Reflection for the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2024

Today’s Gospel, taken from Mark 4:14-20, tells in stunning detail of the call of Peter and Andrew, then John and James by the shore of Galilee. They are minding their own business, literally, two of them mending their nets while the other brothers are fishing. Jesus walks up to Peter and Andrew and simply tells them to follow Him. They drop everything and follow. A little further on, He speaks the same words to John and James who leave their father in the boat, drop the nets and follow Him.

I think of the fishing business to which they must have belonged (because they were working closely together along the shore) and perhaps owned by Zebedee, which suddenly lost four employees. However, there’s no word in the gospel of Zebedee raising any objections, though I know what that means to an employer, having experienced it recently in one of our ministries. Jesus knew, however, that when it’s a matter of the Gospel, sacrifices have to be made—not only by the one called.  Zebedee must have felt that in His heart. I think of parents who must bid a bittersweet goodbye to their son or daughter who leaves home to begin married life or to enter the seminary or the novitiate. It was the only time I ever saw my father cry, the night I left. But, I digress….

The stories of the call of many of the disciples in several of the Gospels, differing slightly in each as the evangelists speak from different memories, remind us, laity, religious, or priests, that Jesus invites those whom He wants, when He wants us, in the way He wants us. A vocation, a personal invitation of Jesus to belong to Him, is for every member of the Mystical Body. Belonging to the Lord doesn’t just happen because we were born into a Catholic family. God has a specific plan for each of us, and at a specific time we turn our hearts, in whatever condition He finds them, to give ourselves to Him simply because He asks us.

Today we might take the time to recall our own coming to the Lord. I have mentioned before the words of Pope Francis when He urged us to ‘return to Galilee,’ to the place where we first knew the Lord or when He first called us to make the choice of Him over all the other choices available to us by an enticing world. That was our Galilee, as it was for the First Four. When did we first respond to Him?  It may have been a progressive knowing of Jesus, as when we began to read the bible and slowly came to be enthralled by Him. It may have been a sudden knowledge that He was real—during a retreat or when your fiancée invited you to Mass with her before you were even Catholic and in one stunning moment you knew—you KNEW—that Jesus was present on that altar, and you would never be the same. First Communion. The birth of your first child. Graces received by praying the rosary. A Sister who prepared you for your First Communion. Any moment or moments like these may have been your Galilee, the ‘place’ where you first heard the Word of invitation that signed you as a son or daughter of the King, a fulfillment of your Baptism. Spend some time today or tomorrow thinking about your first encounter with God, and bless Him for the memory of it.

We can read the Gospel (or hear it) as it is—the Living Word of God. If we allow it, it will nourish our hearts with a deeper understanding of Him, and of His influence in our life. I say to you, be surprised by the grace of it all. Begin all over again, as you might when you review your marriage vows, or celebrate your silver jubilee of profession or write a college application essay—and recognize that it might be time to step out of that boat, drop your nets, bid farewell to the attachments that have crept up on you and respond to the call that changed everything for you. Gaze once more into the eyes of Jesus and say,

Yes Lord, I meant it then, and I mean it now. I will follow You if You lead me.

There is a beautiful passage in Jeremiah 6:16 in the Liturgy of the Hours on Saturday of Week Two, Daytime Prayer, Midafternoon which whispers to us down through the ages in a voice that could very well be that of today’s Gospel:

Stand beside the earliest roads,

ask the pathways of old

Which is the way to good, and walk it;

thus you will find rest for your soul

(New American Bible, 1970, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.)