The Messianic Secret

Homily for Thursday of the 1st Week in Ordinary Time

Throughout a lot of the passages that we read in the Gospel of Mark, we hear Jesus give this instruction to many of the people that He heals or people that have come to understand something about His mission: “See that you tell no one anything” (or some derivative of that). It’s known as the Messianic Secret. It is found almost exclusively in the Gospel of Mark, but it also shows up a couple of times in Luke and Matthew. Jesus asks people to keep things quiet and we might be left wondering why? Well, today’s Gospel gives us an indication of why Jesus wanted things to be kept quiet.

We see what happens when people don’t keep the secret: “The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was…