January 22, 2015 Thursday, 2nd Week
in Ordinary Time
1st Reading: Heb 7; 25- 8:6
Gospel: Mk 3:7–12
Jesus and his disciples withdrew to the lakeside and a large crowd from Galilee followed him. A great number of people also came from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, Transjordan and from the region of Tyre and Sidon, for they had heard of all that he was doing. Because of the crowd, Jesus told his disciples to have a boat ready for him, to prevent the people from crushing him. He healed so many that all who had diseases kept pressing towards him to touch him. Even the people who had evil spirits, whenever they saw him, would fall down before him and cry out, “You are the Son of God.” But he warned them sternly not to tell anyone who he was.
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Years ago a reader of this column asked for Latin prayers because he needed them to “exorcise” his wife. He and his neighbors had to bind her hand and foot and tie her to a kapok tree claiming that she was possessed by a demon. To lighten his mood I said in jest that Japanese words would work better on her than Latin. He frowned when I offered him the Japanese-sounding word: “badbari” (Cebuano for “untie her”).
Granting without admitting that Latin phrases have inherent magical powers, isn’t the power of Jesus enough? The Gospels show us how powerful Jesus was in addressing demonic possessions. In today’s Gospel, evil spirits cried out “You are the son of God”. It was the belief in those days that addressing a powerful spirit by name was an effective way of controlling that spirit. More than confessing the name of Jesus these evil spirits attempted to cast a spell on Jesus. But they failed. Jesus was more powerful than them.
Granting without admitting that Latin prayers have inherent powers, isn’t our status as adopted children enough assurance that the devil has no control over us? Baptism sealed us with an indelible mark as children of God as early as childhood. While we hear of cases of demonic possessions, most of them are cases of mass hysteria or mental and psychological disturbances. Unless a baptized person freely submits himself to the devil, no genuine demonic possession can happen to a level requiring exorcism.
But while we need not worry about demonic possessions requiring exorcism, we need to address the current tendency of humans to control God. Semblance of this appear in the way we manipulate God at prayer. This is worse than demonic possession no Latin nor Japanese words can cast out. May we always end our prayers with “Not my will but yours be done”.- Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email:dan.delosangeles@gmail.com. Website:www.frdan.org.
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