In today’s Gospel we encounter Jesus preaching to great crowds when suddenly a man interrupts and approaches, begging him to save his daughter’s life. Jesus immediately leaves to go to the bedside of the young girl who is near death…but almost immediately is interrupted along the way… yet again.

In the Gospel of Mark, biblical scholars often refer to this “interruption” of a new encounter between Jesus and someone in need as a “Mark-an sandwich.” This “sandwich” is created when Mark begins to recount one story about Jesus’ ministry, and while Jesus is in the midst of responding to the first request, he is interrupted by another request from someone else in need.

Once he meets the need of the second request, Mark returns to telling the original story of the first request for healing, which Jesus has reembarked upon. Thus, a “Mark-an sandwich” -- the second encounter “sandwiched” in the middle of the first story.

This time the second interruption is by a woman who has suffered for twelve years with hemorrhages. She, who is an interruption, becomes the center of his attention. Jesus stops to attend to the woman’s needs knowing the little girl lay dying.

We see a pattern in the ministry of Jesus -- a pattern of “interruptions” that become moments of healing, moments of the Reign of God bursting forth because Jesus takes the interruption and turns it into a grace-filled encounter with The Divine!

Jesus senses this woman’s suffering; he listens to her plea that she has spent all she has on cures and now places her life in his hands and places her faith in him.

And even though she has broken all the social and religious laws around being in public spaces because of the type of illness she has, Jesus calls her “daughter” bringing her close to himself and signaling a relationship to her. He praises her for her faith and proclaims her healed and sends her on her way to a new life, restored to health, and restored to her family and to her community. She is no longer an outcast due to her illness; rather she has been made whole by Jesus and returned to a fullness of life!

Henri Nouwen famously once said that he used to get annoyed with all the interruptions in his ministry until he realized that the interruptions were his ministry. What an incredibly challenging way to look at interruptions!

We all know we must get things done! But the truth is that we can miss occasions to minister to a sister or a brother in need because they arrive as we are “busy about many things.” They appear to be interruptions, but perhaps they are “opportunities”!

These “interruptions” could be opportunities for us to become the love of Christ present in the world through our response to another’s moment of need.

In the midst of this woman’s darkness, she recognized Jesus as a beacon of hope! In the midst of the darkness in our country and our world, our lives are interrupted by the suffering of the poor and the homeless, the refugee, and all those people who are marginalized or demeaned by society. And throughout the day, our lives are interrupted by family members and friends in need.

The Gospel calls us to be beacons of hope for others in their moment of need…for us to be moments of encounters of grace for the other.

When was the last time God interrupted my life in the form of someone in need? Was it a moment of grace? How is God interrupting my life today?

Blessings,
Fr. Tim

Over the past few years, we found ourselves in the midst of a great storm, being tossed about like a small boat in
the midst of a great sea. In the depths of the pandemic we lived through great loss, pain and suffering and many
of us turned to Jesus and said, “Teacher do you not care that we are perishing?” Some of us turned to Jesus and
flung our arms around him as a life jacket and rode out that great storm with him as our solace and security.

But, in the midst of all of the fear, loss, and grief we also reached out to one another and to “the stranger” knowing them to be “sisters and brothers” in need. Even though you feared for yourself, for your family and for your loved ones, you sought to help those in need! Your generosity of heart, in the midst of a great storm, was absolutely incredible and continues to be amazing!

In todays Gospel, Jesus and the disciples are heading to the “other side” of the sea of Galilee, moving from the mainly Jewish enclave to a more Gentile region. This shows a widening of Jesus’ ministry, he is moving beyond
preaching the “Good News” to the people of Israel and is reaching out to non-Jews, to those “outside” his cultural and religious group. He is expanding his ministry to include “the others”!

The disciples show great fear because their boat is about to capsize and Jesus is slumbering away! Terrified, they awaken him seeking his help and he rebukes the wind and the waves, and they become calm. Jesus asks “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” And the disciples are amazed, and ask “who then is this, whom even wind and sea obey?” Jesus ties their fear to a lack of faith, basically saying, “do you not yet know who I am, so why are you surprised at what I do?”

By this time in their following of Jesus, the disciples have already seen Jesus perform many miracles and cure many people: the man with the withered hand, Simon’s mother-in-law, the man with the unclean spirit and the cleansing of the leper, as well as many others. So, who did they think he was at this point in their journey with him? Jesus had already appointed “the twelve” and had sent them out to preach “the message”! What were they missing?

I must admit there is something comforting in their humanness, in their lack of fully comprehending who Jesus was. It puts me a bit at ease! Each of us on our journey with Jesus must pass through howling winds and raging seas and must rely on Jesus to help us make it through the storms of our lives. And we must remember that eventually they do “get it” and they leave the security of the “locked” upper room and risk their lives preaching the Good News of Jesus Christ!

How am I being called to leave the security of my “upper room” to go out into the world and preach the Good News of Jesus Christ by what I say and by what I do?

Blessings,
Fr. Tim

This weekend, once again we hear Jesus speak to us in parables… multifaceted gems that once tumbled around in our hearts and we ruminated upon, yield unbelievable insights into the Reign of God.

While the disciples certainly preferred straightforward answers, Jesus obviously preferred parables. Of the comparisons of the reign of God to a field, a mustard seed or the leaven in bread, I have always liked the comparison of the
mustard seed to the Reign of God. This tiny little seed grows into a great bush…so large that the birds of the air make their
nests in it. If you take the parable at its face value, it all seems quite lovely.

However, there is a dark side that farmers know well: the mustard bush is an invasive plant. It grows wildly and rapidly,
quickly overtaking a garden, ruining the plants that had been planted with care and reducing their yield, if not completely
choking them out. Mustard bushes are uncontrollable and rapidly spread across a farm if not quickly uprooted before going to seed.

Surely this reality was not lost on Jesus…nor on those who heard him tell the parable. It seems that perhaps Jesus is
presenting an image of the expansion of the Reign of God as something uncontrollable, invasive and fast growing!

Looking through the lens of this image, the Reign of God is not something that can be domesticated or controlled. By its very nature it grows uncontrollably and burst forth and, very importantly, offering refuge.

I believe that most of us though would prefer something that we could contain and control and domesticate! But the truth is that the Reign of God is just that – “God’s Reign” – not ours!

We are part of it by our baptism and we are called to help water it so that it continues to grow and “invade” every
crevice and furrow of this earth, but we don’t get to tame it. Two thousand years ago Jesus’ vision of the bursting forth of
the Reign of God was nothing less than radical…and it still is today.

We are called to be part of that radical vision: to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and imprisoned, to
welcome the stranger -- to love one another as Christ loves us and to reach out and to care for “the other,” to proclaim the
deep and passionate love that God has for all peoples!

And wasn’t it just this radical vision of the reign of God that Jesus preached that got him labeled crazy, and branded a
danger and ultimately crucified? As his disciple, just how radical of a life am I willing live? In a world that proclaims a
“gospel of personal prosperity” with tax cuts for the rich at the cost of healthcare cuts for the poor, in a nation where overt
acts of racism and discrimination are on the rise across the country, in a nation that arrests and turns away those who are
seeking asylum or immigrating looking for a better life…to what lengths am I willing to go in building up this radical vision
of the Reign of God that Jesus preached?

What concrete action can I take today to “water” the Reign of God that Jesus preached where the poor are to be housed and fed, the stranger is to be welcomed and the sick and imprisoned are to be cared for and visited?

As a disciple of Jesus, to what lengths am I willing to go to live out his radical vision of total love of God and neighbor, and
forgiveness of neighbor as boundlessly as God forgives me, and to be as accepting of “the other” as God is of me?

Blessings,
Fr. Tim

In this Sunday’s Gospel we hear that Jesus’ family comes looking for him; it would seem that they are concerned about his mental health while scribes accuse him of being possessed by the devil!

It is common technique of Mark to “sandwich” two stories or events in the telling of an event in the life of Jesus. There are often multiple things going on around Jesus in Mark’s Gospel -- Jesus is always presented as harried and hurried, moving from place to place at breakneck speed, leaving the reader almost breathless.

Jesus is so bound up in preaching the Reign of God, in healing the sick, in reaching out to the poor and the marginalized, making sure that the sinner and the outcast know that they are the beloved of God to the point that it seems that even his own family wonders about his sanity.

And yet he preaches with such authority that the people’s hearts are transformed and more and more come to believe in him as the Messiah, the long awaited One of Israel!

But others refuse to see the signs and wonders he works because their eyes and hearts are closed to the very living grace of God that stood before them.

As Jesus proclaims that “his family” was made up of all those who do the will of God, it must have been shocking to ears of the hearers! In Jesus’ culture, how one was related to another person was absolutely essential to the individual’s personal identity and their place in the family and in the wider community. So for Jesus to redraw the lines of familial relationships and tie it to doing the will of God, was truly a bold statement, that would clearly impact societal norms.

On one level Jesus is expanding people’s identity and relationships to one another to include people who otherwise would be outsiders, now becoming insiders, becoming part of the clan and no longer foreigners. This would come about by doing the will of God, as understood by the way Jesus was preaching it! By loving God with your whole being and your neighbor as yourself!

In the first reading from Genesis, we have the story of the origin of sin. And as misogynistic as this story presents, almost all cultures have stories that seek to explain how sin and evil got into the world.

Handed down from one generation to the next these stories were meant to help explain the brokenness of the human condition, to tell us something about God and our relationship to God, our relationships with each other, and how we’ve ended up with all the greed, sin and evil in the world today.

At some level the story of the forbidden apple is a story of scapegoating, blaming the other for our own poor choices or inaction. We see it all the time in our politicians, they scapegoat “the other party” and/or blame it on “the foreign evil”. We see it in schools, workplaces, in the church, in our personal relationship and in our own families. The lack of ability to take responsibility for one’s actions and decisions is truly a sign of our times.

But following Jesus’ example is the cure for our times! Opening our eyes and our hearts to his presence in our midst, in our lives, can transform us just as it did his first disciples. Transform us to truly see all others, no matter how different they seem to be from us…to see them as Jesus sees them, to love them as sisters and brothers, members of our family, members of God’s family!

Where do I see Jesus in my life? What action is my discipleship calling me to today? And in what ways can I best live out my faith and proclaim Jesus’ Gospel of love, acceptance and forgiveness through my daily words and actions?

Blessings,
Fr. Tim