Thursday of the 7th WK of the Year: Sirach 1:1-10; Mark 9:14-29
Mark loses no opportunity to underline the coincidence between our faith, and God’s healing power in Jesus. The variant in this episode is the transparency, the honesty and lack of pretension of that human faith. Whose faith is not as deficient as that of this afflicted father? But how many among us are capable of his honesty and desperate trust?
Thursday after Ash Wednesday: Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Luke 9:22-25
The First Reading describes our relationship to God as commitment to a choice; but so does today’s Gospel. Jesus makes his point in a typically paradoxical manner: not choosing life is the way to the fullness of life. Choice ever confronts us; we will never live in God by being stuck in a rut, evading a choice for the better.