3rd Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2012

Jesus is on the move in today's Gospel of Mark.  He had, not long before, chosen to be baptised, deliberately accepting his solidarity with sin-scarred humanity; he had heard the gentle voice revealing him to be Beloved of God, indeed, Son of God.  Immediately following that, Mark had Jesus alone in the wilderness for six  long weeks, engaging with and mastering his own inner demons.

At last, Jesus embarked on his mission, spreading the word throughout Galilee: The time has come.  The Kingdom of God is close at hand; and urging people to change radically their familiar ways of seeing and evaluating life, to believe and to live out what he said was truly Good News.  Immediately Jesus began to form around him a nucleus of followers who were attracted to his vision and eager to be involved in his project.  The Kingdom of God … something radically new, and given the kingdom they were already experiencing, a profoundly different counter-culture.  But Mark's Gospel did not spell out immediately the determining features of that counter-culture. 

We find a hint of it, surprisingly, in today's First Reading, the quaint, perhaps puzzling, story of the prophet Jonah.  Jonah is presented as a prophet, called to preach repentance, who, himself, miserably failed to repent.  Jonah remained, throughout the whole story, stuck in his own self-righteousness and his hostile, judgmental stance towards foreigners; tenaciously clinging to his sense of God as a vengeful God.  The surprising thing is that the author of the story depicted God as the one who repented: God relented and did not inflict on them the disaster which he had threatened…  A God changing from violent hostility to generous mercy; from a "God-on-our-side" to a God open to the world.

As we continue to reflect on the Gospel of Mark during this Year B, we shall find that the God exemplified in the life of Jesus and proclaimed in his teaching is a God in whom there is no hostility, only anxious care – a God no longer the protector of the self-righteous but the God who reaches out to those marginalised by prevailing social  and religious judgmentalism, and particularly, and perhaps shockingly, to sinners.

It might be helpful to notice how Paul, in today's Second Reading, has run with the vision of life in the Kingdom.  With the resurrection of Jesus, [and the possibility opened to everyone to share somehow in it], disciples began to see life no longer as a cyclical process of eternal return, leading nowhere, but as heading for a definitive fulfillment.  Human history is leading somewhere.  Time is not limitless; it will end.  As Paul wrote: Our time is growing short … the world as we know it is passing away.

Life as we know it is not all that there is.  There's more to life.  What is so desperately important in a world heading nowhere becomes relative.  We can sit lightly with life.  Paul teased out some of the consequences: Contrary to the patriarchal attitudes of his day, wives would no longer be useful simply for bearing male heirs and continuing the bloodline, but seen for the persons they were - no longer owned, but related to and loved.

The joys and sorrows of life are not everything, however intensely felt at the time.  No longer desperately dramatic, they become opportunities to respond to and through which to grow.  In this new way of understanding history, material things lose their importance.  They are there to be respected, cultivated and used appropriately, but no longer carry the impossible expectation of filling the emptiness of human hearts [that can be filled only by the creating, loving God].  

Like Peter and Andrew, James and John, we have been sent to a world still scarred by violence – from the domestic to the international levels, and everywhere in between – a world where people are not seen as equal partners, as brothers and sisters, but feared, excluded, kept at arm's length or exploited.  We have been sent into a world where the unchecked greed of financial marketers has driven, and threatens to drive still more millions, into austerity or poverty.  We have been sent into a world where people's wealth or life-style are seen to determine their self-esteem and often define their very identity. 

We ourselves are by no means totally free from the values of our prevailing culture.  … Nor were Peter and Andrew, James and John.  They failed often enough.  We can't afford to be like Jonah – blind to our own self-righteousness.  But as we struggle to live lightly in this world [that no longer has to be all that there is], we can attract others to our vision and together reach out to the possibilities of life in the Kingdom of God.