Friday and Monday

Friday of the 9th week of Ordinary Time (Mk 12, 35-37)

At the time of Jesus, the Jews were inhabited by a strong messianic expectation. Each current gives it a particular form – the zealots await a revolutionary messiah for example – but all agree on the coming intervention of an envoy of the God of the covenant, who does not forget his chosen people. This is why the scribes seek to find its trace in the Scriptures. They locate it in the prophetic Writings rather than in the Law: in connection in particular with King David who received the divine anointing. The people have integrated this Davidic figure of the messiah and the blind man of Jericho, on the side of the road, shouts “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” “. He recognizes in Jesus the messenger of God.

What matters is therefore to recognize the envoy of God, not to quibble about filiation with David. In the temple, while teaching the crowd, Jesus mocks the scribes: in the psalms, David called the Messiah “Lord”: “Where does he come from when he is his son? Rather than confining God to a dynastic lineage, he shows him at work through his life and his words. “And the large crowd listened to him with pleasure. To say that Jesus is indeed the expected Messiah, the evangelists Matthew and Luke show his genealogical filiation with David. But above all, they make it go back further: to the root of the alliance with all the people.

Father Nicolas Tarralle (Augustine of the Assumption)

Other texts: Tb 11.5-17: Ps 145.

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Monday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time (Mt 5.1-12)

Saint Augustine designates happiness as the goal of existence, but he points out that most people do not know the way to get there. The whole Gospel is a response to this quest. In the text of the Beatitudes, the Greek word behind “Happy” suggests a particular happiness, both a blessing and a gift from God. Thus, the Beatitudes do not place happiness at the level of positive sensations and material well-being; material wealth and the easy life, if not negative, are not a guarantee of happiness. However, Christ, when he establishes a link between poverty, meekness, mercy, even tears, and happiness, does not praise misery. Rather, it highlights the possibility for each man and each woman to be “blessed” by God, regardless of their living conditions.

Insofar as the Beatitudes draw up the portrait of Jesus, each one who conforms to the text can find his full dimension, his full dignity. The hope that this gives, André Chouraqui expressed it by translating the Greek “happy” by “on the move!” Thus, when we experience poverty, when we experience injustice, when we are called to oppose gentleness or forgiveness to violence and offense, let us remember that Christ walks with us and that our heart becomes broader, our existence fuller…

Sister Véronique Thiébaut, nun of the Assumption

Other texts: 2 Co 1,1-7; Psalm 33 (34)

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