Seeking the Lord    I was in a large parking lot, and a couple was walking up and down the aisles, searching earnestly for their car. Alice was looking for her cell phone, but it was nowhere to be found. Ah, the sure trick: she used my phone to call her phone. She didn’t hear its ring. Then she remembered having left it in the car. She went to the car, and it was in the console, ringing melodiously.
   St. Mark wrote that after the previous Sabbath’s events—the lesson, the healing in the synagogue, and helping the crowd outside the door in Simon’s house—Jesus rose very early in the morning and went to find a quiet place to pray. Likely, sometime later, those in Simon’s house awoke to find that Jesus was not present. “And Simon and those with him searched intensely for him.” (1:36) Mark took the word for search, “dioko,” and added an intensifying prefix, “kata,” getting “katadioko,” which translates to “search intensely.”
   Most textual scholars think that Simon, a.k.a. Peter, taught Mark the story of Jesus. So he would clearly remember waking up in the morning and finding Jesus gone, after a most remarkable Sabbath. Simon and the others with him remembered the intensive search for Jesus. In St. Luke’s parallel account, he only said the people sought him; his word does not indicate the same intensity as Mark’s word. (Luke 4:42)
   Why the intensity of the search for Jesus? Some undoubtedly sought him out of love. Some probably sought him out of fear that he might have deserted them. According to St. Luke, some sought him because of what he could do for them.
   The couple in the parking lot found their car; Alice found her phone; and those who searched diligently found Jesus. The Prophet Jeremiah, writing to people about seeking Yahweh, said, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jer. 29:13) True for Israel, true in Capernaum, and still true today. . Directory