General. There seems to be plenty of disorder around in the world today, humanity having forgotten God’s doings with us and given in to the evil one’s promptings. Today’s Liturgy is a prayer to God to deliver us from the evil we have brought upon ourselves so that together with the Church we might give praise to Him in peace as becoming to both God and humanity which has been formed in His very likeness.

Hosea prophesizes using the words of a groom to his bride. God wants to speak to man in the silence of the desert where He took him after freeing him from under the Pharoah’s clutches in Egypt. There the Lord will remind him of the righteousness, justice, goodness and mercy shown towards him in the desert and espouse him forever with Him notwithstanding his infidelity. It is by this great of forgiveness and mercy that man will be aware of the Lord’s fidelity toward humanity.

Psalm 102. The Lord bestows His blessings on all and in response the Psalmist blesses Him and His name, aware of all that He has undeservedly done with him. The Lord’s goodness and mercy forgives all sins and heals all maladies for He has never taken measure for measure for our wrong-doings, but rather as an ever-loving Father He has shown mercy towards His Sons.

Second Letter to the Corinthians. St Paul, in terms more understandable to Jews of his time than to us, distinguishes between the letter of the Law (Torah) written on stone-tablets and the letter of the Word of the Living God written in the flesh. All such trust and might is incarnate in Paul and other evangelizers by the will of God through the power of Jesus Christ, Who has made them worthy ministers of the New Testament by strength of the live-giving Spirit.

St Mark. The groom which espouses a sinful bride wants to set a new order in her life. Jesus was sent to the world to kindle an inextinguishable fire in the hearts of all those who followed him. New ways required completely new means, radical changes in life and certainly no patching up. This is how any spouse who sets up a new family wants to act, foregoing the past and instituting a definitively new alliance within his converted household.

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