Saturday of Week 7 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Sirach 17:1-15

Today Sirach speaks of the relationship between the Creator and the human beings he has made. It is part of a poem in praise of the Lord for the creation of humankind. The author is following the order of Genesis and has already spoken of the creation of stars, plants and animals.

He combines in one the two accounts of the creation of humankind (Gen 1:26-27; 2:7) and interprets the image of God in humans under the headings of authority, strength, and dominion, thus developing a hierarchy of power: God, humans, living beings.

Humans were created by God from the earth, and will at the end return to earth. The First Man had been created a living thing from the earth and at the end is buried and returns to where he came from.

Human life on earth is temporary, but privileged:

He gave them a fixed number of days
but granted them authority over everything on the earth.
He endowed them with strength like his own
and made them in his own image.

God shared his ability to know and love and to have his vision of creation. Because of this, we were put in charge over all beasts and flying things and:

He [the Lord] put the fear of them in all living beings…

This is a generally true statement, but there are exceptions where the human is the one who fears.

God shaped humans giving them:

Discretion and tongue and eyes,
ears and a mind for thinking…
He filled them with knowledge and understanding
and showed them good and evil.
He put the fear of him into their hearts
to show them the majesty of his works.

The Israelites believed that the heart was the seat of reason rather than the seat of the emotions, as it is for us. The list of faculties for perception is similar to that common to the Stoic tradition. The ‘five faculties’ were sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste.

The human was also filled with knowledge and understanding and given a sense of good and evil. In this way, God’s light was planted in human thinking so that we could appreciate, as other creatures cannot, the magnificence of God’s creation.

God also taught us as well:

He bestowed knowledge upon them
and allotted to them the law of life.

This refers to the Law of Moses, which is included in the endowments that God “allotted” to mankind. The gifts of Creation and of Mount Sinai are here telescoped into one act of God.

And we were given another gift:

Their eyes saw his glorious majesty,
and their ears heard the glory of his voice.

This is a reference to the Israelites’ experience at Mount Sinai.

For us, of course, there is the further teaching that we have received through the Incarnate Son of God a new and “eternal covenant”:

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
(John 10:10)

Our response to all these gifts will be to:

…praise his holy name,
to proclaim the grandeur of his works.

A very important part of our prayer is to praise and thank the Lord for the beauty and gift of his creation.

At Mount Sinai also, God told his people to beware of all wrongdoing and:

…he gave commandment to each of them concerning the neighbor.

He did this through the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law. And they needed—as we do—to be aware that:

Their ways are always before him;
they will not be hidden from his eyes.

Let each one of us reflect that we too are part of this creation. We have been given these gifts to develop so that we can continue to grow ever more in the likeness of our God. That is the sole purpose of our existence and we forget it at our peril.

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Saturday of Week 7 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Mark 10:13-16

The Gospel begins with the line:

People were bringing children to [Jesus] in order that he might touch them…

It is so sad that this act of ‘touching’ has lost any connotation of innocence in our present day.  A compassionate and healing touch is something for which children, the sick and, at times all of us have a great need.

His disciples felt that Jesus, who may have been in the process of teaching, was being bothered by these mothers and tried to drive them away.  More than once we have seen the officiousness of the disciples who were taking to themselves an authority that not been given them.  They still had to learn the lesson that authority serves rather than controls and manipulates. It is a lesson that those in authority in our Church today need also to remember.  And it reflects to some extent the low place that children had in adult society, to be neither seen nor heard.

Mark, who likes to record the feelings of Jesus, says that he was quite “indignant” at his disciples’ behaviour, saying:

Let the children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

“Children” here can be taken in a wider sense to include all those who approach Jesus with a completely open, unprejudiced mind—and also those who have a low status in our society.  Such people are often more ready to hear the message of the Kingdom and to take an active part in it.

So Jesus says:

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

Only those with the openness and simplicity of a child will be able to enter the Kingdom.  These words were, no doubt, addressed to all-knowing scribes and Pharisees and their like, and also to the disciples.

Jesus then took the children, put his arms around them, laid his hands on them and blessed them.  Jesus knew the importance of physical touch in communicating with people, in expressing encouragement and affirmation and in bringing healing.

This passage can be linked, in a way, with the recent one on scandal (Mark 9:42-50).  The disciples, perhaps not deliberately, were blocking access to Jesus by those who were most open to his teaching.  As people who are responsible for children, either as parents or teachers or in other roles, we need to be aware of how—by word or action—we can block our children from being exposed to Jesus’ message of Truth and Love.   But we can also be a block to other people who can be influenced and turned away from the Way of Christ by our unchristian way of behaving.

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