Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa: XXXI Sunday Of Ordinary Time
This Meditation is shared from the website of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
Below you can find the Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, for the XXXI Sunday Of Ordinary Time, Sunday 3 November 2024.
Mk 12: 28b-34
Last Sunday we saw that for Jesus, loving a person means stopping before him and for him - Jesus is in Jericho and on his way to Jerusalem to give his life.
But on this journey, giving life means for Jesus that he stops and takes the pain of this person to heart, that of Bartimaeus, who cries out and turns to him in order to be able to see again. Jesus stops, meets him and heals him.
So loving also means stopping and listening, taking the pain to heart.
In today's passage, we see that Jesus has come to Jerusalem. It is the city to which one goes up, where love for God finds concrete and visible expression: offering worship and sacrifice to the one God and Lord.
The passage, moreover, is set precisely in the temple, the place where God dwells and which people enter to worship him.
We are in Mark chapter 12. The previous chapter describes Jesus’ solemn entry into the Holy City. In the days following his entry, he goes to the temple and enters into a dialog with the religious leaders, with the scribes, who have basically already decided to kill him. And the dialogs that Mark reports do not make his situation any better. Jesus speaks freely, and that certainly does not help to put him in a good light. But once again, Jesus remains steadfast and does not flee from the encounter with those who are hostile to him.
It is in this context that the evangelist Mark places the dialog between Jesus and a scribe who asks him which is the first commandment: “Which commandment is the first of all?” (Mark 12:28).
The answer would basically be simple: the first commandment is to love God.
But Jesus does not leave him at this first answer, as if to say that this answer alone is somehow incomplete, and he adds what the second is: “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12,31)…
This news was originally published on the website of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Please click here to read the full text.