Hebrews 2:14-18 / Mark 1:29-39
Jesus shares our lot; He was tempted as we are.
Frederic Remington was an American sculptor who worked in the early 1900s. His works sell for as high as $100,000 apiece. One of his most striking pieces is called The Rattlesnake. It depicts in vivid detail the classic moment when horse and rider encounter a snake on the path they are traveling. The horse is reared up on its two hind legs; the rider is holding on to his hat— and to the horse for dear life; and the rattlesnake is poised to strike. This dramatic bronze piece acts as a lesson on how to deal with temptation when we encounter it. We should react as quickly and as seriously as the horse and the rider. It is something deadly serious.
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Do we believe that Jesus is ready to help us when we are tempted? Do we ask his help? “You are not tempted because you are human.” Fulton J Sheen
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The gospel shows this compassion of Jesus to those afflicted with all sorts of ills, to the broken-hearted. He is committed against death and misery. Isn’t that the mission he entrusts also to us today?
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To step down from a position of power and authority is never an easy thing to do. At least one of the things that one has to get used to is the downsizing of the office. Where once everyone is at your beck and call, now you will have to make your own coffee and get your own lunch and wash your own dishes.
What would be really difficult to accept will be that where once the final decision would lie with you, now you don't have a say anymore, and you would feel quite redundant and maybe even useless.
So when Jesus emptied Himself and took on flesh and blood and became like one of us, we can imagine what it was for Him.
But as the 1st reading puts it, it was essential that He should become completely like His brothers so that He could be a compassionate and trustworthy high priest of God, and to be able to atone for human sins. So, in emptying Himself, Jesus did not become redundant or useless; on the contrary, He was able to help those who are tempted and to save them from their sins.
In the gospel, we heard Him doing just that - He cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another and He also cast out many devils. Yet because He emptied Himself, Jesus had to rely on the power of God for His mission and so in the morning, long before dawn, He got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. If Jesus, the Son of God gave such an important priority to prayer, then we who are weak and wounded by sin, certainly cannot do with any lesser priority to prayer. When we pray, we unite ourselves with Jesus, and like Him, we too empty ourselves so that we can be filled with the power of God to continue the mission of proclaiming the Good News of God's love.
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One cannot really understand the sufferings of others without having passed through suffering. Try to tell a husband who has lost his wife or someone who has met an accident, “I know what you are suffering,” or “It is not so bad,” and he will answer, or at least think, “You don’t know, because it is not you who suffer.” Jesus, says Paul’s disciple, could be compassionate and understand us because he suffered for us and became one of us.
Let us pray: Lord God, compassionate Father, every day we meet people who suffer, who have been tried hard in life, who have encountered evil and pain. What shall we say to them? Let us like Jesus, try to understand the pains of our neighbour in need feel with them, and be reliable friends, perhaps in respectful silence, on account of him who suffered our pains and shared in our ills, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
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Saint Paul the Hermit
Feast day January 15
St. Jerome wrote, or at least translated from the Greek, a little biography of St. Paul the Hermit. Some speculate that he did so in order to establish St. Paul’s reputation as the “first hermit” and to let the world know that the great St. Anthony had a predecessor. Others regard the story as so full of fables that they treat Paul as a type of a third-to- fourth-century hermit rather than as a historical individual.
A Christian from his youth, Paul was orphaned at age 15. In 250 the persecution by Decius forced him into hiding, first at a friend’s house and then, fearing exposure, to a cave in the Egyptian desert. He had planned to return home after things quieted down, but the peaceful solitude of the desert seduced him to stay. A palm tree and a spring near his cave provided him food, clothing, and water until he turned 43. After that time, as it had happened for Elias, a raven brought him half a loaf of bread each day.
In Paul’s 90th year in the desert his presence was revealed to St. Anthony, who immediately went to find him. Anthony met Paul in his cave, and the two hermits became friends overnight. They shared a whole loaf of bread brought by the raven, discussed world events, and prayed. Anthony thought he had found a companion, but Paul knew that God had sent Anthony to help him die. The biography described their meeting:
Blessed Paul said to Anthony: “For a long time now, I have known that you dwelled in these regions. And for a long time God had promised you to me for a companion. Since my hour of eternal sleep has arrived, and because I have always desired ‘to be dissolved and to be with Christ’ (see Philippians 1:23), having ‘finished the course, . . . a crown of justice’ (see 2 Timothy 4:7–8) remains for me. You have been sent by God to bury my miserable body, rather to return earth to earth.”
Anthony listened to these words with tears and groans, begging Paul not to leave him behind, but to accept him as a companion on that journey. Paul answered: “You ought not seek your own interests but those of another. It is indeed profitable for you to cast off the burden of the flesh to follow the Lamb, but it is also profitable for the rest of your brethren that they may be the more instructed by your example. I beg of you, hasten, if is not too much to ask, and bring back the cloak which Athanasius the bishop gave you, to wrap about my wretched body.” Now, blessed Paul made this request, not because he cared at all whether or not his body decayed covered up or naked, since for a long time now he had been wearing garments woven from palm leaves, but because he wanted to spare Anthony the grief of witnessing his death.
Anthony went to get the cloak. When he returned he found Paul kneeling with arms outstretched, but already dead. Two lions dug Paul’s grave and Anthony buried him. But he kept Paul’s outer garment woven from palm leaves, which he treasured from that time and which he always wore on great feast days.
Paul was spared a lonely death because he found a friend in Anthony. His experience suggests that we become friends with the sick and elderly and provide them companionship in their last days. And that we make friends with younger people ourselves as insurance against loneliness in the autumn of our lives.
