By F. Luis Casasus, General Superior of Idente missionaries
Commentary on the Sunday Gospel of 21-1-2018, III Sunday in Ordinary Time.(Book of Jonah 3:1-5.10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Saint Mark 1:14-20).
1. Can you believe it? You have two possible choices when situations arise. You can be reactive and let the situation dictate your response, or you can be proactive and choose your actions based on your knowledge that God has things in control. This is what happened to Jesus in today’s Gospel text: John is arrested and, instead of taking precautionary measures, or becoming discouraged, He considers that it is the time of fulfillment. Can you believe it? This is the logic of the Kingdom as being a sort of logic of the impossible. We also face many difficulties from within and from without, in our life and in the lives of the people we love. But we should not allow ourselves to become disheartened because we have many proofs of the Holy Spirit’s continuing action. The most apparent and at the same time intimate is a special and specific sort of forgiveness: Unexpectedly, when I have been lukewarm, even unfaithful, and…here is a new, clear and concrete opportunity to do good to my neighbor, to do something in the name of God. Again, a good reason to be proactive rather than reactive in the affairs of the Kingdom. It is the time of fulfillment.
Every week we learn how to draw and share in lessons from the most painful situations (our sins, our mistakes and our doubts) in the Didactic Lesson of the Ascetical Examination. Yes, we have to pay attention to the many ways the Holy spirit confirms his active presence in our lives:
Son, observe diligently the motions of nature and grace; for they move with great contrariety and subtlety, and can hardly be distinguished but by a spiritual man, and one that is inwardly enlightened. (The Imitation of Christ)
2. In order to be aware and sensitive to the Holy spirit, we have to fast Fasting, like celibacy, or in general, abnegation, makes little sense outside the context of eternity. To fast does sound meaningless to the person who lives for this life alone. Why waste good pleasures when this is all there, when the physical and psychological world is king? Individualism and modernity tell us to do what feels right, that pleasure is convenient, and that you harm yourself by not taking what you want. Of course, we refer most of all to fasting of our passions. We have the experience in our Examination of Perfection: it is so difficult to separate the attachments to our judgments, our desires and our instinct for happiness…they stand as one!
The temptations of Christ in the desert were directed towards pleasure, power and fame. The three were presented during the forty days of prayer and fasting. The three were overcome with the contrary virtues: denial, obedience to God and His Word, and humility. These three virtues are the fruits of fasting.
In fasting, we discover the emptiness of earthly realities and the true food of the Eucharist. The physical emptiness that we experience in fasting helps us to become more aware of our interior emptiness and our need for spiritual realities. Even psychologists tell us that patient people are able to vividly imagine the future. They are also more apt to accept the outcome, even if things do not turn out as they predicted. They are less attached to the outcome than those who want it…now.
This is the masterful teaching of Saint John Chrysostom:
The value of fasting consists not only on avoiding certain foods, but of renouncing to all attitudes, thoughts and sinful desires. Whoever limits fasting simply to food is minimizing the great value that fasting has. If you fast, prove it in your actions! If you see a brother in need, have compassion on him. If you see a brother receiving recognition, do not envy him. For fasting to be true, it cannot be so only in our mouths, it must be a fasting of our eyes, ears, feet, hands…of all our bodies, interior and exterior.
Fast with your hands by keeping them pure in the disinterested service of others. Fast in your feet by not being slow in love and service. Fast with your eyes by not seeing impure things or by not looking at others to criticize them. Fast of all that puts your soul or your holiness in danger. It will be useless to deny my body food while I am feeding my heart with waste, with impurity, with selfishness, with competitions, with comfort.
You fast of food, but you allow yourself to hear vain and worldly things. You ought to also fast with your ears. You ought to fast from hearing things that are said about your brothers, lies that are said about others, especially gossip, rumors, cold words that are hurtful and against others.
You also ought to fast with your mouth; you ought to fast from saying anything bad about others. For of what value is it for you do not eat if you devour your brother?
Yes, fasting also cannot be separated from fraternal charity. If a Christian would deny himself all things, it is in order to give it and to give himself to his brothers and be, therefore, a testimony of his love for God.
Although fasting of food is not the essence of spiritual fasting, listen to the well-made remark of Benedict XVI:
To fast means to accept an essential aspect of the Christian life. It is necessary to rediscover again the corporal aspect of the Faith: abstention from food is one of those aspects. Sexuality and nourishment are among the fundamental elements of the physicality of man. In our time, the decline in the understanding of virginity goes hand in hand with the decline in the understanding of fasting. And these two declines have a single root: the present-day eclipse of the eschatological tension, which is to say, of the tension of the Christian faith towards eternal life. Virginity and periodic abstinence from food are meant to testify that eternal life awaits us, indeed that it is already among us, and ‘the form of this world passes away.’ Without virginity and without fasting, the Church is no longer Church; she is assimilated to her historical surroundings. The modern world finds fasting of our passions (power, curiosity or pleasures) strange and foolish, because it deprives us of the things that are supposed to give us life and joy. Fasting opens the heart of the Christian to just how unfulfilling worldly pleasures are. Yet, we choose to continue flooding our souls with them, because we are terrified of the emptiness we believe will come without them. We seek for immediate gratification. To fast is to believe that the attachments of this world are merely band aids on a wound, while God is the final remedy upon which we can depend. This is why the Ninevites’ fast was so successful. By their actions, they showed Yahve that they believed in His power and might, and that they wanted him to fulfill them more than their previous sins and pleasures ever could. 3. Today, there is another relevant point for our reflection: Time is running out, Saint Paul says. Many Christians believe that it is an exaggeration to say that we are called to save humanity from destruction just as Jonah was called to save the Ninevites. But there is too much suffering, both seen and unseen, mainly because the world is degenerating into godlessness. We use to say that life goes so fast! No one is promised another day of life. Every day on this earth thousands of people die and, unfortunately, thousands die without Christ. With all of our resources and technical abilities, there are still hundreds of people groups and millions of persons who have yet to hear the Gospel message of Christ. Unless someone intervenes, they will die without ever having heard the life-saving, eternity-shaping Good News. But again, we do not fully believe that the eternity of our fellowmen is in our hands and depends on our testimony. We are not talking about the dilemma of going to Hell or going to Heaven; we do not refer to a distant future or after death; when you act on the Word within you, the Most Holy Trinity will manifest his presence and makes
himself real to the people you have presented it: The Kingdom of heaven is at hand. We will only be aware of this, with Saint Paul in today’s second reading, when we realize in many ways that the world in its present form is passing away. there is a possibility that we think of the Kingdom as only belonging to the life after death. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are some things that are happening now that give us a real feeling that time is running out and the blessed hope will appear. There is a bombardment of violence and lawlessness that the earth has never witnessed. Maybe the world is coming to an end, sociologically, technologically, and physiologically. Who knows? There are many comments on this topic, but the most important aspect is that time us running out for you and me. And for each of our neighbors. These are things many people know but some choose to ignore or rationalize what they know deep in their heart of hearts, because of the fear of facing reality or out of plain rebellion. The gradual increase in the Church’s sense of urgency for renewal in mission over the last 150 years, has taken the form of a call to a new evangelization. Personal witness is the starting point for all evangelization. A Christian disciple is such to the degree his actions are witness of his love for God and others, and of God’s love for man. Consciously or not, the unbeliever will evaluate Christ and Christianity through what he sees in Christians.
Talking about urgency, what could be the reason for the immediate response of Andrew, Simon, John and James to the call of Jesus? They must have been so struck by Him, His passion, His life and His teachings that they fell in love with Christ. Indeed, vocation is not so much a logical thing that you decide based on your expertise or skills or knowledge or training. It is based on the heart. Indeed, it is said that those whom we admire, we have reasons, but those whom we love, we have no reason. And this urgent call happens not only once in our life, but in a permanent manner, through the deepest needs and dreams of our neighbors.
The urgent repentance that is required of us is to believe that we are loved unconditionally and are forgiven. “Repent and believe!” In other words, the first repentance is not just from sin but from unbelief. If I truly believe that God loves me as He loves His only Son, then I will be able to help others to be truly human and happy in life, people who will live a life based on truth and compassion. This is what the New Evangelization is all about; namely, to help those who are already baptized come to a personal encounter with the Lord so that they in turn can be like the disciples, and become “fishers of men” to all those who have not known Him yet. Unbelief, together with a mistaken understanding of tolerance, have given rise to a view of secular society which is stripped of the public presence of God. There is now the sense that to promote the interests of man, God must be denied, or at least expelled from the public square. Pushing this vacuous secularism is a consumerist materialism in which the supreme value of man’s flourishing is to be found in the pursuit of ease and pleasure. Not
surprisingly, the effect of this on society, including on many Christians, has been an increasing sense of indifference, and even hostility, toward God, and matters of faith. The three groups of non-believers, former believers, and indifferent believers prove to be quite resistant to evangelization. We see that there is an urgent need for increased missionary fervor among us, something that was recognized more than a century ago. While there is an argument to be made that things have improved over the last years, few would argue the progress has been adequate to the challenges we face. But we must be mindful that authentic, evangelical enthusiasm is borne from a mature understanding, and living of the faith. Attempts at shortcuts to increased fervor by means of emotional manipulation or temporary programs will result in short-lived, superficial, and ineffective responses. Christ is in need of our immediate response, and humankind too. He knew that His mission was not going to be realized by Him alone. If the disciples could give up their whole life for Jesus, it was because they had been listening to Him and watching Him, and then they fell in love with Jesus. Like the disciples, if we want to find meaning in life and true security today, we must be ready to let go of our worldly securities completely and follow Jesus, because a vocation is not something that you do, but something that you are. In the course of a lifetime, modern people have many careers, many jobs. But this is not who they are, it is just something they are currently doing. When Jesus called Simon and Andrew, James and John, you and me, he did not call us to do something. He called us to be something. He called us to be disciples. And the very reason for the urgency of the apostolic ministry and the zeal in Christ’s heart that was to consume him was because of the sense of the urgency of men and women repenting and believing now, or else they would be lost now and forever. This is how we share in the energetic and vigorous Affliction of Christ.
