In this section you can find a daily commentary on the Gospel of the Day.

Saturday 29 August 2020

The Beheading of John Baptist

Word for Today
The Gospel of Mark 6:17-29

The propitious day

Satan is patient, very patient. Even if he has invented haste and anxiety for us, he himself is very patient. He knows how to wait for the propitious day, the day in which all the pieces of evil come together with the right orientation and with enough destructive energy.  To launch the final attack against his bitter enemy, the evil one uses an incredible amount of patience. He creates occasions to weaken the enemy by setting mines of envy and jealously all around. He sets nets of prejudice, raises towers of the law, digs ditches of ignorance and then cultivates eveything with the destructive energy of revenge, spite, anger, and ire. In the meantime he prepares men and women who are willing to become - at the propitious moment - destructive enemies of his enemy. The closer and friendlier they are to his enemy, the more satisfying is his victory. Judas is an example as far as  Jesus is concerned. Only when everything is ready and is converging with the right destructive force  - and it can take decades according to our concept of time - he launches the attack which is never only on a single front because in order to be winning and sufficiently humiliating it must never leave any way out. When time is propitious and only when it is propitious for whatever pretext but always for one that is predisposed and studied and after having warmed the hearts and the souls with envy and jealousy, the evil one elicits furious ire and destructive rage in the minds of the enemies of his enemy and strikes out. That is what he did to get the head of John the Baptist – John, the greatest prophet - on a platter and that is what he does for all his enemies throughout history.
In reality Satan’s propitious day is the day in which he succeeds in convincing people to become judges of other men and women and convinces them that truncating  lives, cutting off heads, slandering neighbors is man’s right and duty. That day is a glorious one for Satan, his demonic liturgy, his evil rite, his dark celebration. Satan’s propitious day is the day in which men start wars and massacre one another in the name of some phantom human or divine justice. It is a war of and between the poor. The war of Herod was against the only man in the world who at that time could have saved him from ignorance and  abject stupidity. The war of Heroidias which led to John’s head on a platter was against the only man in the world who could have reawakened in her the grace and the beauty of being a woman in love with God and her fellow men. It is the war of the poor, icing for unclean spirits, jubilation for the children of the evil one.