Do you still not understand? (Mk 8:14-21)
The Pharisees and Herod are enemies of Jesus' teaching. They are people who have their own self-interest and are trying to protect it from Jesus who threatens them. Pharisees wield spiritual authority. They have their own vision of rule-based religiosity. There is no place for God the Good Father in it. There is no room for justification from God: for forgiveness and healing. They see the meaning of religiosity in the self-justification that comes from keeping the commandments perfectly. They are closed to God's grace.
Herod is an example of a worldly person interested in power, influence and pleasure. Jesus is a threat to him, because the simplicity of his life and putting God first undermines Herod's system, in which he himself takes the first place.
There is another person that needs to be looked at. This is my own person. Even though I follow Jesus, and try to believe, but like the disciples in the boat, very often I lose the most important thing from the horizon: the action of God's grace in my life. When I do not know what exactly God is going to do in my life; when I need to trust in God's goodness without knowing the future; when I see my sins and weaknesses; when I look at the world and do not see God's presence and action in it, the leaven grows up in me. First, slowly: doubting in God's goodness, in the rightness of God's intentions, in the beauty and goodness of my person created in the image and likeness of God, into the hidden meaning of sometimes sinful events that I do not understand yet. The leaven is the opposite of grace. It is all in me, which, not necessarily out of evil will, but simply out of human weakness, goes against God's grace.
Jesus tells me how I can help Him work in my life. For he says to his disciples: "Don't you remember ...?". So, we need to remember those moments in our life when God worked miracles. When he saved me from oppression. When he sent his angels to me in the form of people who were kind to me. When he gave me comfort - an increase in faith, hope and love in the midst of the greatest night and confusion. Do we remember those wonderful moments of God's action in our life? Why do we want to doubt and stop believing that God is, that He is working, that He loves us as so much?
The way to meet God is through gratitude. St. Ignatius of Loyola, in a letter to Simon Rodriguez, one of his first companions, writes that "ingratitude is the most terrible of all sins ... It is the forgetting of grace, benefits and blessings. As such, it is the cause, origin and source of all sins and misfortunes. "
Let us today remember how much good God has already done in our lives. And how much good God has prepared for us for the future! Let us be confident in God's goodness. Let us remember all His graces. Let us trust Him with all our hearts!
Do not worry about our daily bread. The disciples were worried as to whether they had enough bread. The concern that there is shortage of bread - of course – is completely understandable. But it is not good if this concern drowns out concern to serve God well. Man's first duty should be the desire to entrust himself completely to God. It shows that disciples do not understand yet something so elementary.
They deserved the reproach of the Lord Jesus because they saw with their own eyes how He fed five thousand people in the desert, and then - once again - how He miraculously multiplied the bread for four thousand people. Lord Jesus' reproach: " Do you still not understand?" it is like a repetition of the reproach from the Book of Jeremiah: why " Who have eyes and do not see, who have ears and do not hear?" (cf. Jer 5.21).
Until Tomorrow
fr. george