ENFL125

Tuesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time

A free speech and a free life

Then they came to Capernaum, and on the sabbath he entered the synagogue and taught. The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes. In their synagogue was a man with an unclean spirit; he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are:the Holy One of God!” Jesus rebuked him and said, “Quiet! Come out of him!” The unclean spirit convulsed him and with a loud cry came out of him. All were amazed and asked one another, “What is this? A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.” His fame spread everywhere throughout the whole region of Galilee.  Mk 1,21-28

Today the gospel of Mark presents  to us Jesus teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. It does not represent the matter of the subject, but it tells us that this is “a new teaching” announced with authority and it shows the effects: wonder and amazement to those present, in addition to the power to eradicate the evil where it lurks . It is the power of the word of God, which, at those times as well as now, wins our inertia and the obstacles which keep us in the Egypt of our indifference, making us standing up to begin an exodus by ourselves, as followers of Jesus. It is the liberation from a deep-rooted social evil since thousands of years, which is expressed in the greed, in the selfishness, in the continuous searching of the maximum profit and in the spirit of domination. This Egypt, in which the men have always been slaves, the persons mentally ill, who are the weakest, those who fail to establish a mature relationship with a so difficult society, end up to be even more devastated. Monsignor Pezzoni, provost of Varese, recalling the years when he dedicated himself to his loved ones ‘mad’, whom always regretted, said: “There is no poor even poorer than the one who is not even master of his own thought”. It is the sin of the world, continually fed by the man, always ready to grant rights to the devil, which lies on the weakest. It is the spirit of the evil, rooted in the society, which has nothing in common with the word of God – free and liberating – in which there cannot be any  kind of compromise. This state of things finds its explosion in the cry of this demoniac “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God”. But Jesus, speaking directly to the spirit of the evil which enslaves that unfortunate, commands him: “Quiet! Come out of him” It is the process of the human liberation, which begins with the word of God, always able to free from the evil and to go further. Then, a program of life arises for us, to fight, being in the Lord’s side, the battle against the slavery of the man: a free speech which reflects the freedom of the gospel, confirmed by a way of living free. A free speech and a free life are the real way to attack the social evil at its root.

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