Homily:
2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B
“What do you ask of God’s Church for your child?” It seems simple enough to me. I mean, it’s a question with a one word
answer and so it seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to know what the answer
is. And, it’s obvious that the parents already
know the answer, even if they don’t realize it, because they’ve brought their
child to church that day in a gleaming white outfit. Nonetheless, more often than not, this
question seems to make parents anxious and so their answers stumble.
Perhaps the answer to this question is not as easy as it
seems to be. Sure, the expected answer
(and the one most commonly used) is “baptism”.
This is why the parents have brought their child to church that day, so
that their child could be baptized.
Nevertheless, the Rite of Baptism gives options for the response to this
question that tell us something about how “weighty” it is. These include: “faith” and “eternal
life”. Whoa. That is different. “What do you ask of God’s Church for your
child?” “Faith” looks a lot different
than “baptism”, doesn’t it? And “eternal
life” takes this question into a whole other spectrum. “Whoa, Father, I don’t want something that
‘weighty’. I just want a nice little
ceremony… and some pictures when it’s over.”
And so, even if they don’t realize it, perhaps these parents are sensing
the weightiness of this question and so stumble a bit in making their response.
In many ways, what this question is really asking is “What
are you looking for?” In this case, even
the answer “baptism” is a lot weightier than it seems at first. Because the question “What are you looking
for?” goes deep down to the fundamental desires that move us. And so to try and answer that question
becomes difficult, especially if you’ve never thought about what your response
should be. ///
In today’s Gospel reading, we hear a radically different
telling of how Jesus’ first disciples came to start following him. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
Jesus is always the one initiating a call.
Finding his would-be disciples engaged in their daily activities, Jesus
calls them to leave those things behind and to follow him. In John’s Gospel, however, we are given a
different perspective. Here, Jesus is
not doing any calling; rather, it is John the Baptist who is pointing him
out. John had garnered a following:
disciples who were taking seriously his call to repentance in preparation for
the coming Messiah. When Jesus appeared
on the scene, John began to point to him as the one who had been sent from God
and his disciples began to follow Jesus.
These included Andrew, the future Apostle, and (in a mark of consistency
with the other Gospel accounts) he is shown as being the first to follow Jesus.
As Andrew and one of John’s other disciples turn to follow
Jesus, Jesus turns to them and asks them “What are you looking for?” These two could have given Jesus any number
of answers: “the Messiah”, “redemption”, “hope”, or even answers consistent
with those that parents give when presenting their child for baptism, like
“faith” or “eternal life”. It is
interesting, though, that these two didn’t give Jesus a straight answer. Their response, rather, was “where are you
staying?” Perhaps they weren’t ready to
give an answer to such a weighty question and so thought they could buy some
time if they could follow Jesus to wherever it was that he was staying. Perhaps not.
Either way, this account shows us a different way to become Jesus’
disciple: one that comes not from receiving a direct call, but rather from
responding to a longing within that senses its fulfillment in Jesus.
I like this alternative way of becoming Jesus’ disciple,
because it’s accessible to anyone, not just to those who have received a call. I like it, too, because it reminds us that
there is some responsibility on our part to be open to the possibility of
following Jesus. In other words, this
way shows us that there has to be some engagement of this question, “What are
you looking for?”, before one can find the answer (or, at least, before one can
realize that he or she has found the answer).
Finally, I like it because it shows us that there is also a communal
aspect to every call to discipleship.
In our first reading, we heard the Lord’s call of young
Samuel. At first, Samuel didn’t
recognize the Lord’s voice. Each time
that he was called, Samuel thought that it was Eli who was calling him. Samuel needed help in order to recognize that
it was the Lord who was calling him.
When Samuel approached Eli for the third time, Eli realized that it was
the Lord who was calling Samuel and so he instructed Samuel in how to respond
if the Lord called him again. Without
Eli, Samuel may have never understood what was happening—in a sense, what it
was that he was looking for—and thus he would have missed the chance to respond
to the Lord’s call. Then, in the Gospel
reading, we heard how the disciples didn’t recognize who Jesus was until John
pointed him out. And so we see that those
who surround us have an impact on whether or not we will begin to follow Jesus.
And so, my brothers and sisters, perhaps today we need to
ask ourselves this question that Jesus posed to these first disciples: “What am
I looking for?”; because if we aren’t engaging life on this level then we
probably aren’t living very well and we almost certainly aren’t living very
satisfying lives. When we engage life on
this level, however, we open ourselves to finding answers in places that we
least expect and, thus, the possibility of finding lasting fulfillment becomes
very real.
And so let us ask ourselves this question again today and
throughout this week—in fact, let’s allow Jesus to ask us this question: for this
is prayer—and let us open our hearts to see that the answer to this question is
found in him; for he is here and he invites us: come and see.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – January 18th, 2015
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