NewCreation

Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the third Sunday in ordinary time. In this Gospel, we hit the ground running with the beginning of Jesus's ministry. Full and little, we've jumped somewhat from the baptism of our Lord two Sundays ago, when Jesus receives knowledge of his sonship. He's declared a son and begins to become aware of what this might mean. And then last Sunday we had him leading some of John the Baptist's disciples into this new kind of following. In other words, it was the move on from John the Baptist. Here we have the beginning of his ministry suddenly, but we've jumped something that we'll only get to in Lent, which is the temptations in the wilderness. Immediately after his baptism, according to Mark as in Matthew and Luke, he goes into the wilderness and he spends time being ministered to by angels and amongst the wild beasts, which may be genuine wild beasts; it may be the beasts that surrounded the throne in the heavenly vision. In other words, this may be the place where he receives the fullness of his heavenly vision and works through all the human patterns of desire which he's then going to have to act out for us thereafter. This is his time of learning what his mission is before he suddenly starts it. And now we have in today's Gospel the beginning, the sudden start. "Now after John was arrested," it says. Actually, the Greek is "after John was handed over." That's a very important verb in Mark's Gospel, because it also refers to Jesus as being handed over. It suggests both treason and perhaps gift, because Jesus gives himself away in the Last Supper: he's handing himself over. God hands him over into our hands, and then of course in a less friendly way Judas hands him over, and then later the Sanhedrin hands him over to the Romans. But the handing over of the Son of Man is going to be absolutely vital, and that's, if you like, prefigured by John's handing over. We don't know exactly how that worked; history doesn't tell us whether John was betrayed or whether he was simply taken by Herod. In any case, John is handed over and Jesus comes — this is something quite new, distinct from John. Jesus comes to Galilee. Jesus had been baptized on the other side of the Jordan; that's where John had been baptizing, if you like, outside the promised land. And now Jesus comes to begin his ministry in Galilee. And that's a bit of an oddity as well, of course: it's the area where he'd been brought up around Nazareth. But also it's not Jerusalem; it's not the royal and priestly center; it's not the place where the wise and learned hang out; it's not the place where the scribes and those who really know their stuff — the experts, are to be found. It's, if you like, the periphery, what we would now call the periphery. It's a marginal part of the Holy Land at the time. And yet this is where he starts. And we'll see that this is going to be tremendously important, starting in the unexpected place in the periphery, and that that's always where people are going to be told to go back to at the resurrection. The disciples will be told to go back to Galilee, where Jesus will be before them. In other words, you always go back to the unimportant place to start. That's going to be really central to the understanding of the Gospel. So he comes to this place and he proclaims the good news of God. Now, this does not mean the good news according to God. It means the good news that is God. God as good news. This is, if you like, that which is going to take us, all of us, the rest of our lives to unpack. The good news that is God, that God is good news. What does this good-newsness of God, what does this sound like? What does this look like? How is this lived by any of us? Well, one of the things about it is that the terminology of the good news comes from Isaiah, where we're used to the passage about the good news of the one who brings feet – the messenger whose feet bring good news, blessed are they. There are a number of references to what is translated in Greek as good news, but it's in Hebrew the bearer of good news, and this is something that is absolutely central. Because what Jesus is saying is: this Isaiah vision of God as good news is now being instantiated in your midst, and that I'm telling you about this is now happening. The good news of God. Now here our Jonah passage, our first reading, is actually very helpful, because it gives us, if you like, how not to do this. Jonah is a wonderful story because it's someone who is told to go and say something that he doesn't want to say. Why? In the book of Jonah, God tells Jonah to go and preach conversion to the people of Nineveh. And Jonah really doesn't want to go. Why? Because he knows that if God is sending him to preach good news to Nineveh, it really means that God likes the people of Nineveh and wants them to be set free from all the hardness of heart and difficulty and awfulness of their lives. And he, Jonah, doesn't like them. He really doesn't want the people of Nineveh to be glorified. He longs for them to be punished. He's got quite a vengeful attitude. So he runs away, and eventually he's spat back up and sent to go and preach the word in Nineveh, to tell them about God. And as he arrives in Nineveh preaching the word of God, he finds that they are already starting to repent. In other words — and it says — "and they believed God." And here's the thing: what What the Hebrews understood, and what's difficult for us to understand, is that believing in God and being penitent amount to the same thing. Why? Because God likes us. This is the central thing, which is difficult to grasp. If you like somebody, you long for them to be able to be penitent; you long for them to be able to have their hearts stretched open so they can become more. If you dislike somebody, what you want them to do is to close down ever more, to double down into their hardness of heart, and become, if you like, more and more stuck in ruts that will lead to their self-destruction. If you like someone, they become penitent. If you like someone, they are able to relax in your liking them, and their hearts are able to be broken and become open, and so be able to be stretched into ways of peace — things that are good for them and for each other. This was what Jonah knew. He knew that if God likes someone, he helps make you penitent. If you really don't like them, you don't want them to become penitent. The best thing that you could wish for your enemies is impenitence, because it means they'll never grow, they'll never become new. So here Jesus is saying the good news of God — the good news of God is: God likes you, he likes us, therefore he's making it possible for us to become penitent. These two phrases he's saying: "The time is fulfilled," and "The kingdom of God has come near." So he's saying all of that Isaiah stuff about the good news coming in — all of that is being fulfilled. The text of Isaiah is absolutely fundamental; we've seen that during Advent. Effectively absolutely fundamental in terms of the shape of God's good news coming into the world. Jesus is going to be constantly reenacting and fulfilling Isaiah. Isaiah is the most quoted text in the New Testament. "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near." So the time when God is going to be able to reign, thus making it possible for us to live together — this is what is possible for somebody who likes us: humans being able to live peacefully together, collaborating, learning how to help each other. The one who makes that possible is the one who is bearing God's liking of us. That's good news. And then he says, "Repent and believe in the good news," which is saying all of this: the one who's going to make it possible for you to be able to do this is coming. In fact, that is what he, the Son, is going to be doing. He's going to make penitence possible for us. That's the whole point of him coming in and going up to his death — not to judge us, but to make it possible for us to see the kind of things we're doing and be forgiven from it, so that we can learn to collaborate without destroying each other. This is the program of someone who likes us. Repent and believe the good news. What's the good news? The good news is God — the utterly living one, the one who is not out to get us, not trying to punish us, not come to judge us — has come to make it possible for us to learn how to live together, for God's kingship to be brought alive amongst us. This is the great announcement. And what we'll see in Mark's Gospel, as in all the Gospels — Mark has a particular way of doing it — is Jesus starting to make penitence possible. And one of the ways he does this is by whom he chooses. If he'd gone to Jerusalem and chosen scribes, learned people, they could have come and explained to us how wrong we all were, which is what so many of us priests and preachers do. We fail to be sinners who are learning how to become something else, and therefore how to be able to share the good news of what it looks like as we are broken open and allowed to become someone else, rather than people who know something and telling other people what they need to do. But that's not how Jesus starts. He starts — he's preaching, he's going through Galilee, the peripheral place — and he comes across Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake. In other words, they're actually doing something. These are two guys, they're two brothers; they've got Greek names, so they're Hellenized Jews. The next couple we'll see have Hebrew names: Jacob and John, who we call James and John — Jacob and John, sons of Zebedee — so they have Hebrew names. And these two, they are fishing. They are actually engaged in fishing, a perfectly normal thing to be doing in the lake of Galilee, which had particularly splendid fish, very highly valued fish. And he calls them: "Come, follow me and I will make you fish for people." That's interesting. Why fish? Well, one of the key things… Behind the notion of fishing is the bringing up. This is going to be central to what's going on here. Jesus's mission is fulfilling the God bringing people up from the land of Egypt. The same verb for bringing fish up and bringing people up from the land of Egypt — in Hebrew it's the same verb. So here we have the beginning of the mission. What's the mission going to look like? It's going to look like bringing people out of Egypt. And it's going to be bringing people out of Egypt, and this is going to be something which is going to be happening in their midst, in the midst of the promised land of the time. And that too is going to be fundamental to Jesus' preaching as he goes on, we'll see. He's constantly putting the question to people: are you really part of the Israel of God, or are you in fact secretly Egypt? He treats Egypt as a permanently living principle, if you like, that people need to be taken out of, and that part of the role of the fishermen is themselves coming out of Egypt and themselves learning how to help other people out of Egypt. It's going to be a skilled task, and it starts with non-pretentious people. Next he comes to James and John, and they leave their father — very significant in that culture. They had been preparing their nets, so these are people who engaged in preparation. They too can become followers of Jesus and learn this work of bringing people up. And then, whereof he's chosen these four, they will appear together towards the end of the Gospel when Jesus is talking about the end times with them. They're going to have to work through their various forms of rivalry, but they are the beginnings of the people who are being turned into the preachers of the kingdom, our predecessors and people to whom we can aspire. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.