Catholic lectionary for 6 February 2019

King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

Hebrews, Chapter 12, verses 4-7, 11-15

¹ An exhortation to constant faith, patience, and godliness

⁴Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.

⁵And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:

⁶For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.

⁷If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?
...

¹¹Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.

¹²Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees;

¹³And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed.

¹⁴Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord:

¹⁵Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled;

Read more:Hebrews, Chapter 12

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12

12:4 Unto blood - Unto wounds and death.

12:5 And yet ye seem already to have forgotten the exhortation - Wherein God speaketh to you with the utmost tenderness.Despise not thou the chastening of the Lord - Do not slight or make little of it; do not impute any affliction to chance or second causes but see and revere the hand of God in it. Neither faint when thou art rebuked of him - But endure it patiently and fruitfully. Heb 3:11, etc

12:6 For - All springs from love; therefore neither despise nor faint.

12:7 Whom his father chasteneth not - When he offends.

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Mark, Chapter 6, verses 1-6

¹ Christ is contemned of his countrymen

¹And he went out from thence, and came into his own country; and his disciples follow him.

²And when the sabbath day was come, he began to teach in the synagogue: and many hearing him were astonished, saying, From whence hath this man these things? and what wisdom is this which is given unto him, that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands?

³Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.

⁴But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

⁵And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.

⁶And he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went round about the villages, teaching.

Read more:Mark, Chapter 6

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6

6:1 Mat 13:54; Luk 4:16.

6:3 Is not this the carpenter? - There can be no doubt, but in his youth he wrought with his supposed father Joseph.

6:5 He could do no miracle there - Not consistently with his wisdom and goodness. It being inconsistent with his wisdom to work them there, where it could not promote his great end; and with his goodness, seeing he well knew his countrymen would reject whatever evidence could be given them. And therefore to have given them more evidence, would only have increased their damnation.

6:6 He marvelled - As man. As he was God, nothing was strange to him.

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NOTES

Who would go to a carpenter for healing? That question arose among the people of Nazareth when Jesus, already famous for miracles, visited...

Continuing the discussion of Christian life, the author of the letter draws his readers' special attention to the need for no "bitter root" to take hold among them...

Continuing the discussion of Christian life, the author of the letter draws his readers' special attention to the need for no "bitter root," as he puts it, to take hold among them. By "bitter root," taking traditional Jewish usage into account, what was usually meant was a "root of sin," that is, sin that had taken root in the human heart or in some human community. And the issue here is not only the desire, as people say, to keep the ranks pure. Nor is it even only that bad company, as even pagans knew, corrupts good morals.

The issue is that every sin that has become the norm and is perceived as the norm disrupts the normal existence of the Church as the body of Christ, whether the members of the Church notice it or not. In fact, even in pre-Christian times it was already known that sin defiles, and not only those who sin, but also those with whom the sinner is in communion. Of course, there was much that was archaic and magical in this view, especially if we are speaking about the mass religious consciousness of the pre-exilic era.

But there was also something else, something no longer so archaic, connected with the perception of the people of God as a single spiritual whole, as a kind of spiritual body. In that case it was obvious that the sin of a specific person belonging to the spiritual body turns out to be more than only his personal problem. His sin becomes a problem for the people-community to which he belongs. And all that has been said is even more true of the Church as the body of Christ, for here we are speaking of people called to the life of the Kingdom, with which no sin is compatible.

And if sin takes root in such a community and becomes the norm, then all who share in it actually cease to be part of the body of Christ. The Church then actually disappears, preserving only the appearance of its true self. Such a substitution is all the more dangerous because often, especially at first, it is barely noticeable, so that many may think everything in their church is in order. It is this danger of unnoticed spiritual corruption of the church body that the author of the letter reminds his readers about.

Like his teacher, the author of the letter compares the spiritual path with runners competing in a stadium: each one...

Like his teacher, the author of the letter compares the spiritual path with runners competing in a stadium: each one has his own race ahead, and only the one who runs without losing sight of Jesus can run to the goal. Jesus has gone ahead of all who are running, so that all the others run after Him, who has already reached the goal (vv. 1-2). At the same time he reminds his readers that the events of their own life, which they perceive as punishment from God, do not at all testify that God has rejected them and that they have nothing more to hope for in regard to salvation. The author of the letter gives them Christ Himself as an example, Christ who had to endure punishment He did not deserve at all, but without which He could not have done for those seeking the Kingdom and salvation what He did for them (vv. 3-5). Relying on the tradition reflected in the Book of Proverbs, the author reminds his readers that punishment is not an evil in itself, that it is part of what we today call the process of upbringing, and a necessary part at that. Since God's relationship with a person includes an educational aspect as well, punishment becomes inevitable; otherwise the relationship between God and the faithful would not be a relationship of father and children, but a relationship of people who are strangers to one another (vv. 6-11).

Of course, if we keep the author's analogy in mind, we have to think that the issue is persecution for the faith, as is directly suggested by the author's phrase "you have not yet resisted to the point of blood, struggling against sin" (v. 4), because when New Testament authors speak of shedding blood in struggle, they almost always have in mind confession or martyrdom. But the author of the letter brings new shades of meaning into the traditional expression. This may have been connected with the fact that some of his contemporaries began to perceive persecution and harassment in the traditional Jewish spirit not as an inevitability, but as God's punishment for one sin or another committed by the community as a whole or by individual people. The author tells them directly that persecution can also become punishment for sin if the persecuted themselves forget the sufferings of Christ. In that case what could have become witness, as it became for witnesses who understood the meaning of what was happening, turned into punishment for those who were seeking an easy path, trying to avoid what the Savior had directly and completely unambiguously warned His followers was inevitable, and had warned them more than once. And the goal of punishment in this case was to remind the faithful of the path from which they had turned aside or were ready to turn aside, having forgotten the price paid by the Savior for the triumph of the Kingdom to which they themselves had been joined, after choosing a path that now seemed too hard to them.

FAQ

How are we to interpret that Jesus is the "brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon"? Does this imply that Mary had other children?

No, Mary had no children other than Jesus Christ. The individuals referred to as His brothers in the Gospels, according to historians and biblical scholars, were...

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