The Universal Church celebrates Sunday, January 21, 2024, as the third Sunday in ordinary time in the Church’s year B. In the Entrance Antiphon, we pray: “Sing a new song to the Lord! Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Truth and beauty surround him; he lives in holiness and glory. Amen.”
The theme of this day’s Mass is repentance and conversion needed to receive God’s blessing. In the first reading, we hear the classical example of a conversion story, the repentance of the city of Nineveh at the preaching of the prophet Jonah. Even though Nineveh is a pagan city and the capital of the Assyrian kingdom that had conquered Israel, God still shows his mercy to them, much to the dismay of the prophet Jonah, who reluctantly carries God’s message of mercy to them.
It is the same call to repentance that rings through Saint Mark’s Gospel as Christ begins his public ministry by selecting his first close companions to whom he will later give the name of Apostle. They are simple fishermen whom he invites to follow him so he would make them fishers of men. In the second reading, Saint Paul exhorts us to turn away from perishable things and seek that which is abiding. He reminds us that time is short and so we have to be detached from earthly cares and worries and attach ourselves to the Lord.
In the course of this Eucharist, let us pray for the grace to hear Christ’s call to follow him so he would also make us fishers of our brothers and sisters, who have fallen by the wayside in their faith.
First Reading: Jonah 3: 1-5. 10.
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.
Comment
One of the most intriguing stories in the pages of the Bible is the tale of Jonah, the runaway prophet. God commands him to go to Nineveh and tell the people that God is going to destroy them in forty days. Nineveh is a very large city. It is the capital of the Assyrian kings who destroyed Israel and is thus a symbol of evil and enmity with God. The people of Israel have an intolerant and narrow-minded nationalism that totally excludes non-Jews from God’s mercy and concern. That is why the prophet Jonah himself does everything possible to avoid going to preach to the people of Nineveh as God commands him to. His first reaction, therefore, is to try to flee from God’s command. He ends up spending three days and three nights in the belly of a whale that finally dumps him on the shores of Nineveh. To his greatest surprise and dismay, the people of Nineveh hear his call for repentance and are saved from God’s anger.
What is the sacred writer of this story telling Jonah and his Jewish brothers? He wants them to understand that they do not have a monopoly on God’s love. God forgives everyone who repents, even Israel’s greatest enemy, the Assyrians of Nineveh. The God of the Jews is equally the God of the Gentiles because there is only one God (Rom 3: 29-30).
Later, the Scribes and Pharisees, who are also noted for their intolerance towards anyone who does not act as they want, would ask Jesus for a sign of the truth of his teaching. He responds that the only sign they would receive would the sign of Jonah (Lk 11: 29-32).
What message do we draw from this reading? The same kind of narrow-minded nationalism and intolerance that characterized the post-exile period in Israel is very much prevalent in many African societies today. Cultural prejudices, blind tribalism, and a false sense of superiority are still very much with us, even in our Christian communities. Sometimes memories of tribal conflicts that had taken place in the past but which people do not want to forget, lead to a spirit of vengeance even among Christians, sometimes leading to the awful killings, like the genocide in Rwanda that is still so fresh in our minds.
Even though the sacred author of the Book of Jonah was aware of the atrocities the Assyrians had committed against his people of Israel, he still believed in God’s forgiveness for those who repented, no matter who they were. This is a wonderful lesson for us who are still intolerant of one another because of our tribal or ethnic origins. Even if hostility had once characterized our relationship with a different ethnic group, this day’s reading challenges us to enrich our understanding of God, who is full of mercy and compassion for everyone, irrespective of tribal or ethnic origins.
We sometimes also despise people who worship differently from us. The spirit of ecumenism, especially during this week of prayers for Christian unity, should lead us to the simple fact that no religion or religious belief can claim a monopoly of God’s mercy and love. Let us learn to share the water from God’s deep well of compassion with all our brothers and sisters who are thirsty for the truth (Jn 4: 7). We pray for tolerance towards others, even those whose convictions we do not share. Amen.
Second Reading: 1 Cor 7: 29-31.
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.
Comment
The city of Corinth of Saint Paul’s day was a wealthy and populous port. It had a bad moral reputation and Saint Paul had a hard time establishing the church there during the 18 months he spent in that city (50-51 AD). Such difficulties notwithstanding, Paul seemed to have loved its Christian community as a parent loves a rather troublesome child. Though that community was passionately devoted to its new-found faith, its inhabitants were not noted for their obedience to Paul’s instructions. They had not been Christians for long and submission to apostolic authority was extremely difficult. Some of them openly preached obedience to the Law of Moses, especially the obligation to submit to circumcision, a fact Paul denied and preached against. Some factions were so hostile to Paul that he had to leave the city in a hurry to avoid a riot against him.
Some members even began to attack and question Paul’s rights as their apostolic leader. They felt they could choose their religious leaders and relied on worldly wisdom to govern their Christian life. The result was a rivalry that made use of pagan law-courts and a permissiveness that allowed gross sexual laxity and tolerance.
That is what led Saint Paul to answer the question put to him in the passage we have just listened to. The Corinthians had problems with marriage and virginity. They were worried about the use of meat known to have been offered to idols but that was being sold in public markets. There were disorders in the liturgy and they quarrelled about the gifts of the spirit, and had serious difficulty accepting the idea of the resurrection of the dead.
In today’s passage, Saint Paul reminds us that life is short and should not be wasted on trivialities; rather, we should concentrate our attention on the second coming of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. As Christians, we should detach ourselves from worldly things. Let us pray for the courage to keep our eyes, minds and hearts focused on Christ and on him alone. Amen.
Gospel acclamation: “Alleluia, alleluia. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel. Alleluia.”
Gospel: Mark 1: 14-20.
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." 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.
Comment
Today’s Gospel invites us to repent for our sins and renew our lives; in other words, to be open to the promptings of God so that his good news can take root in our hearts and bear rich fruits. It is an invitation to turn towards God by conversion of heart. The next step is faith. Christ invites us to believe in the Good News, which he brings to humanity.
To believe is to trust, to take the Gospel as the principle of our life because “Time is short,” as Saint Paul tells us in the second reading of this day. Life passes away quickly. There is therefore an urgent need for conversion. John the Baptist, Jesus, and his Apostles insist on the need for conversion, the need to change one’s attitude and behavior as a prerequisite for receiving the Kingdom of God.
This Gospel also describes how Jesus call those who would later form part of the Apostolic College, Peter, Andrew, James, and John. From the start of his public ministry in Galilee, he seeks co-workers to help him in his mission as Saviour and Redeemer. He looks for them among people used to hard work, people for whom life is a struggle and whose lifestyle is not complicated. These are fishermen.
“Follow me and I will make you fishers of souls” (Mark 1:17), he tells them. They leave their nets at once and follow him. There comes a time in the life of every child of God when God invites him or her to follow him more closely and to participate in his mission. This might require a change of career or at least a transformation of our present careers into a means of service.
No matter the career path we have chosen to follow, be it in the teaching, medical, legal profession, or retailing business, we have a basic decision to make: either to pursue it solely as a means of livelihood and personal enhancement or to use it as a means of service to God and humanity.
God’s call to follow and serve Him often takes us to places we would never have dreamt of going. Jonah’s call in the first reading took him to Nineveh. Being called to evangelize the pagans of Nineveh was abominable to a Jewish prophet. After all, Nineveh represented the seat of godlessness, immorality, and corruption. Nineveh, as we saw in the first reading, was the capital of the Assyrian empire that had conquered and colonized the kingdom of Judah, looted and destroyed the Temple, and carried the notables of the people into exile. It was a big metropolitan city where the social and economic law of the survival of the fittest reigned supreme.
Materialism expressing itself in all forms of immorality, corruption, and crime was the order of the day in Nineveh. For pious Jews like Jonah, Nineveh was the godforsaken city, the highway to perdition where evil reigned without any hope of change. For them, Nineveh was a hopeless case, peopled by lost souls without the slightest hope of regaining God’s favour. No wonder Jonah objected to being sent there. As far as he was concerned the mission to Nineveh was nothing but an exercise in futility. The big surprise in the story is that as soon as the “godforsaken” people of Nineveh heard the word of God, they received it with eagerness, repented with sincerity, and regained God’s mercy and forgiveness.
Even today, my brothers and sisters, God seeks men and women to send on mission to Nineveh. Where is our Nineveh today? Our Nineveh today is found in the back streets and alleys of our cities festering with prostitution, drugs, and crime. It is found in our immediate family, in our offices, at our job sites, in our hospitals, etc. God invites us to bring the Good News to unimaginable places and “impossible” situations. The good news for us is that these “hopeless” cases are not too hopeless after all. For if even Nineveh could turn back to God so can they. In our country today, we have people who are committing all kinds of atrocities against innocent people in the northwest, southwest, and northern regions of our country. They kill, they maim, and they kidnap innocent people for a ransom. To many of us, these warlords on both sides of the conflict, seem like a lost case, just as Jonah thought the Ninevites were. But they are our brothers and sisters, be they those who are in the bushes as well as those from the barracks. Through our prayers for them, they can repent and, as the prophet Isaiah says, “beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Is 2:4). That way, they will turn their instruments of war into instruments of agriculture to feed our people instead of killing them.
Today’s readings call us to become new people, new converts and to accept Christ’s invitation to follow him to carry his message of salvation to the whole world, beginning naturally with our immediate families. To be messengers to others, we must ourselves be unconditional believers in Christ as the Messiah, who brings salvation to humanity. We too must be willing to abandon everything, our own nets, to follow him, as the first Apostles did. Let us call on the Holy Spirit to strengthen our faith and give us the courage to carry God’s message of salvation to the Ninevehs of the world. Amen
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