Jan. 21: 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Teach me your ways, O Lord

Jon 3:1-5; Ps 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; 1 Cor 7:29-31; Mk 1:14-20

In her book “The Cloister Walk” describing her visits to the Benedictine monastery of St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota, novelist Kathleen Norris has a chapter on the difference between a “choice” and a “call.” All of us like to have choices, and, if we are fortunate, we make a lot of them in our lives: what school to go to, what we will wear, what friends we prefer, what food we like to eat, what job we desire, and so on. 

But a “call” is something different — it can come unexpectedly, not something we choose but breaking in on us from an outside source. We get a phone call about a job opportunity we hadn’t expected. We meet someone who stirs our heart and changes our life forever. Or we receive sad news of the sudden death of a loved one and our world is no longer the same. 

When the Gospels describe the first encounter of Jesus with his disciples, the stories are framed as a “call” not a “choice.” In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, fishermen are going about their business on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, casting their nets in the sea or sitting in their family boats mending their nets.

Unexpectedly, Jesus breaks into their lives: “Come, follow me and I will make you fishers of people.”  

There is no run-up to this encounter; no exploratory conversations; no job interviews so they could make an informed choice. No, they are called and they follow: “they abandoned their nets and followed him.” First, it was Simon and his brother Andrew; then James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. “So they left their father Zebedee in the boat along with the hired men and followed him.”

The first reading today also deals with a “call” but a collective one to the people of Nineveh, a very ancient Assyrian city (the location now of the tortured Iraqi city of Mosul). For the biblical peoples, Assyrians were nothing but trouble and threat. That is backdrop for the book of Jonah, one of the most enticing books of the Bible.  

The lectionary provides a heavily edited version. God asks the prophet Jonah to be the voice calling the Ninevites to repentance. Since Jonah can’t stand them he is reluctant to do so, trying to escape by a sea voyage (only to end up in the belly of the whale). When he finally does his job he is amazed — and even thoroughly depressed — that the Ninevites heed God’s call and repent.   

Some of the most profound and transformative events of our lives come as a call, which we can either accept or ignore. This is how the Gospels describe the experience of our Christian faith. 

For most of us, our induction into the church came when we were infants and it was our parents and family that “responded” for us to God’s offer of faith. Others, though, must grapple with the call of faith later in their lives, perhaps influenced by their spouse or in the wake of an illness or some other challenging experience. But, all of us, as we mature, have to respond to that initial call over and over.  

In that same chapter of her book, Norris describes a custom at the monastery where periodically individual monks lay out for the rest of the community their “path” to the monastery — the experiences and the people that eventually alerted them to their call or vocation to monastic life.

For us, too, we might reflect on all the people and experiences that have shaped our lives. How has God’s gift of faith, our “call” to be a follower of Jesus, worked in our lives? How faithfully have we responded to the call in the everyday choices we make, in the way we respond to others, particularly those in need? 

The poignant refrain of the Psalm response for today can be our own humble prayer: “Teach me your ways, O God; teach me your paths.”