Homily for Monday of the 6th Week in Ordinary Time

More often than the other evangelists, St. Mark, in his gospel, refers to the emotions of Jesus. And we need to remember that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human; he experienced the full range of human emotions, but without sin.

In today’s gospel passage, Mark shows Jesus responding with a “sigh to the depths of His spirit” (also known as a groan) to the argument of the Pharisees and their request for a sign. Then He asks, “Why does this generation seek a sign?”

While listening to this story play itself out, it’s almost impossible to get beyond a sense of the Lord’s frustration in that sigh from depths of His spirit. We’ve all experienced that kind of a sigh, both within ourselves and from others. We know the emotion it conveys. But why was He sighing? What frustration was He experiencing as He dealt with the Pharisees?

Well, throughout human history, people who are religious have often been tempted to search excitedly for signs from heaven, for visions that are extraordinary and unusual. But Jesus is always directing us towards the ordinary moments of our lives as moments to find the divine: the sower who goes out to sow seed in his field; the woman who looks for her lost coin; the care given by a Samaritan (one who was looked down upon) to a stranger on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho; the man who unexpectedly finds treasure in his field; and the list goes on.

If we see God only in the rare miraculous moments, then we miss His presence in the ordinary moments of our everyday lives, where He dwells at all times. It is often in the ordinary that the mystery of God’s kingdom is to be found because God’s good creation of full of God’s glory.+