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Lunedì 5 Giugno 2023

Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Word for today
The Gospel of Mark 12:1-12

Devil’s haste

The parable Jesus told, its meaning so evident, ends revealing which kind of future is waiting for the religious and political intermediaries who took, at that time as well as now, the place of God in taking care of the mankind, not for man’s wellbeing but for their own interests: He will come, put the tenants to death, and give the vineyard to others. The conclusion of the parable has no way out: the political and religious leaders of the people will be erased and God’s people, God’s Kingdom, will be given to others. But if the parable’s message is so clear, why is it that the chief priests, the scribes and the people’s elders, to whom Jesus was talking, were not so perspicacious and intelligent to understand that Jesus was talking exactly about them, foreseeing their certain death unless they converted to God? How come they did not understand that killing Jesus, as they were organizing and forcing, they would have been the cause of their own disappearance and substitution for the eternity? How come they did not understand? The fact that Jesus was the Messiah, the Lord, was well understood by people, by the simple ones, by children, women and men of the street. How come that the Scriptures’ expert, the ones who knew Israel history, accustomed to the mental circuits of theology and the bible’s law, did not understand? How come that the one who were so dedicated to the study of the bible and so expert of the hundreds of prophecies regarding Jesus, then were the ones who refused Jesus in such a decisive and violent way?
It has been told for two thousands years: the chief priests, the scribes and the elders of the people in Jesus’ time, experts of the bible, even though they were waiting for the Messiah, refused and killed Jesus because they did not recognize Him. This is not the truth: the chief priests, the scribes and the people’s elders, the people’s religious and political hierarchies, refused and killed Jesus right because they had recognized Him before and better than anybody else, in fact they were the only one who had the technical, historical and theological tools to do that. Indeed the hierarchies’ task was to recognize Him promptly so to be able eliminate Him immediately, and so they did. Truly, they did understand, they did understand very well, and there was not anything more clear in their mind than that man, that beautiful man was the Son, the beloved Son of the Highest made flesh, visiting earth. They knew very well who Jesus was, and because they knew it they made haste to kill Him as soon as possible.
The hostile behaviour of the people’s leaders towards Jesus indicates a paradoxical haste to fulfil the Scriptures: Jesus, the Son, had to die. Killing and eliminating Jesus was done in a strange haste, certainly suspect, definitely counterproductive even for the leaders themselves, for the chief priests, the scribes, the people’s elders who proposed themselves for thousands of years as the ones who, par excellence, were waiting for the Messiah, the Son of God. They knew very well that killing Jesus was also the end of their power and prestige, because that was what was written. But then how do you explain so much expertise on the biblical texts, so much obsessive and fanatic study to gather all the possible information about the coming of the Messiah? The haste to kill and eliminate Jesus reveals that the chief priests, the scribes and the elders were not what was believed and made believe they were throughout centuries. They were the experts, with a mandate to recognize God’s Son, but not to serve Him with love, to announce Him to people with joy and holy reverence, to adore Him, but to be able to recognize Him without any mistake in order to eliminate and destroy Him as soon as possible.  So, on one hand they understood perfectly what was going on, and comprehended that their mandate was about to end unless they adhered to God’s Son with love and humility. On the other hand they had to show to people that Jesus was an impostor, disproving Him before them to create an enemy to be easily eliminated. But then how do you explain all that haste to fulfil the Scriptures, and kill Jesus, if that also meant the end of their religious and political power? Was it because of that kind of intellectual dementia that goes with every fanaticism and arrogance’s process? Or was it fear? Or maybe to be remembered in history as the ones who tortured and killed the Son of the Eternal Father? Why? Simply because the slave blindly obeys to what his owner asks.
Now we have to understand if the true nature of the chief priests, the scribes and the elders was to serve the Heavenly Father of the satanic prince of the worldly power. Were, and are right now, the chief priests, the scribes and the people’s elders, the political and religious hierarchies at the service of the Life’s Lord or employees of Satan, the death’s lord? Where does that hell of a haste to slander, tease, humiliate, condemn, torture, nail Jesus to a cross come from? From who could the order to hit, eliminate God’s prophets, shutting up the unheard voices which offered their life to awaken God’s people, to inspire it in the name of Jesus and the Paraclete Spirit come? Does it obey to God the Father command or to Satan’s one? All that bustling to kill Jesus and His servant has a dark haste, a devil’s haste.