First reading, Jonah 3:1-5: The first reading tells us how we should respond promptly to God’s call for repentance.  The Book of Jonah was written in Palestine around the 5^th century B.C. after the Babylonian exile. Some of the Jews were quite nationalistic, filled with a smug sense of superiority over other nations. Like Jonah, they wished God would destroy the nations perceived as enemies.  For Jonah the Ninevites were terrible people doing terrible things.  The story of Jonah is meant to rebuke their smallness of vision, and teach them that God has care for other peoples as well as for them.  The first two chapters describe how God forces Jonah to accept His call by subjecting him to an excruciating experience in the belly of a whale.  Finally Jonah accepts God’s call to preach repentance in Nineveh but is disappointed seeing the ready response of that evil city to God’s message of repentance and penance.  Jonah was not even finished the first day of his preaching journey and the people totally turned around – and believed in God’s love and reconciliation and forgiveness.  Contrary to his expectations, the pagan peoples of the city "believed in God" and "renounced their evil behavior".  But perhaps the greatest change – the more radical turn about happened to Jonah.  Jonah was the arrogant, bigoted, narrow-minded prophet.  But he finally realized that God’s love is not elite – God’s forgiveness is not to be contained – God’s offer of salvation is for all – and we’d best not thwart it.

SOURCE: Fr. Tony's Homilies / Used with permission

Second Reading, 1 Corinthians 7:29-31:The second reading also urges us to get converted and to accept the “good news’ preached by Jesus.Saint Paul had to be strict and detailed in his moral teaching to the Christians in Corinth because Corinth was a bawdy seaport with a typical seaport's set of ethics and very bizarre philosophical ideas.  Hence Paul spends all of chapter 7 on marriage and sexual morality.  He tells the Corinthians to live in total freedom and detachment because nothing they have, whether things or personal attachments, are permanent and can disappear at a moment's notice.  Whether life is very good or very bad: nothing lasts except the fundamental values of truth and love, of freedom and justice.  It is what we are, not what we have that counts.  Hence let us ask to have the freedom to follow the call of God and to be ready to go wherever Jesus is asking us to go.  

SOURCE: Fr. Tony's Homilies / Used with permission

Invitation to repentance: It is highly likely that Jesus and the four followers he summons here are not strangers.  Even if they have not personally met each other before this time, they were aware of each other's aspirations and objectives.  Jesus uses exactly the same words as John the Baptist used:  'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’  The Greek word used “metanoeo” means to change one's mind or direction.  Repentance means that we take a complete change of direction in our lives.  It involves a radical conversion (metanoia), a change of direction and priorities in our lives.  Real repentance means that a man has come, not only to be sorry for the consequences of his sin, but to hate sin itself.  We often think of repentance as feeling guilty, but it is really a change of mind or direction -- seeing things from a different perspective.  Once we begin to see things rightly, it might follow that we will feel bad about having seen them wrongly for so long -- but repentance starts with the new vision rather than the guilt feelings.  By true repentance we are giving up control of our lives and throwing our sinful lives on the mercy of God.  We are inviting God to do what we can't do ourselves -- namely to raise the dead -- to change and recreate us.  "Repent" is used in the present tense -- "Keep on repenting!"  "Continually be repentant!"  It means that repentance must be the ongoing lifestyle of the people in the kingdom. 

Kingdom of God is the theme of Jesus’ preaching.  Matthew as a devout Jew consistently uses the phrase "kingdom of heaven" while Mark, a gentile convert,  uses the word  "kingdom of God," without any scruples about using God's name.  We probably shouldn't interpret the "kingdom of God" as heaven where God rules.  If we did, what should be our response to the coming of heaven's rule?  Surprisingly, it is not worship or praise, but repentance.  Perhaps this is the big problem with the coming of the Kingdom or the coming of Jesus at Christmas or Palm Sunday -- we want to celebrate and praise, rather than repent.  In telling us that the kingdom has come near, Jesus is telling us that we can dwell in this kingdom provided we repent or turn away from the idols that crowd our lives and do the will of God as it is done in heaven, thus   allowing God to reign in our lives.  

Believe in the “gospel’ or “good news.”  It was preeminently good news that Jesus came to bring to men.  It was the good news that God is our loving and forgiving Father and not a punishing judge, and He wants  to save us through His son Jesus.  So it is good news of truth (Gal.2:5; Col.1:5), good news of hope (Col.1:23), good news of peace with God and man (Eph.6:15), good news of God's promise of salvation (Eph. I; 13, 3:6) and good news of immortality (2Tim.1:10).  To believe in the good news simply means to take Jesus at his word, to believe that God is the kind of God that Jesus has told us about, to believe that God so loves the world that He will make any sacrifice to bring us back to Himself, to believe that what sounds too good to be true is really true.  To believe in the “good news” involves a total commitment; the investing of one's whole self in God without any guarantees or preconditions. 

The call of the apostles: Just like Matthew’s, Mark’s account of this call is very brief.  Jesus calls two pairs of brothers Andrew and Peter, James and John inviting them to become his disciples.  The men respond immediately by leaving their nets, their boats, and their father to follow Jesus.  Usually rabbinical students sought out their teachers and attached themselves to them.  However, Jesus as rabbi takes the initiative and calls -- probably less than ideal candidates -- to be his students.  The disciples were simple fishermen with no great background.  In Cicero's ranking of occupations (De Off 1.150-51), owners of cultivated land appear first and fishermen last.  What Jesus needs is ordinary folk who will give Him themselves.  What Christ needs is not our ability, but our availability.  What Jesus teaches them is not a course of study, but a way of life to follow.  Hence Jesus offers these men the opportunity to observe him at close hand on a daily basis.  

Call to make fishers of men: In the ancient world fishing was a metaphor for two distinct activities: judgment and teaching.  Fishing for people meant bringing them to justice by dragging them out of their hiding places and setting them before the judge.  And “fishing” was also used of teaching people, of the process of leading them from ignorance to wisdom.  Both cases involve a radical change of environment, a break with a former way of life and entrance upon a new way of life.  We are the fish and what God promises us, who are dragged out of the water in the nets to die, is a resurrection, a new life, a new family, a new future, all under God's control, all within the Kingdom of Heaven, which has come near in Jesus.  We have very little control over our own lives, but as fish caught in the net of God's love, we can trust that we are under God's control.  We have to believe that being captured by God's love, that responding to the command to repent and die to self, that being raised to a new life by God, is not only right for us, but a message we need to share with the entire world.  The disciples will be trained to do precisely what Jesus is doing right now:  proclaiming the kingdom, recruiting people for it, and drawing them into a community that experiences God's reign. 

SOURCE: Fr. Tony's Homilies / Used with permission