Catholic lectionary for 21 January 2023

King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

Hebrews, Chapter 9, verses 2-3, 11-14

¹ The description of the rites and bloody sacrifices of the Law, ¹¹ far inferior to the dignity and perfection of the blood and sacrifice of Christ

²For there was a tabernacle made; the first, wherein was the candlestick, and the table, and the shewbread; which is called the sanctuary.

³And after the second veil, the tabernacle which is called the Holiest of all;
...

¹¹But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building;

¹²Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.

¹³For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh:

¹⁴How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

Read more:Hebrews, Chapter 9

Mark, Chapter 3, verses 20-21

¹³ chooseth his twelve apostles

²⁰And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread.

²¹And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.

Read more:Mark, Chapter 3

NOTES

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something...

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something, prove something to himself, or justify something for himself, his mind is glad to try and please him. It will find the needed arguments and offer such interpretations of perfectly obvious facts that, if the person wants, they will allow him to see those facts as completely different from what they really are. This activity of the human mind turns out to be especially "useful" when certain facts simply refuse to fit within the framework of a scheme, concept, or theory devised by the same human mind.

Something like this happened when certain "scribes" (apparently learned rabbis or teachers of Torah from the Jerusalem academy) began to claim that Jesus supposedly cast out dark spirits by using the power of their own head, the ruler of the world of shadows and the kingdom of death, one of whose names was Beelzebul. The absurdity of such a claim was obvious, and Jesus immediately pointed it out to the scribes: if everything were as they claimed, that would be a tremendous stroke of good fortune, because it would mean that a split had occurred in the kingdom of darkness, so that fighting it would now be quite easy. It was obvious to everyone that nothing of the sort was to be expected.

The scribes simply proposed a theory that could explain what was happening without destroying their own concepts, above all their messianic concepts, and some others as well. This Man, they said, violates the Law given by God (in reality, the prescriptions invented by people and proposed as an interpretation of that very Law given by God); therefore He cannot be a man of God; therefore He cannot heal; and since He nevertheless heals, then... at this point the new theory came in handy: therefore, He heals by the wrong power, not by God's power. The logic is preserved, but it has no relation to reality.

Yet a person who wants to deceive himself tries not to notice this, and truly does not notice it, while the mind helps him remain in ignorance. A person's life is determined not by mind and not by logic, but by will, which compels a person to choose and decide. This includes choosing what he wants to see and what he does not want to see. And seeing what one wants or failing to notice what one does not want is not so hard; when needed, both mind and feelings will help with this. They cannot resist the will, which determines who and what a person will be before God and people.

In today's apostolic reading, the apostle Paul recalls the tabernacle of the first, Sinai covenant and the ark of the covenant. From deep antiquity...

Continuing the theme of the Messiah as High Priest, the author of the letter gives his main attention to sacrifice as a form...

Continuing the theme of the Messiah as High Priest, the author of the letter gives his main attention to sacrifice as a form of communion with God that connects a person with God through purification and sanctification. It is no accident that he speaks of Christ as the One who passed through a greater and more perfect sanctuary, made not by human beings but by God Himself, calling Him "the high priest of the good things already manifested" (v. 11; in the Synodal translation, "High Priest of the good things to come"; the Greek text can mean not only "coming with a greater and more perfect tabernacle," but also "passing through a greater and more perfect tabernacle"). The former sacrifices purified a person from the outside, touching first of all his external, bodily, natural component (v. 13). Such purification could free the one being purified from the consequences of a particular sin, if that sin had been committed unintentionally or in ignorance, but it could not free a person completely from the power of sin. That is no surprise: external purification was directed not at the root cause of human sinfulness, but only at its concrete manifestations.

Jesus, however, makes "eternal redemption" possible, complete liberation from sin, after which it no longer has power over a person (v. 12). This becomes possible because the Kingdom that He brought into the world, paying for it by His death on the cross, changes a person not partially, touching only his nature, but completely, transforming his heart and therefore his spiritual and moral life, "purifying the conscience from dead works to serve the living God" (v. 14).

Since the time of Moses, sacrificial blood had sanctified both individual persons and a whole people, joining to God those who wanted this. It also purified a person from the consequences of sins he had committed, freeing him from the power of the evil in which the world lies (vv. 19-22). Such liberation was sometimes called ransom, or redemption, comparing a person's liberation from the power of worldly evil, and therefore from death, with the ransom and freeing of a fellow tribesman who had fallen into slavery, something that in every age was considered a righteous deed. But formerly the ransom was temporary, the liberation relative. Now the One has come into the world who, at the price of His own blood, ransoms forever everyone who is ready to accept His authority, finally and definitively freeing His faithful ones from the power of sin and death (v. 15). The former covenant required sacrificial blood for the purification and sanctification of those who had made it with God (v. 18); the new covenant unites the faithful with God not through sacrificial blood, but through that life of the Kingdom which the Risen One gives to everyone ready to believe Him and follow Him.

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