Fifth Sunday of the Great Fast: Our Venerable Mother, Mary of Egypt. Our Venerable Father Alexius, Man of God.
Great Fast Day 35. The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great is celebrated today.
Hebrews 9:11-14. Galatians 3:23-29. Mark 10:32-45. Luke 7:36-50.
Read Mark 10:32-45
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
When a deeply held belief is challenged, before changing our belief or behavior our initial response may be to resist the source of that challenge. Today’s gospel reading finds Christ’s apostles doing that at his foretelling of his death and resurrection.
After he had previously told them that whoever receives a child in his name receives him (9:37), Jesus had to rebuke them for forbidding children to come to him (10:13-16). Now, after they were embarrassingly caught by Jesus discussing which of them was the greatest (9:33-35), two requested the highest places of honor from him, about which the other ten were indignant.
A clue to why they were persisting in acting this way is that this wasn’t the first time that Jesus spoke of his passion, death, and resurrection. He had done so twice before. After Peter’s confession of Christ, upon hearing Jesus’s teaching on his rejection, Peter resisted strongly (8:27-33). After the Transfiguration, passing through Galilee secretly to privately teach them that he would be killed and after three days rise, the twelve “did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to ask him” (9:32).
On a verbal level, what Jesus was saying wasn’t difficult to understand. “He said this plainly.” (8:32) On an emotional-psychological level, though, the implications for them of what Jesus was saying was overwhelming. They couldn’t compute the distance between their hopes and Jesus’s promises, especially when the path to close that distance was the cross, not only for Jesus but for them.
The good news is that the only reason it caused such inner turmoil was that they had let Jesus in. If they hadn’t, it wouldn’t have bothered them like that. When we see ourselves resist Jesus, persist with Jesus, and he will lead us in his way of the cross.