Friday, June 5, 2026
Friday of the Ninth week in Ordinary Time
Mark 12:35-37
Listen to the whole reading — MP3
First reading
2 Timothy 3:10-17
But you did follow my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love, steadfastness, persecutions, and sufferings: those things that happened to me at Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. I endured those persecutions. The Lord delivered me out of them all. Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But you remain in the things which you have learned and have been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them. From infancy, you have known the holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Responsorial psalm
Psalms 119:157,160,161,165,166,168
Many are my persecutors and my adversaries. I haven’t swerved from your testimonies. All of your words are truth. Every one of your righteous ordinances endures forever. Princes have persecuted me without a cause, but my heart stands in awe of your words. Those who love your law have great peace. Nothing causes them to stumble. I have hoped for your salvation, the Lord. I have done your commandments. I have obeyed your precepts and your testimonies, for all my ways are before you.
Gospel
Mark 12:35-37
Jesus responded, as he taught in the temple, “How is it that the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David? For David himself said in the Holy Spirit, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.”’ Therefore David himself calls him Lord, so how can he be his son?” The common people heard him gladly.
Lectio
There is a quiet thread running through today's readings about the strange durability of those who stay rooted. Paul, writing to Timothy from the far end of a difficult life, does not promise that fidelity will be rewarded with ease. On the contrary, he says plainly that everyone who desires to live godly in Christ will suffer. Yet he speaks of being delivered, not from the storms, but through them. What sustained him was not heroic willpower but something humbler — the Scriptures he had known from infancy, the faith handed to him by people whose faces he could still recall. "Knowing from whom you have learned them," he tells Timothy. Faith, in the end, has names and histories attached to it.
The psalmist sings from inside the same pressure: persecutors on every side, princes against him without cause, and yet a heart that "stands in awe" of God's words. There is a peace here that the world cannot quite account for — not the absence of adversaries, but a stability beneath them. And in the Gospel, Jesus gently unsettles the scribes' tidy categories, showing that the Christ is more than a clever lineage can capture. The common people heard him gladly. Often it is the unguarded heart, the one not busy defending its own certainties, that recognizes the deeper truth when it appears.
Perhaps the invitation today is to notice what actually holds us up when life presses in — and to be honest about whether it is something living and breathed by God, or merely our own scaffolding.
Who are the people from whom you first learned your faith, and when did you last thank God for the faces behind the truths you now hold?
Where in your life right now are you facing some quiet opposition or strain, and are you meeting it from your own anxious effort or from the awe-filled peace the psalmist describes?
Saint of the day
St. Boniface, Bishop and Martyr († 754) - Memorial
Ora reads this aloud, every morning, free. Ora