Jesus Came Home with his disciples…

10th Sunday in Ordinary Time

June 10, 2018 ~ St. Monica, Palatka ~

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Genesis3:9-15 ~ The woman answered: “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.”.

Psalm 130~ Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; hear my voice!

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1~ Therefore, we are not discouraged; rather, although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.

Gospel: Mark 3:20-35 ~ Jesus came home with his disciples. Again the crowd gathered, making it impossible for them even to eat. When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said, “he is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “By the prince of demons he drives out demons.”

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            How many of us have blamed others for causing us to sin? How often have we had expectations of others to do it our way? Adam and Eve are a gift to us if we have done this. Now what? The family of Jesus had expectations for him, and when he didn’t meet those expectations, they blurted out “He is out of his mind!”

           Jesus shares with us that before anyone can plunder a strong man, they have to tie up the strong man first.  Then they can plunder. The scribes were about to tie up Jesus to a cross so that they could plunder and oppress the people even more. They were profiting from the people by confusing them and misleading them. That is how people are tied up.

            Doctors, nurses, lawyers, counselors and ministers take oaths and vows to protect life rather than destroy life. When they go against that oath, like support abortion or go into useless wars… then they do the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit.

            To profit from war, divorce, abortion, or unneeded hospital stays or selling guns to those who shouldn’t have them or lying in order to get elected, or feeding off of the flock… these are unforgivable. The opposite is life-giving.  

Newspaper columnist George Plagenz once told the story of a young doctor who delivered a baby into a poverty-stricken family in Montana. The child had one cruelly deformed leg. He also had difficulty breathing. “The other children will call him ‘Limpy,’” the doctor thought. “His life will be miserable. If I don’t do anything for his breathing, he will die. Wouldn’t that be better?” he asked himself. Then he remembered his Hippocratic oath and began blowing into the baby’s mouth. Soon the child’s lungs were acting normally and he gave his first cry.

Several years later the doctor’s daughter and son-in-law were killed in an auto accident. The doctor’s ten-year-old granddaughter was left an orphan. He took her in. One day the child was stricken with a crippling and incurable condition. The doctor learned there was a young doctor in the Midwest who had been getting excellent results in the treatment of this particular disease. He took his granddaughter to see the doctor.

The young physician was lame. He was the deformed baby into whose mouth the older doctor had breathed 35 years before. Because of his own infirmity, the young doctor had specialized in this crippling disease. The treatment on the older doctor’s grandchild was successful and the little girl was returned to normal health. *

*Story taken from:

Gerard Fuller, O.M.I., Stories for All Seasons, 1996, Twenty-Third Publications The Columbia Press, page 74 (Jesus Casts Out Devils)

David Redding, The Golden String (Grand Rapids MI: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1988), as quoted in Dynamic Preaching (6):5, July 1991.