3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (26.01.14)
CALLS and ECHOES OF CALLS
When God calls we sometimes try to hide. We sometimes did the same in our infant years when our parents called. The difference is we are no longer infants or innocents!
Echoes of historical calls can lift or depress us. For example, remembrances of unexpected praise from respected critics lifts our sense of self worth. Contrastingly, remembrances of culpable personal failures can cause us to question our worth. God’s calls focus on our worth derived from our being God’s creation. Our enemy, Satan, calls attention to our failures in loving God, which are his triumphs.
God’s historical and present calls to us are indistinguishable in that, they are continuously resonant with his unconditional, unchanging love, which invites us to experience his goodness. God’s calls are a light shining in the darkness of the world. God calls to our appetite for good. Satan plays on our weaknesses.
This 3rd. Sunday of the Year presents us with an extract of St. Matthew’s Gospel (4:12-23). In it, Matthew marks the end of one era and the beginning of the next with a few seemingly inauspicious words. When Jesus receives the news of John the Baptist’s imprisonment and likely murder in Herod’s dungeons, Jesus makes for the region of Zebulon and Naphtali. These were part of the first Israeli territories historically ‘darkened’ by the Assyrian aggression referred to in this Sunday’s first reading from the prophet Isaiah (8:23-9:3). By his now public presence and proclamation of ‘The Good News’, Jesus brought light to that darkness. He called to the hearts of those willing to hear and accept the challenge to repent and walk in the light of his teaching. He called others to serve with him in bringing this light to the chosen people, in the first place.
This Sunday’s First Reading and Gospel underline how Jesus, in his Incarnation, life, suffering, death and Resurrection, is the living fulfilment of all prophecy. He both completes the earlier Covenant, the Decalogue, ‘which is a light offered to the conscience of every person to make God’s call and ways known and to protect against evil’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church para.1962) and reveals himself as the embodiment of the New Covenant.
St. Augustine says: ‘God wrote on the stone tablets the (Mosaic) Law that men did not read in their hearts’. Jesus wrote the new Covenant in his Blood that is still being written. For Jesus’ blood is still being poured out for the forgiveness of human sin, an outpouring that will continue until ‘The Last Day’. The New Covenant calls us not to a memorial, something ‘dead’, but to a living relationship with a living Person, the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus’ words of Institution, spoken at the Last Supper over bread and wine, are repeated, today, by the power of the Holy Spirit through the priest at Mass as he says the words of consecration:
“Take this all of you and eat of it
for this is my Body which will be given up for you.”
Take this all of you and drink from it, this is the Chalice of my Blood, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.”
These two thousand year old words make real Jesus’ self-sacrifice in our day. They describe his continuing sacrifice not an historical event. They call us not to the past but to the present. God’s words and actions are not limited by time, unlike ours. Jesus’ words at the last supper, “Will be poured out ..” refer both to the next day, Good Friday, and to all subsequent days until God the Father decrees the end of time. The celebration of Mass prolongs Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist as his continuing sacrifice. Encumbering the liturgy with elaborate vestment, music and ritual must never be allowed to obscure the living presence of the living God with us.
Jesus could have called the learned to his service. Their wisdom and knowledge would have commanded attention and respect. He could have called those with political power and assured that his message would have received wider immediate promulgation. What Jesus did was to follow his heavenly Father’s example and choose ordinary people, perhaps the least likely, in whom to reveal the wonders of his grace. This is the reason why you and I are so privileged to have been adopted by God, through Baptism, as his daughters and sons.
As Pope Francis never tires of saying and demonstrating, God calls us not to stand in the limelight but, personally, in accordance with our own individual calling such as parents, formators or carers, to bring his light to the dark margins, to those without his light. As recovering sinners ourselves, we should not deflect the attention of our hearers from God as the source of this healing light.
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