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As we make our way through these early weeks of Ordinary Time, we will be hearing stories about the beginnings of Our Lord’s public life and ministry. In the Gospel story we heard today, Saint Matthew depicts these earliest beginnings with three elements:
- Location
- A call to repentance
- An invitation to follow Christ
Let’s look at these elements in some detail in order to see how they pertain to our life today.
Location
Did you notice that the same two towns were mentioned by both Isaiah and Saint Matthew? These are the unfamiliar towns of Zebulun and Naphtali. They were located in the Northern Kingdom of Israel that had been invaded and subsumed into the Assyrian empire. Most of the Jewish people there had fallen away from the practice of the faith, intermarried with pagans, and therefore, had lost much of their Jewish identity.
This region was called, both then and now, Galilee. It was mostly Gentile, but with a small, faithful remnant of Jews, a place of obscurity but with villages whose names are familiar to us, such as Nazareth and Capernaum. The Holy Family lived in Nazareth; Jesus began His ministry in Capernaum. Saint Joseph was of the House (lineage) of David, whose city was Bethlehem, so why was he living in Nazareth? We don’t know for certain. He might have been part of the Jewish Diaspora, or, like so many of our own young people, it could be that he went where he could find work, and establish a career. While Jesus Himself was born in the City of David, one could say that Nazareth was His “home town” since he lived there for thirty of His thirty-three years on earth.
However, it is the combination of obscurity and faithlessness that will serve our purposes in taking a closer look at our Gospel story. Jesus did not begin His public ministry in Jerusalem, one of the great cities of the ancient world, and a place of pilgrimage, where lived many devout practitioners of the Jewish faith. He began, instead, where the people were mostly pagan, where others were people of no particular religion, and where there were only a few devout Jews.
And this is where we find ourselves today: not in one of the world’s great cities, but in a small village that we love, but which is obscure and unheard-of outside of New England. It is also a place where studies have shown, is the most unchurched State in the Union… a State where politics are often opposed to Gospel values… and where the number of active Catholics, small to begin with, is diminishing rapidly. But it is for God’s own purposes that we have been placed in this location, here and now, to live out our faith and our discipleship in Christ.
How can we accomplish such a daunting task as to bring Christ to a people walking in darkness?
A Call to Repentance
We must begin with ourselves, as Christ calls us to repentance, the very first word from the mouth of the Lord as He begins His public life. Usually considered a Lenten theme, Christ puts it here as the cornerstone of Christian life, and the means of entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
In a therapeutic culture such as ours, repentance might be misunderstood as a means of self-improvement, the first step toward self-fulfillment. But the Lord is calling us to new beginnings, beyond our New Year’s resolutions, or our upcoming Lenten penances, to a renewal in self-knowledge in our primary vocation as disciples of Christ.
To repent, then, means to re-think, and here we turn to the Prophet Isaiah for clarity, and here we see something of and Advent theme re-emerging, a month after Christmas. Re-thinking our lives helps us to discover clues to repentance, as mentioned by Isaiah, that will, in the end, bring us what he defines as “abundant joy and great rejoicing.” He speaks of: the yoke that burdens us, the pole on our shoulders, and the rod of the taskmaster… and how God will release us from them.
The yoke that burdens us can be seen as the misunderstanding that holiness of life would be burdensome, or even unattainable… that true discipleship is unrealistic… or that virtue has no value or meaning.
The pole on our shoulders speaks to our human propensity toward sin… the obsessive-compulsive behaviors that drive us, perhaps even to addiction… or a self-centeredness that rejects revealed Truth in favor of a personal, self-generated, relativistic “quasi-truth.”
The rod of the taskmaster can be understood as the political pressure to conform to societal values that are contrary to the Gospel.
When we begin to re-think these yokes, rods and poles, we can attain new insight to their influence on us, and how they limit our freedom to follow Christ. With God’s grace, repentance can help us to overcome them, bringing that abundant joy and great rejoicing of which Isaiah speaks, and to which Our Lord invites us.
The Invitation to Follow Christ
From the beginning, the Lord did not intend to “go it alone,” but called people to Himself, and formed them by way of relationship with Him. His invitation to repent precedes the Call of His first disciples, so we can surmise that they might have been as attracted to the call to repentance as they were to the person of Jesus. Later in the Gospel we’ll see just how true this is: Christ had called ordinary fisherfolk, not people already-fully-formed in sainthood. It raises a question: Why would people, some of whom were practicing their faith, some following a pagan faith, and some of no faith at all, follow Christ?
Although the divinity of Christ had been revealed at His Baptism, we don’t know how many people, if any other that Jesus and John the Baptist, actually saw the dove or heard the voice. So, to most, His divinity was revealed slowly, in His healings and other miracles, but not fully realized until after the Resurrection. Different people would have been attracted to Him for different reasons: His miracles, His teaching, or His person. Looking at these three reasons as a brief aside, we can gain some insight into what we might need in order to follow Christ more closely.
His miracles: Having heard of Christ’s miracles, some people may have sought Him out of curiosity, or others, perhaps, out of hope for a miracle for themselves. Our own search for Christ can have something of these same motivations. But the miraculous is an important element in the mystery of divine intervention in human life.
In speaking of the essence of Christ’s miracles we have to consider two things: First, we believe that God not only created the world, but also that God sustains the world. He has a perpetual, loving interest in His Creation, and especially in humanity. Second: The God who is the source of the laws of the Universe can also express His Will by suspending those laws miraculously.
While the practice of modern medicine can perform what would have been thought miraculous only a hundred years ago, we are not suspending the laws of nature in the practice of medicine, but discovering what God has placed within these laws of nature: His Holy Will and His Divine Providence for us. The Lord’s miracles, then, were performed not to dazzle people into belief, but to demonstrate that divine love.
While we sometimes pray for miracles, or for God’s divine intervention, in the end, our hope should be to discover God’s Will and His Love as the source and the fulfillment of our peace, and the basis for our trust in him.
More briefly, as we consider His Teaching, people recognized that Jesus taught with an authority that was different from that of the Scribes and Pharisees. It was based not in His Office as Rabbi, but in the presence of the divine showing through: He who was present with the Father at Creation, would have greater insight into humanity than humans themselves would have… and He who was present, though invisible, at the giving of the Commandments to Moses, would have greater insight into God’s Will, revealed in the Commandments as a “school of love.” The “new wine” of Jesus’s moral teaching was that the fulfillment of God’s Law does not mean adding more Commandments; it means consolidating them into a single message, as He will say later, “This is my commandment: that you love one another.”
In considering The Person of Jesus: while the call to repentance can be attractive, and the interesting play on words, promising fishermen that He would make them “Fishers of men” is alluring, it seems unlikely that the sheer force of His words would compel serious fishermen to drop their nets, to leave their father in the boat, and to walk off into the Galilean countryside with this itinerant Rabbi. There had to be something different… and there was. It was the presence of the divine that attracted some, and later would repel others.
When the Church proclaims that God became Man, we are not using mere metaphor. In the Incarnation of Christ, the goodness and holiness of God is translated into real flesh-and-blood humanity. All of Jesus’s life must be seen as a revelation of God the Father, and in Christ the most ordinary human experiences are touched by the divine, and become communications of God, be it in the Babe in the manger… the Boy in the Temple… or the Young Man baptized in the Jordan.
Jesus brought the divine into common human experience, especially in His invitation to friendship. There is nothing like this in any other religion: one may take Mohammed for one’s prophet… or Buddha for one’s teacher… but only Jesus invites you to be His friend. He invites us to this same friendship today, but in a more subtle way: He’s still teaching, through the Sacred Scriptures… He’s still working miracles, as we will witness at the Consecration at this Mass… but His presence to us is veiled in mystery, a different kind of presence that the people of Galilee enjoyed as He walked their streets and visited their synagogue.
His invitation to follow Him, however, does come to us by way of our senses:
- hearing the Word of God
- seeing the elevated Host at the Consecration
- touching the Body of Christ as it is placed in our hand at Holy Communion
- tasting the consecrated wine, now His Precious Blood
- smelling the essence of prayer as incense pervades the church…
All of these will eventually become an interior experience of what, as Aquinas would say, “the senses fail to fathom,” the miraculous in our presence. In our real humanity, in our senses, and in the depth of our souls, in mystery and in miracle, the very person of Christ is revealed to us and invites us to friendship.
In order to respond to this invitation we must be in the State of Grace: close to the Lord and close to the Sacraments. Repentance is the first step: re-thinking our lives, eliminating what would keep us from following Him in freedom. Then the next step is to actually make the move with courage, trust and love… to follow him in freedom and friendship, because He wants us, and even needs us, to be “fishers of men,” that is, to bring others to the Father, in Christ, through His Church.