Responding to the Lord’s Life-Changing Word, Third Sunday (B), January 21, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx
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 homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today the Church marks for the fifth time the Sunday of the Word of God, an annual observance instituted by Pope Francis to help the Christian people focus on how they respond to the treasure of God’s speaking to us through Sacred Scripture. In the three synoptic Gospels 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 inveterate, superficial and distracted souls. Jesus wants us to receive what he says to us on what he calls “good” and “rich” soil, which bears fruit 30-, 60-, or one-hundred fold fruit, big Biblical numbers. Today is an excellent occasion to examine how we listen to and act on the Word of God.
• 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. He said, “If we look at the friends of God, the witnesses to the Gospel throughout history and the saints, 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. We think of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, who discovered her vocation 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!’” We can think of the power of God’s word in the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta and how she gave her whole life in response to Jesus’ words, “I thirst,” and “Whatever you do to the least of my brotehrs and sisters, you do to me,” as she sought, like our Lady, to make her whole life a fiat, a “let it be done to me according to your word.” Pope Francis says about the saints, “Their lives were changed by the word of life, by the word of the Lord.” The Word of God is meant to change our lives, too, each time we hear it. It has that power!
• But the Pope poignantly asked, “How is it 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.” 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-changing dialogue.
• Today’s readings are very fitting to help us examine our receptivity and response to God’s Word, to see whether we’re embracing it on good and fruitful soil allowing it to change our life in 30, 60 or 100 ways or more. 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 and sail away to Tarshish, the-then farthest known place on the earth. But when “the word of God came to Jonah a second time,” he 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 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 — urgent conversion and faith, not putting off until tomorrow what God is asking of us today.
• In the 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.” Praising the Lord who gives us this guidance, we exclaimed, “Good and upright is the Lord; he shows sinners the way. He guides the humble to justice and teaches the humble his way.” We seek to receive the word of God with humility and a hunger to know the Lord’s paths so that we can walk in them.
• In the epistle, we pondered St. Paul’s words to the Christians in Corinth, as he wrote to them about the urgency of responding to the word of God, “because 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 Matthew, Mark and Luke: “Heaven and earth will pass away, 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.
• All three of these readings prepare us for the Gospel in which we prayerfully ponder Jesus’ words and actions at the very 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. “The time is fulfilled,” he said, “and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the Gospel!”
• Jesus announces first two essential facts: The first is, “The time is fulfilled.” Like St. Paul afterward, 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. The time to enter his kingdom, to share in his reign, is now. Both of these truths point to the objective reality that is the context in which they, we and every successive generation likewise abide. Literally, now is the time we’ve always been waiting for. 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 verb is “Repent.” The second is “Believe.” The third is “Follow.” And the fourth is “Fish.” Let’s examine each of these realities in turn and ponder, and perhaps recalibrate, our response to them.
• The first command is “repent.” In Greek, this word ismetanoete, which, as we’ve discussed before several times, 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. This is the type of metanoia to which the Lord calls us and calls our society. Within this Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, we repent not just individually but communally of all sins against what Jesus prayed for during the Last Supper, that we may be one as he and the Father are one by the Holy Spirit. Two days after the March for Life and in anticipation of the 51^st anniversary of Roe v. Wade tomorrow, we repent of all the sins of the culture of death. The Lord who calls us to this metanoia will give us all the help he knows we need to achieve it, but we have to correspond.
• 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.
• 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. Likewise for us, it’s not enough to repent and to believe, because the Lord Jesus always calls us in faith to follow him in faith, turning toward and with him and turning our back on other things. The Christian life features this type of discipleship, in which we follow the Lord Jesus and 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. When Jesus says, “Come after me,” it’s important that we grasp why, because, like Peter in Caesarea Philippe, often we seek to lead the Lord rather than to follow him. 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 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, to 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 they’ll enter it through repentance, faith, discipleship and apostolate. Some embrace this reality of the type of Christian growth that flourishes in apostolate quite readily. Unlike Jonah initially, when Jesus called Peter and Andrew, John and James, they “immediately” left their boats, their businesses, even their families behind and followed him. It was an urgent call from the king himself, and they didn’t hesitate. They turned away from everything and, in faith, embraced him who is everything, who created everything. And before they knew it, they were being sent out by him to announce Christ’s kingdom. Our zeal for sharing the Word of God with others is directly dependent on the way we receive it, not just as a word to be heard but to be done.
• 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 to following him and helping others to follow him. Today as we hear the Word of God, let’s together respond to 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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