3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Have you ever had the experience of being approached by a born-again Christian and been asked the question “Have you received Jesus into your life as your personal savior?” It has happened to me a few times and I have been tempted to ask them where in the Bible does it tell you that Christianity is all about receiving Jesus into your life and making him your personal savior. Because I can save you the time of looking – nowhere in the Bible does it tell us that we must receive Jesus into our lives, on the other hand, there are many places where we are told to enter into Jesus’ life to let Jesus receive us into his life and to make his life our own. In our hyper-individualized society we have got it backwards and this inversion of the proper order of things is typified by a spirit where I still remain the center of my own life and I am receiving Jesus into my own life.

This is not what happens in today’s gospel, we do not see Simon and Andrew, James and John saying to Jesus: “hi Lord come on over and join us, there’s a space over here for you in our boat.” No, it happens the other way round. It is Jesus who says to them, follow me, a command that enjoins them to leave their lives, leave what is familiar to them and set out on an adventure with him. In a similar way, Jesus’ call to us should in some way call us out of ourselves, out of the darkness of our own self-preoccupation into the light of discipleship and service of others.

Many of us today might find it hard to give credence to the alacrity with which the disciples respond to Jesus’ call. It is for this reason that many scripture scholars have suggested that this is an abbreviated version that Mark is giving us of a long drawn out discernment process that the disciples went through as they gradually got to know Jesus and slowly move into a space where they might heed his call and gather up the courage to make such a radical commitment to Jesus and his mission. However, to take such a position is to forget how compelling the call of Jesus would have been for these first disciples. Jesus’ call is the promise of adventure for these fishermen who have only known the reality of this small fishing town on the shores of Lake Galilee. Perhaps Jesus discerned in them a longing for something greater, and all that they needed was one little nudge to set them off on a journey. Perhaps they had experienced for some time an longing for something more, a little niggling question in the back of their minds “was this all there was to life?”

As I was searching for a comparison, for a present-day equivalent of what happened on that sea-shore at Galilee, what immediately came to mind was the metaphor of falling in love at first sight. Cast your minds back to the time that this happened to you, if it did happen, or if it didn’t happen at least to a time when your attention was captured by a beautiful woman or a tall, dark handsome young man. You are riveted, you suddenly come alive, your senses are sharpened. Your heartrate quickens and your whole being longs for this person to notice you. You wonder if you are worth being noticed by this person. If, apart from just being beautiful, graceful and compellingly attractive, this person is also famous, you would be at once exhilarated by this person’s importance, but also perhaps slightly sad, knowing how deep is the chasm that separates your mundane and ordinary life from their jet-setting lifestyle. You know how unlikely it is that they will notice little you. This I think was the experience of the disciples that day on the beach. By the time Jesus calls them, he is already something of a local rock star. Yet Jesus does notice them, he sees them and he calls them. The fact that Jesus had singled them out makes him all the more attractive, compelling and fascinating.

I think that one of the things that made Jesus so attractive was the way he paid attention to people. I once had a friend who speaking to me about one of his friends said to me “when you are talking with her, she has the gift of making you feel like you are the only person who she cares about in the world.” I think that when Jesus interacted with people he must have had this gift, which is why his call to Simon, Andrew, James and John was so compelling and they were prepared to leave everything and follow him. Jesus takes the same interest in us and is calls us too to be, each in our own way fishers of men and women. In order to do this we need to learn to see how he sees. To learn to look upon each person as worthy of our attention and our love. it is this quality that will attract other people to us and ultimately to our Lord and Master. What makes us attractive people is not so much what we have accomplished, how much we know or what we do, rather it is how much attention we give to those around us, how interested we are in their lives. When we see people for who they are, when we are able to affirm them in their talents and give them the little nudge they need to take a leap of faith to put their talents to the service of others, then we become like Jesus.

Questions for reflection:

1. Where do I experience the little nudge of God calling me to leave my own comfort zone and answer a call to service of others in world and in the Church?
2. To which one person in particular is God calling me to pay more attention, to invest in getting to know them a bit more so that I may help them discern God’s call in their life?