Catholic lectionary for 24 January 2026

King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

2 Samuel, Chapter 1, verses 1-4, 11-12, 19, 23-27

¹ The Amalekite who brought tidings of the overthrow, and accused himself of Saul's death, is slain, ¹⁷ David lamenteth Saul and Jonathan with a song

¹Now it came to pass after the death of Saul, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Amalekites, and David had abode two days in Ziklag;

²It came even to pass on the third day, that, behold, a man came out of the camp from Saul with his clothes rent, and earth upon his head: and so it was, when he came to David, that he fell to the earth, and did obeisance.

³And David said unto him, From whence comest thou? And he said unto him, Out of the camp of Israel am I escaped.

⁴And David said unto him, How went the matter? I pray thee, tell me. And he answered, That the people are fled from the battle, and many of the people also are fallen and dead; and Saul and Jonathan his son are dead also.
...

¹¹Then David took hold on his clothes, and rent them; and likewise all the men that were with him:

¹²And they mourned, and wept, and fasted until even, for Saul, and for Jonathan his son, and for the people of the LORD, and for the house of Israel; because they were fallen by the sword.
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¹⁹The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!
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²³Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.

²⁴Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel.

²⁵How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou was slain in thine high places.

²⁶I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

²⁷How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!

Read more:2 Samuel, Chapter 2

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1 David receives an account of the death of Saul and Jonathan, Sa2 1:1-10.
He mourns over them, Sa2 1:11-12.
Puts the man to death, who boasted he had killed Saul, Sa2 1:13-16.
His elegy upon Saul and Jonathan, Sa2 1:17-27.

1:1 Ziklag - Which though burnt, yet was not so consumed by the fire, that David and his men could not lodge in it.

1:2 Third day - From David's return to Ziklag.With his clothes rent, etc - As a mourner.

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

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3

3:20 To eat bread - That is, to take any subsistence.

3:21 His relations - His mother and his brethren, Mar 3:31. But it was some time before they could come near him.

NOTES

The messenger who told David of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan presents this sorrowful event quite differently from the way it is told in the last chapter of First Samuel...

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.

Perhaps the most striking thing in the story by the evangelist Mark that we read today is that the Lord answers the outrageous statement of the scribes at all. A crowd gathers around Him...

Perhaps the most striking thing in the story by the evangelist Mark that we read today is that the Lord answers the outrageous statement of the scribes at all. A crowd gathers around Him. There are so many people that there is not even time to pause for a meal. One after another they come to the Lord Jesus with questions and pleas, and most of them need healing. It is hard even to imagine such a concentration of suffering in one place, and how terrible it must have looked from the outside... The possessed and the insane, the crippled and the ragged... One could easily become unclean there; one would not find profound theological insight into the law there; there was nothing respectable there. For an intellectual scribe, or even simply for a respected person with a position in society, it was somehow shameful even to approach this crowd. So even today people sometimes say about our Church that only old women and half-mad people go there...

The religion for which the scribes are zealous, by contrast, is very respectable. It does not concern itself with the fate of every outcast. Its goal is to raise man above the ugliness of a suffering world. Only the best, only the very best, are worthy to shine with virtue in the Kingdom of the expected Messiah. And this preacher from Nazareth... The natural conclusion for the scribes is that He associates with such people because He Himself is one of them. And even the obvious miracles, which cannot be disputed, He performs because He is possessed.

The incredible mercy of Christ is revealed in the fact that He receives and keeps receiving these crowds of suffering people, unattractive as all suffering is. He truly became one of us, though not in the sense the scribes think. He came to share this suffering and to bring His immaterial Light into this darkness. Yet even the scribes themselves, unaware of their own weakness and blindness, saying wild things offensive to any human being, are not strangers to Jesus. And in the midst of this crowd, He finds a way to address them too in their own language. It is the language of wisdom, the language of logic, the language of theology. Christ rejects only one thing: the mercilessness hidden behind the scribes' position.

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