:46-52 Son of 30th Sunday Ordinary Time Son of David have pity on me
October 24, 2021
John 14:1-6 All Souls Day Sa balay sa akong Amahan adunay daghang mga lawak ug moadto ako aron pag-andam ug dapit alang kaninyo
November 1, 2021
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deuteronomy 6:2-6
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 12:28-34
A. Text/Context
• The 10 commandments are the laws given by God to Moses for the people of Israel to follow in the OT
• But in the NT, as what we have heard in the gospel a few moments back the 10 commandments is now summarized by Jesus into the 2 great commandments and what are they? Love of God and love of neighbor
• The first 3 commandments: love God above all things, thou shall not put the name of God in vain, and thou shall keep holy Sunday, these 3 commandments are about the love of God
• The last 7 commandments: from the 4th up to the 10th, honor thy father and thy mother…, the remaining 7 commandments are all about love of neighbor
• So the 10 commandments is summarized into two great commandments: love of God and love of neighbor
• But the focus of the gospel is not really about the 2 great commandments but rather that of the existence of one Lord and one God. That there is only ONE GOD
• And this is reiterated in the 1st reading in Deuteronomy that “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone”
• Although the Jews believe only in one God Yahweh we must remember that during the time of Jesus, the Jews have problems with monotheism or the belief of one God
• Under the Roman empire some Jews also regarded the emperor as a god which we know in our class in theology as emperor worship
• And throughout the history of salvation and even in the NT the Israelites have replaced Yahweh many times with other Gods
• They worship the golden calf, they worship Baal, and in the NT many Jews also believe in the god Apollo and the goddess Diana
• So when the scribe has told Jesus: There is only one true Lord and God and you must love Him alone. And Jesus told him you are not far from the KOG
• There you are you are not far from the KOG it means that from there you go forward and believe and worship and adore and follow the commandments of the one God
• All that we have to do is to live the 2 great commandments
B. Human Situation
• So today in our life as Christians, of course we no longer have problems in the belief of many other Gods. We are monotheistic because we already believe in one God
• But we still have a lot of problems because of the lack of Catechism; and what is that? We mix our faith in God with that of other beliefs or superstition, we still believe in other spirits
• There are the fairies, the dwarfs, the vampires, the nymphs and many others very much alive in our Filipino culture and also as portrayed in western media like many movies in Hollywood like the aliens flying in their UFO’s
• These spirits are all true and some of them are masquerading as good entities but they are really demons, demons, nothing more
• The bad spirits may have their own realm in this world because it is also here on earth that they reside
• Remember that St. Paul said that Satan is the prince of this world and the bad spirits would love to stay and live in a human body but they cannot do that easily unless they found openings or portals where they can enter
• So they live in the wilderness everywhere like a roaring lion ready to devour anybody whom they can enslave
• If we have a weak foundation in the faith of a one God, you will now begin to believe in these fairies or aliens because they also possess power. And of course very much lesser than God as Satan also has lesser power than Jesus
• So now comes the ambivalence of our faith a mixed feeling as we vacillate in our faith of a one true God
• You attend mass and you worship God but you also make offerings to the dwarfs in a mound of soil because you believe there are some entities living there
• What is that? That is already idolatry! Because you believe in another God
• The bad spirits also manifest power to scare us so we may worship them
• That is the tactic of Satan to confuse us in our faith. You are scared to go to the woods because these entities live there and they owned the forest
• It is to us human beings that God has entrusted this whole planet to govern and we are the steward of his creation
• If you are scared that there is a bad spirit living then exorcise them in the name of Jesus and with the intercession of St. Michael the Archangel and they will all go away
• We can drive out demons through our prayers. That’s the truth. You may not call a priest to do that because we are empowered to do that because God has also given us the universal priesthood
• We follow the priesthood of our Lord as what is reiterated in the 2nd reading in the Letter to the Hebrews
• That is why the nurses in the hospital can perform emergency baptism in cases of dying infants because of the universal priesthood
• That is why the father and the mother may give blessing to their children when they go to far places because we are given universal priesthood
• We are the stewards of God’s creation. The problem comes in because sometimes we put more faith in making offerings to the spirit rather than asking God to heal us through our faith
C. Challenge
• So there it is my brothers and sisters, there lies the challenge of the gospel for today
• We cannot be two timers, we cannot be on 2 sides, we cannot be both very faithful and religious, but at the same time we also offer sacrifices to other entities. Our superstition will ruin our faith
• We really cannot be two-timers as the Book of Revelations says that if you are neither hot nor cold I will spew you out. We have to make a choice and the choice is the love of one true God and the love of neighbor
• So today we take sides, and we put God at the center and at the same time we also remember the needs of others as our expression of our love of neighbor
• Surely, if we do this, just like the scribe in the gospel story, the KOG is not only very near to us but the KOG is already in our hearts
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Mark 12 verse 28-34
