Mc 12,35-37 – Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr – Memory
“How come the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David?” With this question Jesus seems to want to lead the crowd to a deeper theological reflection, simply to convey to them a very important question: the Messiah, therefore himself, is not only a descendant like others of the family of David, but it’s someone biggerto which David himself attributes an authority that surpasses any human belonging.
We could summarize today’s Gospel page like this: God acts in the things of this world, but he is always greater than the things of this world. They enters our history without allowing itself to be confined by history. He takes on a human face without ceasing to be the Lord. We too often run the risk of reducing Jesus to our categories, our ideas or our expectations. We would like it to be understandable, predictable. Instead, the Gospel reminds us that Christ certainly belongs to our history, but is not limited to it. He is close to us, yet remains infinitely greater than us.
Faith is born precisely when we accept this disproportion: when we stop building a God tailored to us and instead let ourselves be surprised by a God who continually exceeds our measurements. For this reason, every authentic encounter with Christ broadens the heart, opens the mind and frees us from the temptation to reduce the mystery of God to something we can possess or explain completely. Today’s Gospel therefore invites us to recognize that Jesus is not just a character in the history of salvation, but the Lord of history. And only when we recognize this primacy we can truly understand who we are and what direction to give to our lives.
