An ordinary day in Jesus’ life
"WHEN I lie down, I think, ‘When will I get up?’ The night seems endless to me, and I toss and turn until dawn” (Job 7:4). Job has suffered many misfortunes: he has lost his children and his wealth; moreover, he has contracted the horrible disease of leprosy. Job laments to God and his friends. He feels hopeless. Life seems to him a useless and worthless endeavor: the only thing positive about it is its fleeting nature.
Job finds himself in a deep emotional and spiritual depression. But given all that has happened to him, we can understand his situation very well. In fact, perhaps we too have sometimes felt like him. And perhaps we have also encountered people like him, who seem to be burdened by “trials that are too heavy, too much for our human frailty and smallness to bear.”[1] We don’t know what to say to them; our heart aches in sympathy with their sorrows, and we long with all our soul to offer consoling words to lighten their burden. We don’t want to be like Job’s friends, who were trying to help him but only ended up hurting him.
At the end of the book of Job, it is the Lord himself who tenderly consoles him. He praises his faith and his perseverance in prayer, even when, in the midst of his pain, Job protests filially in a sincere and trusting dialogue filled with authenticity. “Protesting is a way to pray when it is done like that. When children, when young people object against their parents, it is a way of attracting their attention and of asking that they take care of them. If you have some wound in your heart, some pain, and you want to protest, protest even to God. God will listen to you. God is a Father. God is not afraid of our prayer of protest, no! God understands. But be free, be free in your prayer. Don’t imprison your prayer within preconceived paradigms! Prayer should be like this: spontaneous, like that of a child with his father, who says everything that comes to his mouth because he knows his father understands him.”[2] We can learn from Job, and from so many people who resemble him today, how to be firm in our faith and to address God with sincerity, which enabled him to experience the strength of divine mercy in especially difficult moments in his life.
THE PSALM today invites us to praise God, because He comes to the aid of his people and “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Ps 146:3). God loves us with immense personal affection. He cares about our deepest reality, our heart. We know He is not a distant God who governs the universe only by setting it in motion at the beginning and then washing his hands of it, but rather that he “counts the number of the stars and calls each one by name” (Ps 146:4). He knows us by our name and is attentive to each of our actions. “Aren’t you glad to have the sure confidence that God is interested in even the tiniest details of his creatures?”[3] Saint Josemaría asked.
“The Lord is great and mighty; his wisdom is beyond measure. The Lord upholds the humble, but casts the wicked to the ground” (Ps 146:5-6). We are filled with gratitude when we consider how God puts his omnipotence at the service of those who see themselves as small, those who are humble, who pass through history unnoticed. This is God’s way of acting: He cares about each person, with a special love for the smallest and humblest.
In the second reading, Saint Paul reminds us that if we want to belong to Christ, if we intend to live as true children of God, we are called to imitate the mercy that our Lord continually shows each of us, placing himself at our service: “Though I am free, I have made myself a servant to all, to win more . . . To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor 9:19, 22). We can renew our desire that our lives be like this: a gift, a continuous service to each person, striving to understand them deeply, to foster what unites us, to offer a sincere friendship that, imbued with charity, is truly “divine light that gives warmth.”[4]
IN THE GOSPEL for this Sunday, we find Jesus once again in Capernaum. This town on the shores of the Sea of Galilee held an important place in our Lord’s life. He chose it as his residence for extended periods and, apart from Jerusalem, no other place holds so many memories of his time on earth. So it is quite likely that the scene described by Saint Mark reflects a typical day in Christ’s life, in which the ordinary and the extraordinary are intermixed within the setting of daily life, giving us a glimpse of our Lord’s daily work.
Jesus leaves the synagogue and goes to Peter’s house, where He finds the apostle’s mother-in-law suffering from a fever. Our Lord reaches out his hand and heals her. That evening, the crowds start arriving, bringing Him all who are sick or possessed by demons, and Jesus heals a great number and casts out many evil spirits. We see our Lord’s closeness to all the physical and moral suffering in the people presented to Him, freeing them from the power of the devil. He makes himself accessible to everyone and bestows his love on each one. The next day, very early in the morning, Jesus goes to a solitary place and spends a long time in prayer, where the disciples find him and tell Him that the crowds are looking for Him. And once again He eagerly takes up his daily work. It is as though his longing to reach everyone has increased in his dialogue with the Father, and He decides to go also to the nearby villages. And so “he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons” (Mk 1:39).
“Make it a habit to mingle with the characters who appear in the New Testament,” the founder of Opus Dei suggested. “Capture the flavor of those moving scenes where the Master performs works that are both divine and human, and tells us, with human and divine touches, the wonderful story of his pardon and his enduring Love for his children.”[5] By contemplating these scenes from Christ’s life, we can learn to be sensitive, like Him, to the small and great sorrows of others, even of people we may not know well. We will long to serve everyone generously, to set aside our own comfort and ground our entire day of work and self-giving on prayer, striving never to hinder the love our Lord has poured into our hearts. We can ask the Virgin Mary to help us make these teachings part of our daily lives.
[1] Francis, Audience, 18 May 2022.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Saint Josemaría, The Forge, no. 619.
[4] Saint Josemaría, The Forge, no. 565.
[5] Saint Josemaría, Friends of God, no. 216.