Friday of the ninth week in Ordinary Time, and the Church remembers Saint Boniface, the monk from England who crossed the sea to become apostle to the peoples of the continent and died a martyr among them. The Gospel is brief — a single riddle Jesus poses in the Temple — but it stretches every name we think we have for him.
"And while teaching in the temple, Jesus said in answer: '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 set your enemies as your footstool." Therefore, David himself calls him Lord, so how can he be his son?' And a great multitude listened to him willingly." (Mk 12:35-37)
For once Jesus is the one asking, and the question is gentle but unsettling. "Son of David" was the safe, expected title for the Messiah — a royal heir, a restorer of the old kingdom, a figure who fit inside the hopes people already had. Jesus does not deny it; he is David's son. But he reaches into a psalm the scribes themselves revere and shows that David, by the Spirit, calls this descendant "my Lord." How can the son be the father's Lord? The riddle has no answer inside the old category. It can only be answered by enlarging it: the Messiah is not merely the prolongation of David's line but the Lord who stands above it, come into it.
This is how Jesus works on every name we give him. We arrive with a title that fits our expectations — teacher, healer, reformer, the God of our own tribe — and he honours the truth in it while quietly breaking it open, because he is always more than the box we brought. The danger of the scribes is not that they were wrong but that they were satisfied. They had a Messiah they had already measured. A great multitude, Mark notes, "listened to him willingly," precisely because Jesus was unsealing a door the experts had closed.
The first reading names the cost of standing in that open door. Paul writes to Timothy without illusion: "all who willingly live the piety of Christ Jesus will suffer persecution" (2 Tm 3:12). The word that enlarges our small names also unsettles the powers that profit from keeping them small, and the witness pays for it. But Paul's remedy is not retreat; it is the Scriptures, "able to instruct you toward salvation," every page "divinely inspired and useful," so that "the man of God may be perfect, having been trained for every good work" (2 Tm 3:15-17). The disciple who would let Christ outgrow his titles must be steeped in the word that keeps revealing him.
Saint Boniface is exactly that disciple in motion. An Anglo-Saxon who could have lived out his days in an English monastery, he crossed the sea instead, carrying the Gospel into lands not his own, ordaining, founding, and finally dying with a book raised over his head as the swords came down. He did not export an English faith; he handed on the Lord who belongs to no single people, planting him among strangers who became brothers. Here the Bethlehem note sounds clearly: the Child of Bethlehem wears no nationality, and the charism that carries him is meant to move — across the Channel in Boniface's day, across four continents in ours, each people receiving and then handing on a Lord too large for any one of them to keep.
"David himself calls him Lord." On the day of a missionary who crossed a border to say so, the line is also a question to us. Have we let our Messiah stay the comfortable size of our own expectations, or are we willing to follow him as he outgrows every title — and to carry that ungraspable Lord to people who are not yet our own?
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Lord Jesus, Son of David and David's Lord, you are always greater than the names we bring you. Break open the boxes in which we keep you small, and steep us in your word until it shows us your true face. By the witness of Saint Boniface, who crossed the sea to plant your Gospel among strangers, give us the courage to be sent beyond our own people, and to hand on a Lord who belongs to all. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- Which of our titles for Jesus has quietly become a box — a Messiah measured to fit what we already wanted?
- Are we, like the scribes, satisfied with what we have understood, or still willing to be unsettled by the word?
- Boniface crossed a border to hand on the faith; what border — of comfort, culture, or fear — is Christ asking us to cross?
