My Gospel Blog beginning today composes of Gospel Theme Song, The Gospel and The Reflection. Stay Holy and Faithful readers....Theme song for today's Gospel:
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Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Mark 10:32-45.
They were on the way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus went ahead of them. They were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. Taking the Twelve aside again, he began to tell them what was going to happen to him.
Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles
who will mock him, spit upon him, scourge him, and put him to death, but after three days he will rise."
Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."
He replied, "What do you wish (me) to do for you?"
They answered him, "Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left."
Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?"
They said to him, "We can." Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink, you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized;
but to sit at my right or at my left is not mine to give but is for those for whom it has been prepared."
When the ten heard this, they became indignant at James and John.
Jesus summoned them and said to them, "You know that those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones make their authority over them felt.
But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant;
whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.
For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."
Commentary of the day : Saint Alphonsus Liguori
"To give his life as a ransom for many"
A God who serves, who sweeps the house and gives himself to the most onerous work – a single one of these reflections should be enough to fill us with love! When our Savior began preaching his Gospel he made himself «the servant of all», himself asserting that «he had not come to be served, but to serve». It was as though he had said he wanted to be servant to everyone. And Saint Bernard says that, at the end of his life, he was not satisfied «with having taken the condition of a servant that he might place himself at our service but he wanted to take on the appearance of an unworthy slave and be struck and undergo the punishment due to us by reason of our sins.»
See how our Lord, as an obedient servant to all, undergoes the sentence of Pilate, unjust as it is, and yields to his executioners... In this way has this God so loved us that, out of love for us, he wanted to obey like a slave even to death and die a death that was both painful and humiliating: the torture of the cross (Phil 2,8).
Yet in all this he obeyed, not as God but as man, as the slave whose condition he had assumed. There are holy men who have surrendered themselves as slaves in order to redeem a poor man and have won the world's admiration by this heroic act of charity. But what sort of charity is this compared with that of the Redeemer? Being God; desiring to redeem us from the slavery due to us to the devil and death, he made himself as slave, allowing himself to be bound and nailed to the cross. «That the servant might become lord,» Saint Augustine says, «God willed to make himself a servant.»
