From that time on, Jesus began to preach: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”… As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers…they were fishermen. He said to them: “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him…He went around all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and curing every disease and illness among the people. Matthew 4, 12-23
The world to which we belong is undergoing massive change. It is change that is happening at many levels. Much of that change is destructive, triggered by people in positions of power. Today’s gospel-reading reminds us that when Jesus began his public ministry, it, too, was in a climate of precarious change. The economy of Jerusalem had been built on the proceeds accruing from pilgrims over hundreds of years, and would soon be challenged. Without warning, the Baptist had emerged from the wilderness and had begun to call people to repentance in preparation for the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah. In the process he offended a cruel and powerful tyrant and paid the ultimate price. However, before his imprisonment and death, the Baptist had identified Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ of God. Jesus clearly saw that preaching repentance and speaking the truth was a very dangerous practice. But he was committed to ushering in the reign of God, a way of living the values of God that promoted the dignity of everyone, that called for peace, justice, respect and compassion for all. The reign or kingdom of God was about living life and relating to everyone with the mind of God. In the circumstances in which Jesus began his public ministry, he decided that there was no time for hesitation. The rapidity with which he enlisted Peter, Andrew, John and James to assist him and involved them in reaching out to others underlines the urgency with which he embarked on his work.
Living with the mind of God is as relevant today as it was when Jesus embarked on his mission. Our world is in such a mess that many are saying that we are now on the brink of a Third World War. In the same breath, they are saying that this is something which we might have to endure, which we are powerless to change. Yet that is the biggest obstacle to the change of mind and heart required to embrace the reign of God which Jesus lived. His life and ministry shone with God’s agenda, with God’s dream for our world and for humanity. Captivated by Jesus, by his very presence, those first four disciples saw in his invitation to join him in fishing for people a clear message that they would leave behind the catching of fish to sell as nourishment for their customers in order to become nourishment themselves for others in need. Jesus, in his very behaviour, acted out the reign of God, giving expression to God’s agenda and dream for humanity. How could those four disciples have resisted that? Moreover, who is to say that they embarked on that adventure without their families? Matthew simply makes no mention of women and children.
There is no part of our current world that is not longing for nourishing change. Luke, in his Gospel, noted that when the world was faced with severe threat, people were insensitive to the gravity of their situation and, so, took no constructive action but went on pursuing the ordinary activities of daily life: “As it was in Noah’s day, so will it also be in the days of the Son of Man (the Second Coming). People were eating and drinking, marrying wives and husbands right up to the day Noah went into the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all” (Luke 17: 26-28). Luke proceeded to say that it was the same when Sodom was destroyed. Today’s gospel-reading calls us to heed Jesus’ call to adopt a change of mind and heart (metanoia),so as to act in harmony with the reign of God.
Pope Francis called our attention to our participation in polluting and destroying our common home. Effectively, he challenged us to avoid being negligent, giving our time to eating and drinking, to accruing wealth and pursuing personal success while climate change and global warming are turning the Earth into an environment that will no longer be able to sustain life. Are we willing to take positive action or are we trapped in listlessness like Lot’s wife, hankering for the past? Are we deluded, hoping for a return of the days of unlimited use of natural resources? When Jesus called people to act with compassion, he made no room for exceptions. Acting with compassion is a responsibility of every disciple and they are to overlook nobody. When celebrities are obsessed with getting attention, Jesus is intent on noting that everyone is to be treated with dignity and respect. When world leaders are obsessed with expanding their influence, power and status, Jesus is concerned with the well-being of the very least: the stranger, the refugee, the ostracized, the imprisoned, the poor, the hungry, the lonely, the homeless. If there is anything for which we may need to repent, it might be our thinking that anything we can do to change our world for the better is futile. Made in God’s image we are good, creative, free and made for love. They are the gifts and capacities which God’s Spirit invites us to invest in bringing the reign of God to reality. It’s only in collaboration and co-operation with other similarly inspired people that we can succeed in making Christ present in our world. But therein lies the challenge of opening ourselves to accept diversity.
Sadly, communities can sometimes lose their direction when their members fail to work creatively with individual differences. In his letter to the Romans, Paul defended diversity, hoping that the group’s common purpose in promoting the message of Jesus would lead to their rising above individual preferences regarding how best to do it. His experience with the Corinthians was clearly very different, as we hear in today’s second reading. Factions in the Corinthian community had become so intransigently wedded to their own views that they made the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross meaningless. We ourselves have witnessed competition and factions at work in the life of our contemporary Church. All they succeed in achieving is nullifying the message of Jesus and his Gospel.
In the long run, today’s readings confront us with a choice of deciding whether our identifying ourselves as disciples is a nice idea or whether following Christ as his disciples is the only thing that gives meaning to our lives.