3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Peter
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time B
The world in its present form is passing away. What is the present form of the world? And will there be a new one? How will it appear and what will it look like?
For much of modernity, talk of ‘the world’ was normally taken to refer to a physical place, earth or possibly the universe as a whole. Anthropology has a different sort of answer to the question, ‘What is the world?’ The world as most of us experience it is not so much a physical place as a series of interlocking relationships. These relationships, in turn, are governed by various rules. We speak, for example, of the world of politics, and we mean the sort of monkey-business of professional lobbyists, trading favors behind closed doors and so on. From time to time, we hear talk of a revolution in American politics, where the bums are thrown out and new, honest men and women replace them. But the new and honest usually turn out to be bums themselves: the political world, its rules and pressures are too strong for mere human beings to change them significantly.
Perhaps Wordsworth best captured the difference between the world as a place, which is good and beautiful, and the form of the world that we experience as a kind of trap, in which the rules of relationships and apparent necessity snare us and cause to do things we don’t mean to do.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This snare or net woven of the rules of this world is exactly what is passing away. This is why Paul counsels us to live as if those rules no longer held. It is why most of the Fathers of the Church, commenting on this morning’s Gospel, point to the fact that the first Apostles leave behind their buying and selling, their wives, indeed their very worlds in order to follow Jesus Christ as He passes by.
It is worth noting that Jesus is passing by the sea. Mark uses the same word paragon, as Paul does to describe what the form of the world is doing, passing by or passing on. Saint Matthew says rather that He was walking by and Saint Luke omits the episode altogether. I would suggest that this is because Jesus is on a rescue mission, not unlike Jonah. There are two forms of the world in conflict, and they are about to separate definitively from one another. Jesus is coming to rescue those caught in this world, those toiling away at their work and its demands, not sure what the point is. “Leave your nets!” Jesus says, “come after me, and as I have pulled you out of the water, you too will save others by pulling them out of the water.”
That there are two worlds passing by each other also suggests that Jesus is not rescuing us to set us free from commitment or relationships. Far from it. Rather, He is inviting us to be freed from the nets of this form of the world so that the world can be recreated with proper relationships. What will these look like? These will be relationships based first and foremost on discipleship to Jesus Christ Himself. In other words, the new world that is coming into being is the Church, a new set of relationships and rules for acting as human beings freed from the dead-end of sin and death.
This is why we gather every week around the altar and table of the Lord: we are rehearsing, as it were, a new way of being. Our participation in the Eucharist is a decision on our parts to leave behind the old form of the world and work with Christ to co-create the new world. Is this goal too lofty? Are we out of our depth here? After all, we often don’t act like the Church even when gathered here, to say nothing of what we are like once we return to the old world outside of those doors.
John the Baptist preached that there was one coming after him who was more powerful than he. This verb ‘to come after’ signifies someone who will come and take up John’s work when his time is through. And indeed, it is precisely when John was arrested, as we hear this morning, that Jesus begins to preach a message very similar to John’s: the time is fulfilled, repent and believe the good news!
When Jesus sees Simon and Andrew, what does He ask them? Most people would respond, I believe, that He said “Follow Me.” In fact, He says, come after Me. Take up My work! He invites to pick up where He left off to be fishers of men and women, to bring about the conversion of the world to Christ.
Do the Apostles do this? Do they come after Jesus? Eventually, yes, once the Holy Spirit has been given. But today, the best they can do is to follow Him. Not a bad start, mind you, and probably about where most of us are. We recognize the need to change, to repent, but we feel overwhelmed by the possibility and demands of real sanctity. It seems, well, dangerous. To claim that the world is passing is to invite opposition from those who are powerful in the world, after all.
Nevertheless, Jesus really does invite me and you to live as if this world were passing away, and by lives of holiness to proclaim clearly to others that there is a better way than the present form of the world offers. That way is love and self-sacrifice, of the renewal of our minds that they and the world may be transformed, that is, given a new form unlike the one passing away.
Today’s first reading illustrates the dynamics of our efforts on behalf of God’s kingdom and what we can expect when we come after Christ. Oddly enough, when Jonah preached to Nineveh, they were all too ready to listen. In a sense, the old Nineveh really did pass away: the Nineveh of idolatry and sin changes course and becomes a nation that fears God and lives virtuously. The one person who remains unchanged is Jonah himself. It is this sort of stubbornness that often confronts us as we make the effort to be transformed in Christ. We set out to change other people and wind up having our own worldliness shown to us in all its ugliness. This is a good place to be! Conversion and transformation in Christ is not magical. He asks our consent at every step of the way and even forgives when our conformity to the world causes us to hedge. It is only much later in the story that Peter will discover the price of coming after Jesus, as well as the glory of the new world of the Church under the headship of the resurrected Christ.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us begin again today to the Church. So many people want the Church to conform to the world and so only view the Church politically, economically, sociologically and so on. What if we as Church could really proclaim the transformation of the world? Let us begin again the adventure of coming after Christ, of discipleship, that we may begin this transformation by the renewal of our own hearts: seeking out the various nets we have laid for ourselves within, our stubbornness, our pride, our vanity, our fear and need of comfort, and let us leave them behind to pass away. Let us rather look to the Lord, present in our midst this morning and be recreated in the Eucharist to be persons of praise, thanksgiving, hope and love in Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.
The world in its present form is passing away. What is the present form of the world? And will there be a new one? How will it appear and what will it look like?
For much of modernity, talk of ‘the world’ was normally taken to refer to a physical place, earth or possibly the universe as a whole. Anthropology has a different sort of answer to the question, ‘What is the world?’ The world as most of us experience it is not so much a physical place as a series of interlocking relationships. These relationships, in turn, are governed by various rules. We speak, for example, of the world of politics, and we mean the sort of monkey-business of professional lobbyists, trading favors behind closed doors and so on. From time to time, we hear talk of a revolution in American politics, where the bums are thrown out and new, honest men and women replace them. But the new and honest usually turn out to be bums themselves: the political world, its rules and pressures are too strong for mere human beings to change them significantly.
Perhaps Wordsworth best captured the difference between the world as a place, which is good and beautiful, and the form of the world that we experience as a kind of trap, in which the rules of relationships and apparent necessity snare us and cause to do things we don’t mean to do.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This snare or net woven of the rules of this world is exactly what is passing away. This is why Paul counsels us to live as if those rules no longer held. It is why most of the Fathers of the Church, commenting on this morning’s Gospel, point to the fact that the first Apostles leave behind their buying and selling, their wives, indeed their very worlds in order to follow Jesus Christ as He passes by.
It is worth noting that Jesus is passing by the sea. Mark uses the same word paragon, as Paul does to describe what the form of the world is doing, passing by or passing on. Saint Matthew says rather that He was walking by and Saint Luke omits the episode altogether. I would suggest that this is because Jesus is on a rescue mission, not unlike Jonah. There are two forms of the world in conflict, and they are about to separate definitively from one another. Jesus is coming to rescue those caught in this world, those toiling away at their work and its demands, not sure what the point is. “Leave your nets!” Jesus says, “come after me, and as I have pulled you out of the water, you too will save others by pulling them out of the water.”
That there are two worlds passing by each other also suggests that Jesus is not rescuing us to set us free from commitment or relationships. Far from it. Rather, He is inviting us to be freed from the nets of this form of the world so that the world can be recreated with proper relationships. What will these look like? These will be relationships based first and foremost on discipleship to Jesus Christ Himself. In other words, the new world that is coming into being is the Church, a new set of relationships and rules for acting as human beings freed from the dead-end of sin and death.
This is why we gather every week around the altar and table of the Lord: we are rehearsing, as it were, a new way of being. Our participation in the Eucharist is a decision on our parts to leave behind the old form of the world and work with Christ to co-create the new world. Is this goal too lofty? Are we out of our depth here? After all, we often don’t act like the Church even when gathered here, to say nothing of what we are like once we return to the old world outside of those doors.
John the Baptist preached that there was one coming after him who was more powerful than he. This verb ‘to come after’ signifies someone who will come and take up John’s work when his time is through. And indeed, it is precisely when John was arrested, as we hear this morning, that Jesus begins to preach a message very similar to John’s: the time is fulfilled, repent and believe the good news!
When Jesus sees Simon and Andrew, what does He ask them? Most people would respond, I believe, that He said “Follow Me.” In fact, He says, come after Me. Take up My work! He invites to pick up where He left off to be fishers of men and women, to bring about the conversion of the world to Christ.
Do the Apostles do this? Do they come after Jesus? Eventually, yes, once the Holy Spirit has been given. But today, the best they can do is to follow Him. Not a bad start, mind you, and probably about where most of us are. We recognize the need to change, to repent, but we feel overwhelmed by the possibility and demands of real sanctity. It seems, well, dangerous. To claim that the world is passing is to invite opposition from those who are powerful in the world, after all.
Nevertheless, Jesus really does invite me and you to live as if this world were passing away, and by lives of holiness to proclaim clearly to others that there is a better way than the present form of the world offers. That way is love and self-sacrifice, of the renewal of our minds that they and the world may be transformed, that is, given a new form unlike the one passing away.
Today’s first reading illustrates the dynamics of our efforts on behalf of God’s kingdom and what we can expect when we come after Christ. Oddly enough, when Jonah preached to Nineveh, they were all too ready to listen. In a sense, the old Nineveh really did pass away: the Nineveh of idolatry and sin changes course and becomes a nation that fears God and lives virtuously. The one person who remains unchanged is Jonah himself. It is this sort of stubbornness that often confronts us as we make the effort to be transformed in Christ. We set out to change other people and wind up having our own worldliness shown to us in all its ugliness. This is a good place to be! Conversion and transformation in Christ is not magical. He asks our consent at every step of the way and even forgives when our conformity to the world causes us to hedge. It is only much later in the story that Peter will discover the price of coming after Jesus, as well as the glory of the new world of the Church under the headship of the resurrected Christ.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us begin again today to the Church. So many people want the Church to conform to the world and so only view the Church politically, economically, sociologically and so on. What if we as Church could really proclaim the transformation of the world? Let us begin again the adventure of coming after Christ, of discipleship, that we may begin this transformation by the renewal of our own hearts: seeking out the various nets we have laid for ourselves within, our stubbornness, our pride, our vanity, our fear and need of comfort, and let us leave them behind to pass away. Let us rather look to the Lord, present in our midst this morning and be recreated in the Eucharist to be persons of praise, thanksgiving, hope and love in Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.
posted by Prior Peter, OSB | 1:48 PM
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