NOTES for Mar 4:10-23

Many people perceive these words as a kind of classification of people. There are those to whom it is given; everyone else, however much they might wish otherwise, remains outside. But this clearly contradicts Christianity's humanistic universalism. Of course, Christ is describing different states in which our soul finds itself at different moments of our life. At times it resembles stone; then we are deaf both to the word of God and to the problems and needs of other people, and in the end we cannot even tear ourselves away from a monitor or television—or any number of other things—to look at how beautiful the sky is above us. All that remains is to beg the Lord to deliver us from “stony insensibility.” At times we receive another person into ourselves, but only while that person is here beside us speaking about his troubles; once out of sight, he is out of mind. Only in brief moments of life do we feel God's grace within us, when new meanings suddenly open up in the Word and in another person.