3rd Sunday Year A - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2008 

Peter and Andrew left their nets at once and followed Jesus.  James and John, at once, leaving their nets and their father, … followed him.  It was the beginning of a unique apprenticeship.  Initially they observed.  Then they worked alongside him.  In time, they were sent out on a brief mission without him.  They reflected together frequently, Jesus trying to ensure that they had got onto what he was on about.  He wanted them to learn to rely on each other, to relate to each other and to communicate, without hidden agendas and without power plays.

In calling them to follow him Jesus did not mean that they were to be clones of himself.  “Following him” meant something much deeper.  First of all, he tried to share with them his own starting point.

After his baptism, Jesus had been anointed by God’s Spirit, that is: immersed in, soaked in, and overwhelmed by his experience of God’s love for him.  (That is what the Spirit is: God’s love made accessible.)  That on-going, beautifully intimate, sense of God’s closeness and of God’s love became the source not only of Jesus’ strength and single-mindedness, but also of his profound insight into what God essentially is and how God essentially relates to creation: God loves creatures.  On this insight, Jesus based his own profound respect for every other person.  He saw his mission to the world to be an extension of his own experience of his loving God.  As John the Baptist had put it a little earlier in the narrative, Jesus would baptise the world with the Holy Spirit of God.

Jesus sought to introduce the apostles Peter and Andrew, James and John, to the experience of the Spirit, of God’s overwhelming love, by means of his own deep love for them – he made God’s love three-dimensional.  In initiating them into God’s personal love for them – by giving them a concrete taste of it – he wanted them to share his own insight into the way things are with God.

Following from that, he wanted them to respect each other and every human person who crossed their paths – becoming thereby their neighbour.  He showed them how he reached conclusions: exercising a genuine freedom in his respect for the Torah, working from what he took to be its spirit rather than from a lazy adherence to the letter of the law.  He hoped that, like himself, they would begin to discern how to live accordingly – loving even enemies, forgiving, bringing in from the edges all those usually excluded by a narrow and frightened society.

Their wholehearted “yes” to Jesus’ invitation to follow him led them along paths they never dreamt of.  They were sometimes slow learners, and got the wrong message or no message at all.  They were tempted to give up, and under pressure they momentarily disowned him.

But, consistent as always, he forgave, and they persisted.  It’s a lovely story.  And in its own way, it is our story, too.