Mc 1,21-28 – Tuesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
“And they were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who has authority and not as the scribes.” The first note reminds us of a characteristic trait of Jesus: his teaching is authoritative, not authoritarian. Authoritarian things leverage fear and feelings of guilt, while authoritativeness starts from another point of view: believe in what is said.
Jesus was one who he believed what he taught; he was simply not a trained or competent man. You can immediately see when a person does things with conviction or simply does them well. Jesus was a man of authority, and what happens immediately after is proof of this. In fact, the exorcism mentioned immediately afterwards is something that often happens in our lives, even if we don’t realize it. Just pay attention to the many voices within us that discourage us, depress us, make us question everything, ruin our lives: Jesus has the power to silence these voices. «Shut up! Get out of that man.” And the unclean spirit, tearing him apart and crying out loudly, came out of him.
Our frequency with Christ is always something that produces liberation within our lives. The first place of this liberation is very often our head: our voices, our thoughts. In fact, they are often the tool that evil uses to block us, to lock us into our patterns, to make us live a life below our possibilities. Jesus wastes no time analyzing these voices, but silences them, chases them away. Today we can ask the Lord to perform these exorcisms on each of us tooin the hope that what imprisons us can go away as quickly as possible and thus allow us to live a life worthy of the name.
