13 January 2025 -- Monday of the 1st odd week
Homily
Today we resume ‘Ordinary Time’ with the beginning of two books from the Bible that will accompany us for the next few weeks: the first reading is from the Letter to the Hebrews, and the second reading is from Mark's Gospel. This Gospel reading gives us the account of the call of the first apostles as recorded by the evangelist Mark.
The events of Jesus' public ministry are accelerating rapidly. John the Baptist has been arrested and is in prison. He will soon be put to death. Jesus, whose time has not yet come, travels to Galilee, where he begins to proclaim the good news. It would be futile to try and harmonise the accounts in Mark's Gospel with those in John's, and to try and decide whether there were two calls or just one, whether it was in Judea or Galilee. The evangelists are not journalists, and their aim is not to give a precise description of what happened; it is rather to give a spiritual and theological interpretation of the call of the first apostles.
In Mark, there are two initial groups: first, Simon and his brother Andrew, then James and John, sons of Zebedee. All four are fishermen, which was obviously a very common profession around Lake Galilee. All were at work when they were called. When Jesus says to them: ‘Follow me’, inviting them to be his disciples, they are called to give up not only what they own, i.e. their nets and their boats, but also their work -- their profession, their livelihood. In the second group, Mark wants to show that they are also called to abandon their family and other social relationships, that is, their father and his employees.
We see here, already put into practice, what Jesus would later say about discipleship : You cannot be my disciples without giving up everything you have, including father and mother, brothers and sisters and servants.
The beginning of the Gospel already shows us a community gathered around Jesus, made up of people who have given up everything to follow him. They form what will soon be called the ‘apostolic community’, that is, the community of Apostles around Jesus; and the monastic documents of the fourth and fifth centuries will see in this community the prototype of monastic life.
This is an opportunity for us to consider once again our own call to leave everything behind and follow Christ. Have we really left everything behind? How much of what we left behind did we later claim?... For the rest of this celebration, let us ask Jesus to open our eyes and allow us to answer these questions honestly.
Armand VEILLEUX