3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1Cor 7: 29-31; Mark 1:14-20
What’s going on? This is the second time since Christmas that we have had St. John’s account of the calling of the first four disciples, followed a few days later, in this case a week, by the very different version in one of the Synoptic Gospels. The two accounts differ markedly. Does this make them incompatible, and present us with a problem?
Far from it, I would say. It strikes me that John and the Synoptics are interdependent; that, without John, today’s episode would make little sense. Imagine these four fishermen working away, along with their colleagues, when some random bloke comes along and says “follow me”. Would they have done so? Would they heck as like! They would have given him a mouthful and carried on with the task of earning a living.
They would have followed, only if they knew Him already, only if there was a relationship in existence, the sort of relationship described by John, who tells us that they were pointed towards Jesus by John the Baptist, and that they spent time with Him, being drawn into closeness with Him. Hence they would have been waiting for His call, and would have followed with alacrity.
There are lessons for us there. We too are called into relationship with Jesus the Christ, which means that we too have to spend time with Him; time given to prayer, time of stillness in His presence, time to reflect on His word, time to recognize Him in other people and in the events of life, time especially to recognize Him in the Eucharist. Then we will be ready to respond “at once” as did the fishermen, when Jesus has a special call for us, that expression “at once” (euthus) appearing in the call of each pair of brothers.
So they follow. Who (or “whom” if you wish to be grammatically precise) or what are they following? It is definitely “who”: it is a person, not a programme, or an ideal, or a slogan. That is something which we must always bear in mind: we are following the Person, Jesus Christ, God-the-Son-made-man, called into relationship with Him, and nothing and no one else.
This is something which is forgotten by the critics and opponents of Pope Francis. His whole aim is to focus us on Jesus, to make the Church more Christ-like, to steer her away from the temptation to become a Church of the Scribes and Pharisees, obsessed with rules and prohibitions. Hence he is accused (usually, it seems, by people involved in far right American politics) of being ambiguous, “liberal” (whatever that is supposed to mean) lax, or even a heretic. Such people would doubtless have regarded Jesus as a heretic, with His lightness of touch where rules and regulations were concerned.
That, then is the next question for us: am I focused on the person of Jesus, within the context of the Church, but not making an idol of the Church or of our own particular understanding or version of it?
I have said that we are following a person, not a programme, yet Jesus does set out a programme, a programme which our following of Him will entail. “The time has come” He says “and the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.”
Scripture scholars call this the kerygma, the basic proclamation, from the Greek word keryx meaning “a herald”. What is its essence? It begins “the time has come”. The word used for time is kairos which means a special time, the time for which we have been waiting, as distinct from the general word for time, which is chronos.
This is THE time, the time which matters, and it refers both to the time of Jesus’ proclamation and to our time, the here and now in which He is calling us. This is ho kairos for us; the time when we must follow.
Why? Because the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Because the Son of God has come into the world, therefore the Kingdom is here. Jesus Himself tells us that “the Kingdom of God is entos humon”, meaning either “within you” or “among you”: the Greek word will bear either interpretation. The Kingdom of God is already here: the reign of God has begun. It is our task to make it ever more fully present.
How are we to do this? “Repent” says Jesus, a word which means in essence not “be sorry”, as the reading today from the Book of Jonah might suggest, but have a change of heart, a change of focus. Make sure that your gaze is fixed on God, on Jesus, on His will and His Kingdom—“and believe the Good News”.
What is the Good News? It is the same word evangelion which we use for “Gospel”, not just the written Gospels, because they didn’t yet exist at the time that Our Lord was speaking—effectively He was Himself writing them by His words and his actions—but the whole Good News of His abiding presence among us by His suffering, death, and resurrection, and by His sending of the Holy Spirit.
Our repentance, our believing the Good News, is essentially a matter of focusing on Him, and of learning to recognize His presence, and the presence of His Kingdom.
