When we are young, time can seem almost non-existent. It goes so slowly that it can feel like we’ll always be alive and young. But as we get older, time seems to speed up. Every year passes more quickly than the last, and the way time seemed to stretch to infinity in our youth seems like an illusion.

Think back to the summers when you were young and you’ll remember that illusion. We often find ourselves in that same kind of illusion as Christians. Time still seems never to pass in the sense that we forget to look for the coming of Christ. Every day of our life can blend into the next with no sense of urgency to truly follow Jesus and live the Gospel.

Our readings for today challenge that illusion. Though it can be easy for us to live our days as though Christ hasn’t come, he has. And when he came, he fundamentally changed our world and redeemed it. His kingdom has come, and as Christians we are called to shake ourselves from the illusion of this world and to be witnesses to the presence of God that is all around us.

First Reading Reflection

Jonah 3:1–5, 10

Although Jesus told us rightly that no prophet is without honor except in his own land, it is equally true that a foreign prophet  is  not  likely  to  be  heard  either. That  may  have  been one of the reasons that Jonah  first refused  to go to the Assyrian Ninevites.

Though the Mesopotamian empires to the north were powerful enemies of Israel, that may not have been the only reason that Jonah feared to prophesy to the Ninevites. Traditionally, Jonah has been identified with a prophet mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25, who prophesied the restoration of a border of Israel despite the reign of evil kings. We know that within a few years, King Ahaz formed an alliance with Assyria that turned to Israel’s disadvantage when the northern kingdom of Israel was swallowed up by that same power during the reign of King Hoshea.

If the Jonah mentioned here is the same figure, then what we could be seeing in the Book of Jonah is a preparation by God of the people of Assyria to be his instrument in the punishment of Israel for the idolatry of her kings. (The “forty days” warning suggests just such a period of testing and preparation in the Biblical idiom.) If this is the case, then Jonah may have been moved to evade God’s command out of motives of patriotism. That would explain Jonah’s anguish—even to the point of praying for death— when the Ninevites immediately repent with fasting in sackcloth and ashes. He may have realized that this spelled doom for his own people.

The tremendous irony in the story of Jonah is that while Jonah is reluctant to utter the prophetic word to the Assyrians, they are immediate in their response to that prophetic word. That in itself suggests some kind of divine intervention.

Second Reading Reflection

1 Corinthians 7:29-31

St. Paul sounds almost like a latter Jonah preaching repentance to Nineveh in our Second Reading. It is possible that St. Paul is here referring to an imminent return of the Lord at his second coming, as some scholars have argued. Another possibility presents itself, however. There is a reference from the book of Hebrews which may cast some light on what Paul means by “the world in its present form is passing away.”

Although the Church has never been sure that St. Paul is the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, it has always been considered to have been greatly influenced by Pauline thought. Some scholars have argued that it may have been written by Barnabas or Silas or some other close collaborator of St. Paul. There is a reference made in that letter to “the world to come” (Hebrews 2:5). In the context it is clear that the Pauline author is referring not to the next world or Heaven, but to the world that came into being by way of the revelation that had come through Christ, since the old world was ordered by the Law of Sinai and the new world is ordered by the New Law in Christ.

The internal evidence of both 1 Corinthians and Hebrews suggests that they were written before 70 A.D. In both cases the author(s) may have been admonishing their audience to live in a new way because an old world was passing and a new world coming. The new world referred to may not have been Heaven but, rather, a world in which the focus of God’s attention in history underwent a radical shift from Jerusalem to Rome.

Gospel Reflection

Mark 1:14-20

In this short passage we see another call to repentance and another immediate response. In fact, everything in Mark’s first chapter seems to happen “immediately.” Mark begins immediately with the events of John’s ministry and says nothing about Jesus’s birth and infancy. John’s ministry abruptly ends and Jesus’s abruptly begins. Jesus calls the Apostles, who immediately abandon their nets to follow him. In fact, in the Greek, the word eutheós, meaning “immediately” appears eleven times throughout Mark’s Gospel.

So we see in Mark the sudden arrival of the kingdom or “reign of God” at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Jesus says specifically, “This is the time of fulfillment.” One would expect the divine power to have an immediate effect, and so it does. At Jesus’s word, vocations, exorcisms, and healings happen immediately. Jesus has only to speak the word and miracles happen. But more than that—to borrow from St. John the Evangelist— he is the Word. Just as the divine Word speaks and everything is called into being, so also the Word Incarnate speaks and re-creates all of being. The Kingdom of God is indeed at hand.

DIGGING DEEPER:

Discipleship

The Church has a long tradition of talking about following Jesus in terms of discipleship. The Catechism says that to follow Jesus and be his disciple is to conform ourselves to him until he is formed in us. It also says that all the baptized are called to be disciples of Jesus. Being a disciple of Jesus includes going to Mass on Sunday, but it also has to encompass our whole life (See CCC 535–537).

This is an important word for our time when people no longer see the importance of religion. Religion matters because Jesus asks very definite things from us to be his disciple. Encourage participants to look into discipleship resources such as the Catechism or Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples.

PRAYER:

Let’s reflect on these words from the Gospel reading about the urgency of Jesus’s call to follow him. Ask Jesus what they mean in your own life. In what ways are you not responding to his call? What can you do better to follow him with the immediacy of these Apostles? Take a word that comes to mind and reflect for a moment on what it means to you personally. For example, you might have been attracted to the words “they abandoned their nets and followed him.” Ask yourself what they mean in your own life. What “nets” in your life keep you from responding to Jesus with urgency? How can you abandon them and follow him?

RESOLUTION: 

G.K. Chesterton once said, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” When we truly live in Christ and follow him, we have to swim against the stream of this world and its empty promises. Ask the Lord to give you the grace to let go of anything holding you back from him. What practical thing can you do this week to cast aside your nets and follow Jesus more closely?

Reprinted from  Opening the Word at Formed.org .
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