March 04, 2016 Friday, 3rd Week of Lent 1st Reading: Hos 14:2–10 Gospel: Mk 12:28–34
A teacher of the Law had been listening to this discussion and admired how Jesus answered them. So he came up and asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”Jesus answered, “The first is: Hear, Israel! The Lord, our God, is One Lord; and you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And after this comes another one: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these two.”The teacher of the Law said to him, “Well spoken, Master; you are right when you say that he is one and there is no other. To love him with all our heart, with all our understanding and with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves is more important than any burnt offering or sacrifice.”Jesus approved this answer and said, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” But after that, no one dared to ask him any more questions.
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE (Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)
Today’s Gospel reading is sequel to the Gospel scene where the Sadducees tried to trap Jesus on the matter of the resurrection (Mark 12:18-27). Gospel writer Mark does not make any parenthetic remark about a similar attempt in today’s Gospel reading. But this Gospel segment might just be another entrapment attempt by a Teacher of the Law who questioned Jesus about the greatest of all Commandments. Why would he put this question forward when every Jew knew that all Commandments were to be given equal importance?
Most of the questions Jesus received from adversaries were fishing expeditions. Their efforts weren’t fruitless because they finally found a serious charge to pin him down: the charge of blasphemy for calling God his Father. The charge was supposed to rise on the scales of justice. The sincerity of a “prudent, unprejudiced, reasonable and cautious” Jew would have been sufficient to engender the suspicion that there was more to Jesus’ humanity than what his genealogy suggested. But because they had a sinister agenda, their approach to the “Jesus problem” was academic. Oh, what a waste of precious spiritual opportunities in the company of Jesus! It was like dying of thirst at the mouth of a gushing spring.
Bias, no matter how small, always has the power to alter the way we weigh things. This Lenten Season let us purify our concept of God lest we waste precious spiritual opportunities in our relationship with Him and die of spiritual thirst at the wellspring of salvation.— Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com. Website: www.frdan.org.
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