Hearing the Word of God Decisively, Third Sunday (B), January 21, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 21, 2024
Jonah 3:1-5.10, Ps 25, 1 Cor 7:29-31, Mk 1:14-20

To listen to an audio recording of today’s Gospel, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today is a special day in the life of the Church. For the fifth time, the Church marks the Sunday of the Word of God, an annual observance instituted in 2019 by Pope Francis to spur the Christian people to “grow in religious and intimate familiarity with the sacred Scriptures,” “appreciate the inexhaustible riches contained in that constant dialogue between the Lord and his people,” “experience anew how the risen Lord opens up for us the treasury of his word and enables us to proclaim its unfathomable riches before the world,” and “grow in love and faithful witness.” In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus gives us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, to describe our receptivity and response to the seed of his Word in our life. He relates that many receive that gift on hardened, rocky and thorny soil, referring, respectively, to stubborn, superficial and distracted souls. Jesus wants us to receive what he says to us, rather, on what he calls “good” and “rich” soil, which bears fruit 30-, 60-, or one-hundred-fold fruit. The Sunday of the Word of God is blessed occasion to examine what difference God’s word is making in our life, how we are in fact listening to and acting when God speaks.
• In his homily this morning at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Pope Francis focused on the good soil found in so many saints. “If we look at the friends of God, the witnesses to the Gospel throughout history and the saints,” he said, “we see that the word was decisive for each of them. We think of the first monk, Saint Anthony [whose feast we celebrated four days ago], who, struck by a passage of the Gospel while at Mass, left everything for the Lord. We think of Saint Augustine, whose life took a decisive turn when God’s word brought healing to his heart [as students at Columbia learn when they study the Confessions]. We think of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, who discovered her vocation [to be love in the heart of the Church] by reading the letters of Saint Paul. … We think too of the saint whose name I bear, Francis of Assisi, who, after praying, read in the Gospel that Jesus sent his disciples to preach and exclaimed: ‘That is what I want; that is what I ask, that is what I desire to do with all my heart!’” What happened in each of their lives, Pope Francis stated, is meant to happen in ours. “Their lives were changed,” he said, “by the word of life, by the word of the Lord.” The Word of God has that power. It has that power still!
• But the Pope then asked a poignant question. “How is it,” he said, “that, for many of us, the same thing does not happen? We hear the word of God many times, yet it enters into one ear and goes out the other. Why? Perhaps because … we need to stop being ‘deaf’ to God’s word. This is a risk for all of us: overwhelmed by a barrage of words, we let the word of God glide by us: we hear it, yet we fail to listen to it; we listen to it, yet we don’t keep it; we keep it, yet we don’t let it provoke us to change. More than anything, we read it, but we don’t pray with it.” Many of us don’t really listen to the Word of God, he suggested, with good and fruitful soil. We do not allow our encounter with the Word of God — at Mass, in private prayer, or in Bible studies — to be a true encounter with the Lord who speaks to us live through his word and invites us through it to a life-altering dialogue of life. We don’t prioritize the Word of God, recognizing that God’s words to us are the most important words ever spoken.
• The type of impact that the Word of God is supposed to have in our life was illustrated for me in an indelible way back in 2008, during the Synod on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church held in the Vatican. There was a bishop from Jelgava, Latvia, Bishop Anton Justs, who gave a simple five-minute speech that brought his fellow prelates not only to their feet but to tears. It never ceases to do the same for me. He described the importance the Latvians gave to the Word of God during the communist invasion of their country and give to it still. In simple, straightforward English, he said, “I would like to talk about the martyrs of the twentieth century and in particular those in my country Latvia. These are the priests, men and women who died for proclaiming the Word of God. I remember one Latvian priest, [Father] Viktors, who during the Soviet regime in Latvia was arrested for possessing the Holy Bible. In the eyes of the Soviet agents, the Holy Scriptures were an anti-revolutionary book. The agents threw the Holy Scriptures on the floor and ordered the priest to step on it. The priest refused and, instead, knelt down and kissed the book. For this gesture the priest was condemned to ten years of hard labor in Siberia. Ten years later, when the priest returned to his parish and celebrated the Holy Mass, he read the Gospel. Then he lifted up the lectionary and said: ‘The Word of God!’ The people cried and thanked God.” The Word of God, they knew, was a treasure worth suffering for, even the tortures of a decade in a brutal Siberian labor camp. It was worth getting down on one’s knees to kiss. It contained within the open secrets of a true and definitive revolution. Fr. Viktors clearly knew the value of the Word of God and became a living witness to its inestimable value. He knew it contained the words of eternal life because they were revealed and spoken by God. Fr. Viktors, however, was not alone in this testimony. Bishop Justs continued, “In Latvia, during the Soviet era, no religious books, no Holy Scriptures, no catechisms were allowed to be printed. The reasoning was: if there is no printed Word of God, there will be no religion. So our Latvian people did what the first century Christians did: they learned the passages of the Holy Scriptures by heart. Still today in Latvia there is an oral tradition alive. We stand on the shoulders of our martyrs to proclaim the Word of God. Our grandchildren remember their grandfathers and grandmothers, who died for their faith; they want to be, in their turn, heroes of faith. In Latvia we proclaim the living Word of God! We go in the processions and on the pilgrimages, we sing songs and we pray and say: ‘This is the Word of God,’ for which our grandparents died.” A people learning Sacred Scripture by heart, taking the Bible on Pilgrimages, proudly proclaiming the Word of God, and seeking to be heroes in witness to it — this is what the Catholic Church is meant to be.
• For us Catholics here at Columbia, what does it mean? As Pope Francis said this morning, the Word of God is meant to be decisive in our life. We need to recognize it as a gift, to thank God for it, to grow in our knowledge of it, and to try to share it. In today’s Psalm, we made our own the prayer of faithful Jews throughout the centuries in gratitude for the gift of God’s word. “Teach me your ways, O Lord,” we sang five times. We continued, “Your ways, O Lord, make known to me. Teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my savior.” That’s precisely what God does for us in Sacred Scripture. But do we hunger for every word that comes from the mouth of God? Do we listen to Sacred Scripture as it is proclaimed at Mass as words coming from God himself to teach us his ways and guide us in his truth? Do we pray with Sacred Scripture, using for example, resources like the Word Among Us, given out for free through Columbia Catholic Ministry? Do we study Sacred Scripture, recognizing that knowing what it contains is more important than anything we could learn in any of our classes at Columbia? Do we take advantage of opportunities like the FOCUS Bible studies to get to know Sacred Scripture better, supporting and supported by others? Do we avail ourselves of great resources like the Bible in a Year podcast by Fr. Mike Schmitz, which can help us to get to know the whole of Scripture so that we can better understand its component parts. Sacred Scripture is meant, as the Holy Father says, to play a decisive role in our life, but we have to respond to it like the saints did, rather than letting the Word of God pass through the other ear and fall by the way side or on rocky or thorny ground.
• We see the decisiveness of the Word of God in the readings the Church gives us today, which help us to examine our receptivity and response to God’s Word. In the first reading, we meet the reluctant prophet Jonah, who became, in some ways, the most successful prophet of all time. The first time he heard the Word of God summoning him to be a prophet to the Ninevites, he tried to run from it and sail to Tarshish, the-then most western place known on earth. But after the famous storm, his being tossed overboard, and then being rescued by a whale, when “the word of God came to Jonah a second time,” Jonah set out for Nineveh and announced that in 40 days Nineveh would be destroyed. The pagan Ninevites didn’t wait until Jonah continued the countdown. They heard and responded immediately to the summons to conversion God was communicating to them through his messenger. We read, “They turned from their evil ways.” They fasted, and “everyone, great and small,” even down to their pets, put on sackcloth. And they began to live by faith: as we see at the end of today’s passage, “The people of Nineveh believed in God.” That’s the type of response to the Word of God the Lord hopes to see in each of us — an urgent response of conversion and faith, not putting off until tomorrow what God is asking of us today.
• In the epistle, we pondered St. Paul’s words to the Christians in Corinth. He spoke to them about the urgency of responding to God’s word, because, he said, “the time is running out” and “the world in its present form is passing away.” Time is always running out. We never know the day or the hour when the form of life in this world will expire for us or for everyone. But what will not pass away? Jesus tells us very clearly in his eschatological discourses at the end of the Gospels of synoptic Gospels. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” he said, “but my words will not pass away” (Mt 24:35; Mk 13:31; Lk 21:33). Paul is asking us to build our whole life on the word of God, just like he sought to do as a Pharisee before his conversion and did much more after Christ called him to conversion and faith outside the gates of Damascus. After all other words pass, God’s Word will remain into eternity. As St. Peter confessed to Jesus at the end of the Bread of Life discourse, “You have the words of eternal life.”
• Those images from Nineveh and Corinth about the immediacy and decisiveness of responding to God’s word prepare us very well for the Gospel in which we prayerfully contemplate Jesus’ words and actions at the beginning of his public ministry. In his inaugural 18-word homily — 16 words in St. Mark’s Greek — and in his conversations with his first followers after, we see four different commands that Jesus gives them and his followers in every age. Jesus had spent nearly three decades in his hidden life on earth waiting to announce this summons. It’s also what he, as God, had been waiting since the Fall to establish. How we live these four commands is a good litmus test for us to determine how we listen to the Word of God as a whole. Jesus proclaims, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the Gospel!”
• The Lord first announces two essential facts: The first is, “The time is fulfilled.” Like St. Paul later, Jesus proclaims an urgency: the time of waiting is over; the time to act is now. The second fact is, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus declares that God’s kingdom is here because God himself is here. Therefore, the time to enter his kingdom, to share in his reign, is now. Both of these truths point to the objective reality, which is the context in which they, we and every successive generation likewise abide: literally, now is the time we’ve always been waiting for! Jesus would say elsewhere, “Many prophets and kings desire to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.”
• After Jesus announces these two astounding realities, he turns to four ways he calls us to respond to those truths and, even more, to him. These are the four conditions for entering and living in his kingdom. These are the four ways we won’t waste the time God has given us but make the most of it. These are the four actions on which we can evaluate whether we have been responding to God’s word on good and faithful soil.
• The first command is “repent.” In Greek, this word ismetanoete, which etymologically means a total revolution of our mind, of the way we look at things. It’s a call to conversion, to think no longer as everyone else thinks, to do no longer as everyone else does, but to put on the mind of God, to align our heart and our actions to him. It means to compare ourselves to God rather than to everyone else and to recognize we’re not yet living enough as the image and likeness of God. For some people this will mean a 180-degree turn. For others it might mean a 50-degree turn or a 10-degree turn. But all of us need this conversion. And we will always need it. The Christian life is one of continual conversion, in which we literally learn how fully to “turn with” Jesus (con-vert) in all parts of our life. As he turns in prayer to the Father, we turn with him; as he turns with charity to our neighbor, we likewise pivot; as he turns with mercy to a family member who has sinned against him and against us, we, too mercifully rotate. This call to continual metanoia means that we’re incessantly seeking to change for the better, to become more and more like the Lord who calls us to this penance and renewal. The type of conversion to which we’re called is what we witness among the pagan Ninevites in today’s first reading. The Lord will give us the grace of responding to his summons as decisively as they did, but we have to act on that grace.
• The second command is “believe.” To believe means not just to accept something as true. It means totally to submit oneself to a reality on the basis of a trust in the one testifying to the reality. To believe involves entrusting ourselves completely to Jesus and on that foundation grounding our lives on what he says. The Christian life should be marked with this type of faith. Because of our trust in Jesus, we believe in what he tells us about the path of happiness in the Beatitudes and we seek to align our whole lives to what he says. Because of our trust in him, we believe in what he reveals to us about God the Father and we ground our existence on that Father’s love and call. Because of our faith in Christ, we believe in what he says about his presence in the Eucharist, about his sending out the apostles and their successors for the forgiveness of sins in Confession, about what he says about caring for others as if we were caring for him, about praying for our persecutors and even loving our enemies. To believe in Jesus, to believe in the Gospel he enunciates and enfleshes, means truly to seek to grow in both our intellectual knowledge of the Gospel and our putting it into practice. It means sincerely to say to the Lord, “Teach me your ways, O Lord,” and then to walk in the Lord’s truth. That’s what believing involves. He will give us the grace to live by faith, but, again, we have to choose to correspond to that grace.
• The third imperative is “follow me” or “Come after me.” Jesus says those words to Peter, Andrew, James and John in the Gospel and they immediately left their nets, their boats, their fish, their employees and their families to follow him. They were open to the type of revolution in the way they looked at their life that is contained in Jesus’ word metanoeteand they believed in Jesus already enough to leave everything behind on a dime to base their entire life on his word calling them to follow him. Similarly for us, it’s not enough to repent and to believe, because the Lord Jesus always calls us in faith to follow him, turning toward and with him and turning our back on other things. The Christian life features this type of discipleship, in which we learn from the Lord and seek to walk in his paths. And this following is meant to continue our whole life, following the Good Shepherd into dark valleys and up steep mountains, following him up close on the Way of the Cross all the way to heaven. The Lord who calls us to this type of joint journey of faith in response to his Word will give us all the help he knows we need to achieve it, but, once more, we have to correspond.
• And the fourth word is “fish.” Jesus says in the Gospel that, if we follow him, he will make us “fishers of men.” He will form us to be apostles and then send us to spread the faith, to make us missionaries drawing others to him with the same message he announced to us: that the time is now, that the door to the Kingdom of God is open, and to enter it we need take seriously our call to repentance, faith, discipleship and apostolate. Some embrace this reality of the type of Christian growth that flourishes in apostolate quite readily, like Peter, Andrew, James and John. Others respond with initial fear and reluctance, like Jonah. But just like a seed germinates, forms a tree and bears fruit that contains other seeds that fall on soil and eventually bear fruit, too, so a faith that is real is always contagiously shared. The Word of God is a saving word! It is a rock on which to build life securely against the storms and floods. It’s the owner’s manual given to us by the Creator to how everything works: how he works, how we work, how the world ultimately works and what everything means. The same Jesus who made Peter, Andrew, James and John fishers of men wants us to go out, too. To put out into the deep water, like they did, and lower our nets, cast our line, for a catch. Spreading the Gospel is not an optional part of the Catholic faith, but an essential one. If faith is alive, then it is life-giving, and spreads, just as surely as the living cells in our body replicate. And so one great test of how we’re hearing and living the Word of God is our zeal to help others open up and live this treasure. At the beginning of this semester, I’d like to ask each one of us: When was the last time you invited someone to come to hear the Word of God, to pray to to worship God with you? Can you invite one person to join you here with us? Imagine what would happen if each of us, with God’s grace and the help of the other person’s guardian angel, were able to bring at least one person here on Sundays. How our worship would be enhanced! How everything we do would grow! Then imagine we made another commitment each to try to find and invite another. And so on. Our task here at Columbia is far less daunting than one Jonah faced, Peter, Andrew James and John faced, or Paul faced. I’d urge you to think about inviting those Catholics you know who go elsewhere and might be choosing to live the faith individualistically rather than in communion with their spiritual siblings on campus. I’d urge you to consider in a special way those Catholics you know who have stopped practicing the faith and to invite them with particular tenderness, patience and zeal. On this day on which we’ve begun a new cohort of the OCIA program, I’d similarly urge you to think about your non-Catholic friends who might be open to the gifts with which God has lavishly blessed us in the Church. There’s room for all of them. As Jesus tells us, “Come after me and I will make you fishers of men,” he sends us out to where the fish are with his divine assistance. So please don’t waste any time. Now is the time of fulfillment. Think about one person you can invite. Pray for that person during the prayers of the faithful in a few minutes. Mention that person silently to Jesus when he is lifted up for us in the Holy Eucharist. And then reach out, with courage and charity. It may turn out to be the greatest gift that will ever happen in that person’s life.
• The Mass is the most privileged place of all to hear the Word of God and to respond, the setting where the Word of God takes on flesh anew under the appearances of bread and wine and seeks to dwell within us. It’s where Jesus summons us to conversion and to faith. It’s where he teaches us his ways. It’s where we commit anew to following him. It’s from here he sends us to announce the Gospel to everyone he has created. It’s where through the Word of God, decisively heard and lived, he seeks to make us saints. Today as we hear the Word of God, let’s together respond to God’s grace to seize the gift of the fullness of time and the reality of Christ’s kingdom, turn away from worldliness to live by faith, and then, as devout disciples and ardent apostles of Jesus, bear fruit 30, 60, 100 ways and more.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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.

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