Monday, Fourth Week of Ordinary Time, Year C

Hebrews 11:32-40/ Mark 5:1-20

The ongoing AFCON has continued to highlight African football heroes and sprout a number of surprises. The defending champions had failed to make it to the knockout stages; the host, South Africa had crashed out to Mali; and now the tournament’s favourites, the mighty Elephants of Cote d’Ivoire, the number one in Africa, has bowed out rather ungracefully to the less-esteemed Super Eagles of Nigeria. The deciding moment of the latest encounter came at the 78^th minute when the homeboy, Sunday Mba, made a solo run and rifled the ball into the Ivorian goal. Obviously, he was the hero of the match.

Talking about heroes, we have a number of them mentioned in the first reading of today. The eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews gives us an interesting catalogue of faith heroes in the Old Testament. We hear of Gideon and Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David and Samuel “who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, received promises... won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, and put foreign enemies to flight” (Heb. 11: 33-35). They were real heroes in their days and we have a record of their feats.

In the gospel reading, we see a no less heroic occurrence. It happened in Gennesaret where there was a demon-possessed man. So terrible was his condition that he was almost totally reduced to a beast by the malevolent spirit that controlled him. At the sight of Jesus the tormented man began to cry out. He ran and prostrated before the Lord and the evil spirits in him began to negotiate their exit for they knew that their oppression and bullying of that ‘son of Abraham’ had come to an end. They begged to be granted a soft landing: “As you are driving us from this man that we have maliciously reduced to an animal, let us at least enter these animals so that we can reduce them to nothing”. Well, Jesus granted them leave and 2000 pigs were drowned almost immediately. What a loss! But why did Jesus take that decision? Why did He not command those ‘yeye’ spirits to go to hell? May be He wanted to teach the guys of that village an important lesson, the lesson that a single human soul is worth more than thousands of pigs and thousands of dollars. Unfortunately they didn’t get the message. They asked Him to leave their territory because they prized the economic loss higher than the spiritual gain. We learn from their miscalculation and we adjust our ways.

Have a nice day and God loves you.