Tuesday in the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time, March 4, 2025

Mark 10, 28-31

Peter began to say to Jesus, ‘We have given up everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come. But many that are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

Today’s Gospel Reading follows after yesterday’s, in which a man asked the Lord Jesus how he could be saved, with the Lord telling him to sell all he had, give the money to the poor, and follow him.  After the man, grieved, departed, the Lord declared that it would be next to impossible for a rich man to be saved.  Peter, at the beginning of today’s Reading, is responding in exasperation.

“We have given up everything and followed you.”  In Peter’s time, success in life was the sign of righteousness.  In his mind, he is thinking that he gave up everything to follow the man who would restore the Kingdom of Israel, who would reward him with a high position, wealth, and property.  Now Jesus is saying that there will be no earthly reward for loyalty and fighting for him.  This comes at Peter and the other Apostles as a total betrayal.  

The Apostles are victims of their own false expectations.  They believed deeply in the Messiah whom the Pharisees had assured them would come.  When Jesus came and performed works of great power and preached about the Kingdom of God, they ran to him and clung to him because they believed  him to fit the description of the Messiah they believed in.  The skirmishes with the Pharisees worried them a little, but they set this down to the fact that the Messiah was supposed to rid Israel of religious corruption and they saw this in the Pharisees and in the Jewish priesthood.

Jesus assures the Apostles that they will indeed receive a great abundance of what they gave up for persevering in him.  Jesus means this, though, in a way no one could have foreseen and so he does not explain it.  The Apostles, through their work in spreading the Gospel after the Lord’s Ascension into Heaven, would receive a multitude of “houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands”.  We should recall here how the Lord Jesus understood these: “Whosoever shall do the will of my Father, that is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Matthew 12, 50).  The houses of the men and women whom they converted would be open to them, and the whole world was given to them for sowing the seed of faith.  

The Apostles heard the word “persecution” as well.  They expected a fight, a war.  They also heard “eternal life”, meaning, for them, a continuation of all the rewards they received on earth for standing by their Master as he took Jerusalem and fought the Romans.  It was not until the Pentecost after the Lord’s Resurrection that the truth dawned on them that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard: neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2, 9).