Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Lesson: Jon 3:1-5, 10
Epistle: 1 Cor 7:29-31
Gospel: Mk 1:14-20
“Calling of the Apostles” by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1481)
After John had been arrested,
Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God:
"This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent, and believe in the gospel."
The Gospel for today’s Mass, the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, known since 2020 as the “Sunday of the Word of God”, opens in the striking and abrupt fashion that is characteristic of the Gospel of Saint Mark. After the baptism of Jesus by John in the River Jordan and the latter’s subsequent arrest by Herod, Jesus launches into his public ministry in the synagogues and villages of his native Galilee. The immediate fruit of this ministry is the call of the men who will form the core of the Twelve Apostles.
As he passed by the Sea of Galilee,
he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea;
they were fishermen.
Jesus said to them,
"Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men."
Then they abandoned their nets and followed him.
He walked along a little farther
and saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John.
They too were in a boat mending their nets.
Then he called them.
So they left their father Zebedee in the boat
along with the hired men and followed him.
There exists an intimate connection between Christian discipleship and the experience of hearing the call of God. This connection is so strong that it is embedded in the terminology we use for living a Christian life. To embrace the message of the Gospel and to allow our lives to be transformed by sanctifying grace is rightly known as our “Christian” or “baptismal” vocation. This word, vocation, is derived from the Latin verb vocare, “to call”. To be a Christian, then, is not only to adopt a code of ethics or to pledge allegiance to a specific faith community or universal ideology. Being a Christian consists in a consistent, lifelong response to a supernatural Call.
Yet what is the nature of this call? The answer to this question has developed throughout the course of salvation history. In the age of the patriarchs, Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, it consisted in the call to respond to God’s offer of a covenantal relationship between Himself and Abraham and Abraham’s heirs. In the time of Moses, it was a call by God to His people Israel, the Children of Abraham, to go out of Egypt, that place of slavery, and receive the Law at Sinai before taking possession of the land promised covenantally to Abraham. This iteration of the call is marked by concreteness and particularity. “You shall be my people, and I shall be your God.”
With the arrival of the age of the prophets, this promise had begun to grow and take on a more universal character. The first reading from the Book of Jonah captures this reality in singular fashion.
The word of the LORD came to Jonah, saying:
"Set out for the great city of Nineveh,
and announce to it the message that I will tell you."
So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh,
according to the LORD'S bidding.
Now Nineveh was an enormously large city;
it took three days to go through it.
Jonah began his journey through the city,
and had gone but a single day's walk announcing,
"Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed, "
when the people of Nineveh believed God;
they proclaimed a fast
and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way,
he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them;
he did not carry it out.
Here we see a difference between the call received by Abraham and Moses and that delivered by the prophet. This is not a call to a ratified relationship of exclusivity between God and His Chosen People. The people of Nineveh are not even simply foreign pagans, but are the inhabitants of the capital city of the great imperial power that represented the greatest danger to Israel’s existence for the entire history of the Two Kingdoms. From a call initially delivered to God’s chosen friends, we see a call that is now extended to God’s enemies, and from out of a people whose ties to God are those of friendship and fidelity, we hear a call go out to a foreign oppressor, offering mercy as the fruit of penance.
This extension of the call to the great enemy of the People of the Call points to the cosmic nature of the fulfillment of the call in the Gospel. In the face of the call of the Gospel, all human relationships and modes of subjectivity, even (or especially!) those of friend and enemy, oppressor and oppressed, are renewed and transformed in the light of the Gospel. The way in which our Christian vocation is played out in the world as it is while being rooted in the world as it is to become is illustrated by Paul’s words to the Corinthians in the second reading.
I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out.
From now on, let those having wives act as not having them,
those weeping as not weeping,
those rejoicing as not rejoicing,
those buying as not owning,
those using the world as not using it fully.
For the world in its present form is passing away.
We ought not to interpret these words as somehow indicating that the Gospel vocation requires a Stoical attitude of indifference to whatever life might throw at us. The call of God does not negate the reality, good or ill, of all that transpires in our lives, but it puts these things in relation to the life of the world to come. A man who in other circumstances might reasonably situate his wife as the center of his life is now called orient himself upon Jesus Christ, to just the same degree as an unmarried man might, without neglecting his wife or loving her any less. The one who weeps and the one who rejoices are equally called to place the cause of their sorrows and joys in proper proportion to the promise of the Heavenly Jerusalem, where on the one hand every tear will be wiped away, and on the other hand every joy will be purified and taken up into the singular joy of God. Those engaging in commerce and the management of goods are not called in blanket fashion to give all these up and seek God in total poverty, but they are called one and all to dispose of these things in such a way that ensures that they build up treasure in heaven.
Yet the Gospel vocation cannot remain at the level of some bloodless mental abstraction. We would fall far short of the mark if our response to the call were to remain at the level of an intellectual assent to the primacy of God and His coming one day in glory. We see this in the example of Peter, Andrew, James, and John. The call of Jesus to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men,” did entail a radical departure from their expected mode of life and web of relationships. Instead of working under the earthly fathers to catch fish which feed the body, they followed Jesus so that they might work under the heavenly Father to catch men and feed souls. If our lives and mode of living are not meaningfully, even radically, different from how we would live and conduct ourselves even as virtuous pagans, than we need to assess our own fidelity to our Christian vocation and be honest in determining if we are truly striving to follow the call.
But doing so requires that we understand the full nature of the call. The disciples were able to respond in the fashion they did because Jesus Christ is the Call of God made Flesh. Their vocation, as ours is, is nothing less than Jesus Christ Himself. In Him is the promise of covenantal friendship with God that was originally extended to Abraham. In Him is the call to repentance for sins and the promise of mercy even to the very enemies of God. The Christian vocation sets all earthly goods, all earthly joys, all earthly sufferings in a new context because Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, unites heaven and earth in His own self, in an unprecedented and unrepeatable fashion. The vocation that we received at baptism is one that should transform our entire lives, because that which we have received is nothing less than the Living God.
When considering our own vocations, it is often tempting to get caught up on secondaries and externals. We can obsess over things like state in life, mission, purpose, charism. These things can be important, in their proper place, but we should not consider them to be central or constitutive element of our call by God. When we listen to the words of the Gospel and pray and ponder within ourselves, “What is God’s call in my life?” we would do well to always bear in mind the words of Saint John of the Cross, “In giving us His Son, his only Word (for He possesses no other), He spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word - and He has no more to say.”