3rd Sunday of Year B
“Convert” is the key word of this Sunday. At the words preached by Jonah, the people of Nineveh did penance and converted. Jesus, according to Mark’s Gospel, began his preaching in Galilee by inviting people to convert: “Repent, and believe the Good News.” In the second reading we are shown the consequences of true conversion, because the true convert lives in the awareness that the world as we know it is transient.
P. Antonio Izqeuirdo, L.C., Copyright © Dicastery for the Clergy
Passing of the Baton
24 January 2021 | Library of the Apostolic Palace
3rd Sunday of Year B
This Sunday’s Gospel passage (cf. Mk 1:14-20) shows us, so to speak, the “passing of the baton” from John the Baptist to Jesus. John was His precursor; he prepared the terrain for Him and he prepared the way for Him: Jesus can now begin his mission and announce the salvation by now present; He was the salvation. His preaching is summarized in these words: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (v. 15). Simply. Jesus did not mince words. It is a message that invites us to reflect on two essential themes: time and conversion.
In this text of Mark the Evangelist, time is to be understood as the duration of the history of salvation worked by God; therefore, the time “fulfilled” is that in which this salvific action reaches its pinnacle, full realization: it is the historical moment in which God sent his Son into the world and his Kingdom was rendered more “close” than ever. The time of salvation was fulfilled because Jesus arrived. However, salvation is not automatic; salvation is a gift of love and as such, it is offered to human freedom. Always, when we speak of love, we speak of freedom: love without freedom is not love; it may be interest, it may be fear, many things, but love is always free, and being free it calls for a freely given response: it calls for our conversion. Thus, it means changing mentality — this is conversion, changing mentality — and changing life: no longer following the examples of the world but those of God, who is Jesus; following Jesus; “doing” as Jesus had done, and as Jesus taught us. It is a decisive change of view and attitude. In fact, sin — above all the sin of worldliness which is like air, it permeates everything — brought about a mentality that tends toward the affirmation of oneself against others and against God. This is curious… What is your identity? And so often we hear that one’s identity is expressed in terms of “opposition”. It is difficult to express one’s identity in the worldly spirit, in positive terms and in those of salvation: it is against oneself, against others and against God. And for this purpose it does not hesitate — the mentality of sin, the worldly mentality — to use deceit and violence. Deceit and violence. We see what happens with deceit and violence: greed, desire for power and not service, war, exploitation of people… This is the mentality of deceit that definitely has its origins in the father of deceit, the great pretender, the devil. He is the father of lies, as Jesus defines him.
All this is opposed by the message of Jesus, who invites us to recognize ourselves as in need of God and his grace; to have a balanced attitude with regard to earthly goods; to be welcoming and humble toward everyone; to know and fulfil ourselves in the encounter with and service of others. For each one of us the time in which we are able to receive redemption is brief: it is the duration of our life in this world. It is brief. Perhaps it seems long… I remember that I went to administer the Sacraments, the Anointing of the Sick, to a very good elderly man, very good, and in that moment, before receiving the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick, he said this phrase to me: “My life flew by”. This is how we, the elderly, feel, that life has passed away. It passes away. And life is a gift of God’s infinite love, but it is also the time to prove our love for him. For this reason every moment, every instant of our existence is precious time to love God and to love our neighbour, and thereby enter into eternal life.
The history of our life has two rhythms: one, measurable, made of hours, days, years; the other, composed of the seasons of our development: birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, death. Every period, every phase has its own value, and can be a privileged moment of encounter with the Lord. Faith helps us to discover the spiritual significance of these periods: each one of them contains a particular call of the Lord, to which we can give a positive or negative response. In the Gospel we see how Simon, Andrew, James and John responded: they were mature men; they had their work as fishermen, they had their family life… Yet, when Jesus passed and called to them, “immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Mk 1:18).
Dear brothers and sisters, let us be attentive and not let Jesus pass by without welcoming him. Saint Augustine said “I am afraid of God when he passes by”. Afraid of what? Of not recognizing him, of not seeing him, not welcoming him.
The Gospel of God
25 January 2015 | Saint Peter’s Square
3rd Sunday of Year B
The Gospel today presents to us the beginning of Jesus’ preaching ministry in Galilee. St Mark stresses that Jesus began to preach “after John [the Baptist] was arrested” (1:14). Precisely at the moment in which the prophetic voice of the Baptist, who proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, was silenced by Herod, Jesus begins to travel the roads of his land to bring to all, especially the poor, “the gospel of God” (cf. ibid.). The proclamation of Jesus is like that of John, with the essential difference that Jesus no longer points to another who must come: Jesus is Himself the fulfilment of those promises; He Himself is the “good news” to believe in, to receive and to communicate to all men and women of every time that they too may entrust their life to Him. Jesus Christ in his person is the Word living and working in history: whoever hears and follows Him may enter the Kingdom of God.
Jesus is the fulfilment of divine promises for He is the One who gives to man the Holy Spirit, the “living water” that quenches our restless heart, thirsting for life, love, freedom and peace: thirsting for God. How often do we feel, or have we felt that thirst in our hearts! He Himself revealed it to the Samaritan woman, whom he met at Jacob’s well to whom he says: “Give me a drink” (Jn 4:7). These very words of Christ, addressed to the Samaritan, have constituted the theme of this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity which is concluding today. This evening, with the faithful of the Diocese of Rome and with the Representatives of different Churches and ecclesial communities, we will gather together in the Basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls to pray intensely that the Lord may strengthen our commitment to bring about the full unity of all Christians. That Christians remain divided is a very bad thing! Jesus wants us to be united: one body. Our sins, history, have divided us and that is why we must pray that the same Holy Spirit unite us anew.
God, in becoming man, made our thirst his own, a thirst not only for water itself, but especially for a full life, a life free from the slavery of evil and death. At the same time by his Incarnation God placed his own thirst — because God too thirsts — in the heart of a man: Jesus of Nazareth. God thirsts for us, for our hearts, for our love, and placed this thirst in the heart of Jesus. Therefore, human and divine thirst meet in Christ’s heart. And His disciples’ desire for unity is part of this thirst. We find it expressed in the prayer raised to the Father before the Passion: “That they may all be one” (Jn 17:21). That is what Jesus wanted: the unity of all! The devil — we know — is the father of division, the one who always divides, always makes war, does so much evil.
SOURCE: The Holy See Archive at the Vatican Website © Libreria Editrice Vaticana
This is the Time of Fulfilment
55 January 2009 | Saint Peter’s Square
3rd Sunday of Year B
In the Gospel this Sunday the words of Jesus’ first preaching in Galilee resound: “This is the time of fulfilment. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mk 1: 15). And precisely today, 25 January, is the memorial of the “Conversion of St Paul”. It is a happy coincidence, especially in this Pauline Year, thanks to which we can understand the true significance of evangelical conversion metanoia by looking at the experience of the Apostle. In truth, in Paul’s case, some prefer not to use this term because, they say, he was already a believer, rather a fervent Hebrew, and therefore he did not pass from no faith to the faith, from the idols to God, nor did he have to abandon the Hebrew faith to adhere to Christ. Actually, the Apostle’s experience can be the model of every authentic Christian conversion.
Paul’s conversion matured in his encounter with the Risen Christ; it was this encounter that radically changed his life. What happened to him on the road to Damascus is what Jesus asks in today’s Gospel: Saul is converted because, thanks to the divine light, “he has believed in the Gospel”. In this consists his and our conversion: in believing in Jesus dead and risen and in opening to the illumination of his divine grace. In that moment Saul understood that his salvation did not depend on good works fulfilled according to the law, but on the fact that Jesus died also for him the persecutor and has risen. This truth by which every Christian life is enlightened thanks to Baptism completely overturns our way of life. To be converted means, also for each one of us, to believe that Jesus “has given himself for me”, dying on the Cross (cf. Gal 2: 20) and, risen, lives with me and in me. Entrusting myself to the power of his forgiveness, letting myself be taken by his hand, I can come out of the quicksands of pride and sin, of deceit and sadness, of selfishness and of every false security, to know and live the richness of his love.