Readings:
Hebrews 1:1-6
Mark1:15
Reflection:
Now that all the bruhaha of Christmas and New Year celebrations have subsided, the gifts have been shoved away into drawers, the Christmas pudding is finally finished, we will hopefully find some time to reflect upon what the season was really all about, perhaps to look under our metaphorical bonnets, to recalibrate our lives a little, to realign ourselves to God’s plan. God knows that we enter 2025 with a pretty grim report card on the state of world affairs and, for many, with anxiety about the future.
In today’s excerpt from Hebrews, the writer reassures us that Christ is with us, that he was always present and that he will be so throughout the whole of time, in the entire breadth of creation.
The Old Testament revealed the teachings of ancestors and prophets. They told us about the angels.  Now Hebrews teaches us that the Christ, who came among us as human, was, in fact, there all along, from all eternity!  It was through Christ that God made everything there is Christ, who is the perfect image of God’s nature, far more important than the angels, who sustain the universe by his powerful command.
These words vastly expand the context of what we just experienced in Christmas: God, entering into time and space in the body of a helpless child; God, loving us rancorous, destructive, bitter, greedy, unloving, ungodly creatures. Christ removes all this defilement. All we have to do is embrace his Gospel of love, peace and justice (read: love God and love neighbour) and get to work to bring this healing into our time and context.
And so, today’s Psalm 97 invites us to take a step back and to gaze into the Divine masterplan and, therein, to see the Master-planner. The Lord is king, let the earth rejoice, the many coastlands be glad……his throne is justice and righteousness…. What a tonic for New Year’s doldrums!
Finishing off our Mass readings for today, Mark’s Gospel is a masterstroke. Here, we find Jesus rounding up a mob of fishermen to follow him.   Uneducated, they were smitten by the Good News that Christ proclaimed and so left everything to follow him. We so-much-better-educated-wiseacres, who despair of a world going down the gurgler on our watch in 2025, might reflect upon what these twelve achieved through embracing the Gospel.  We can take heart, then, that with God’s grace, together we can reach out and fashion a world of true justice and peace.
Brian Norman has been associated with the Passionists in various ways since he was three weeks old when he squared off with Fr Placid Millay CP over the baptismal font at St Brigid’s, Marrickville.