Carmelite homily for Thursday, January 23, 2020 – Lectionary 314 (Mark 3:7-12)
The best known poem of Saint John of the Cross is The Dark Night. It begins, “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings – ahh, the sheer grace – I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.” In today’s Gospel we have far from a stilled house – big crowds pressing on Jesus. He’s healing them. He has to get into a boat so they don’t crush him. They’re looking for something. They’re looking for healing. They’re looking for food. They’re looking for health. They’re looking for immediate needs met. But I think Jesus goes and brings us all deeper than that. Yeah, he’ll start there with all of us. But I think if we stay with Jesus we start to look at not just immediate bodily needs being met, but spiritual needs, soul needs, eternal needs being met. And that, in time, maybe we all will say individually and deeply and richly, “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings – ahh, the sheer grace – I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.”