THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

 ‘Follow me and I will make you into fishers of men.’ And at once they left their nets and followed him.”

That’s all we get in today’s Gospel to describe how Jesus called his first disciples and how they responded. That’s it. In just seven verses our Gospel writer says four fishermen drop everything and follow Jesus on the basis of his two-word command: Follow me.

The Gospel doesn’t mention that the fishermen had ever heard of Jesus—this was their first encounter. God broke into their ordinary world in an extraordinary way through Jesus’ call and that call demanded a response. These men were established fishermen, they had a trade, however they were nobodies to the aristocracy of the time but They weren’t on the margins. Simon Peter was married and his family home in Capernaum. James and John were part of their family’s successful fishing business that actually had hired workers. These were grown men who were established members of their society. This decision to follow Jesus placed a burden on all their families in one way or another. And yet, they did it.

So often, we want to be like Jonah from our First Reading today. We hear God’s call, and we turn the other way and run, as far as we can go. We don’t want to disrupt things, especially things that we’ve worked so hard for. We hear other voices saying that we can’t make a difference, so we just end up with Jonah, out of touch with God and out of touch with our meaning and purpose that God is trying to gift us with. To “repent and believe in the good news,” as Jesus asks us in our Gospel means that we must turn to God and turn away from all the voices calling us to walk some other path.

This is a paradox! We are often afraid of God—afraid to follow the very one who is our rock and our salvation. It doesn’t feel safe to follow God, even though it is only with God that we know the deepest peace, the greatest protection when we are weary, the call that echoes in our bones. But even with all those things,   we don’t know how the Holy Spirit will move. We can’t control God and that scares us. Being Christians makes us risk-takers. As the English theologian Charles Raven once said, “Religion involves adventure and discovery and a joy in living dangerously.”

When we hear in the Scriptures the words, “The Word of the Lord came to so-and-so…” we know that the person who is experiencing the Word of the Lord is in for a life-changing experience. The word translated as “came” actually means “happened” in Hebrew. Think about how that changes our story of Jonah: “The Word of God happened to Jonah a second time.” Words are important. Jonah knows what to expect when the Word of God happens to a person, and they refuse to respond. Jonah ran the other way the first time and ended up in the belly of a huge fish. So, this second time, Jonah responds to God with faithfulness and sets out to warn the people of Nineveh of their impending destruction. Jonah has learned discipleship the hard way.

Discipleship comes with a cost. It means we might have to give up a comfortable, safe life. It means we turn away from the voices that plague us and follow the One who is leading us to a new way of being—the One that is “happening” to us. We don’t have to worry or fear, though. We bring to God’s service all the gifts and abilities we already have, and we trust that we will always receive new gifts and the power to use them. It is unsettling—we are not used to it. We’re used to maintaining the status quo. But we have this one, beautiful life (that we know of), and it demands that we give it our best, no matter what our age, our education, our economic status, our insecurities—no matter what. And who knows what our best is better than God?

The Gospel challenges us to heed the call of Jesus, embracing the transformative power of the kingdom of God. As we repent, believe, and follow, may we, like the disciples, experience the profound impact of Jesus' call in our lives and, in turn, become instruments of His grace in the world.