St. Paul, in today's Epistle, equates Christ's appearances to the apostles immediately after His resurrection with the revelation he himself received at his conversion. St. Paul writes: “And last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.”
This took place at least two or three years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. And after Paul had become a Christian, he spent a few years in Arabia and then another fourteen years in Tarsus before becoming a missionary at the encouragement of St. Barnabas. Paul’s decision to preach the gospel did not come easily and was preceded by deep reflection and inner preparation.

St. Paul speaks in today's Epistle about various gifts of the Holy Spirit. At the end of the same twelfth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, from which today’s Epistle is taken, he says: “But covet earnestly the best gifts; and yet shew I unto you a more excellent way.” What is this “more excellent way” and what is the greatest of the gifts of the Holy Spirit? St. Paul tells us this in the next chapter of his Epistle to the Corinthians, that “the greatest of these is charity”.

In today’s Gospel we meet three characters: a father and his two sons. The most famous of them is undoubtedly the one we are used to calling the Prodigal Son. He doesn’t care about his father, only about the inheritance he hopes to receive from him. He can’t even wait for his father to die, and claims his share, cashes it in and lives a lavish, downright unbridled life.

Undoubtedly, the Holy Spirit does various outstanding things, but the greatest miracles are those that St. Paul speaks of in today’s Epistle: mortifying the deeds of the flesh, adopting us as children of God, and bearing witness to Christ with our new life. If these three acts of the Holy Spirit are absent, then everything else is completely worthless.

When reading the Gospels, one often wonders why some passages contain quite a lot of seemingly unimportant details, while in other places the evangelists tend to abbreviate too much. There are also several facts in today’s Gospel that may raise the question of whether they are needed. The correct answer is it is quite certain that if they were not needed, St. Mark would not have wasted ink or parchment on them.