January 16, 2026 -- Friday of the 1st Week "B"
1 Samuel 8, 4-7. 10-22; Mk 2, 1-12
H O M I L Y
The first reading is a good example of how God respects our liberty. He has put us in charge of our own existence, and has left us with the full responsibility of making all the important decisions about our life.
Sometimes we pray as if God had decided everything in our place, and if the only thing for us to do were to discover what He has already decided. It is not so. God leaves us the responsibility of making our decisions freely. He simply offers us all the lights we need to make the good decisions and the grace we need to implement them. We are always free to use the lights he gives us, or not. Usually he does not appear to us in person; his lights usually come to us through the intermediary of other human beings. Apart from these lights, we also have, of course, to use the intelligence he has given us, and all the other means of discernment he has placed at our disposal. Once our decisions are made, it is useless to look behind and wonder whether it was the right decision or not. What is important from then on, is honestly and generously to accept all the demands implied with our decision, and God will be with us.
The people of Israel could have continued to have "judges" like Samuel as intermediaries between them and God. But they wanted to have a king, like all the other nations. God told Samuel to give them a long list of the things that a king would require of them. It seems that the list was so long that it should have discouraged anyone from having a king. But they still wanted a king; and so, God told Samuel to give them one. And God continued to be with them and their king, faithful to his love even when they were not faithful to theirs.
All this leaves all of us with a great responsibility. When something happens in our personal lives or in the life of our community, we easily say: "it is the will of God". This may sound very edifying, but it may be an easy way of coping out of our responsibilities. God wants us to use all the human means he has given us to make a wise decision: prayer, careful analysis of the situation, reflection, consultation, dialogue, and, most of all, careful examination of what are our motivations. When we pray God to give us his light, we should not expect Him to tell us what to decide, but to give us a light that will reveal to us our own conscious and unconscious motivations.