Second Sunday In Ordinary Time

God fishing

First Reading: 1 Samuel 3:3b-10, 19

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 40:2, 4, 7-8, 8-9, 10

Second Reading: 1 Corinthans 6:13c-15a, 17-20

Gospel: John 1:35-42

"If today you hear God's voice, harden not your hearts"

This week past week was vocations awareness week in the Church.  It’s no surprise, then,  that today’s scriptures are classic texts dealing with God’s calling.  In the Old Testament, there is the famous call of Samuel to be a prophet with the equally classic response, “Speak, O Lord, your servant is listening.”  The Gospel of John is the story of Jesus’ invitation to join him with a response to “where are you staying” with “come, and you will see”. 

Samuel’s call to being a prophet is like Jesus’ call.  Both are responding to hearing God’s voice calling them.  In the Gospel of John, we frequently read of the Son hearing the Father’s words.  Like the call of the disciples, we are invited in John’s gospel to follow, and then “see”.    This seems backwards, though.  Who proceeds to follow without seeing first?  Fools, I suppose, but such is the nature of falling in love.  Jesus awakened something profound in his followers.  Remember the disciples on the road to Emmaus, where one of them, Cleopas, remarks to the other disciple after Jesus stayed with them:  “Were not our hearts burning within us….?”(Luke 24)  We follow Jesus without seeing where we are going because we are like love-struck fools, “our hearts burning within us”.  But like Cleopas and the other disciple, and the two of John’s disciples who followed Jesus, we often “see” in recollection rather than in the moment of the call.  There is a type of gestation associated with vocation, a growing awareness of something we cannot escape.  Rarely are we overcome with brilliant light and a deep voice from the clouds and proceed meekly, with a sense of terrible awe; rather, our calling is often like a whisper, and our response like a series of awakenings, epiphanies.  Like Samuel, we often mistake God’s voice for someone else’s (and, unfortunately, sometimes, someone else’s for God’s).  Jesus’ implausible nature as Messiah, the Christ, God incarnate, is God’s way.  Consider who God has called in salvation history.  None of the anyone would consider likely candidates for carrying God’s message. 

We’ve heard of Mary’s unlikely calling recently.  Abraham and Sarah laughed at God’s plan for him to be the “father of the nation of Israel,” Moses protested “Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant.  I am slow of speech and tongue”,  Gideon’s response to God’s call to defeat the mighty Midianites was “My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family”.  Rehab, a prostitute who lived in Jerico, helped Joshua defeat the people keeping them from the Promised Land.  David was a scrawny teen that became the greatest of the kings of Israel.  God has even used a donkey (Balaam’s donkey in Numbers 22:27-31) to bring God’s message.  Sinners, stutters, scrawny kids and donkeys God has considered worthy to be called.  When you learn about the Apostles, you’ve got uneducated fishermen who never seem to get what Jesus is trying to show them.  You’ve got Peter, who is nicknamed by Jesus “The Rock”, and is called to lead the Church, who denies he even knows Christ three times following Jesus’ crucifixion.  Rather than approaching vocation with a sense of not being worthy (who is?), let your faith in God resurrection to make all things new, work in your heart.  As the Psalmist sings: “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts”. 

Vocation, though, is more than a call; it is also a response.  The incarnation is more about Jesus’ dynamic and heart-led relationship with God than being God-In-the-Flesh, through the response to be baptized, being led into the desert and, ultimately to the cross, Jesus grew into his relationship with the Father.

 We too “grow” into our vocations.  We never come fully aware of where we are going to stay.  Through fits and starts, dead ends, cul-de-sacs and wrong way markers, we follow, however imperfectly, led by the burning in our hearts at having heard the voice of God who still calls us today.