4th Sunday of Ordinary
Time –
January 31, 2021
At times we find ourselves amazed and
astonished before something or someone. The sight of a newborn child. Maybe it
was when we first saw a photo looking back at our earth from space. We might be
astonished at Yuichiro Miura, at the age of 80, who became the oldest person to
climb Mount Everest.
The gospel reading today refers to the
people of Capernaum being astonished by Jesus’
teaching and then by his subsequent action in releasing a man from his demons.
In their astonishment, they started asking what it all meant. Mark indicates
that this was one of the ways people reacted to Jesus, with amazement, which in
turn lead on to asking what it all meant. When Jesus and his disciples were
caught in a storm at sea and Jesus calmed the storm with his authoritative
word, Mark tells us that the disciples were filled with great awe. The Lord’s engagement with people left them
amazed and astonished to the point where they wanted to know more about him and
to understand who he was and what he was about.
The reading might prompt us to ask, “To what extent am I amazed and
astonished by the Lord and his gospel?”
The Jesus who was present at Capernaum is the same risen Lord who is present to
all of us. The Lord’s involvement with us has the potential
to leave us astonished. We can, of course, loose that sense of excitement about
our faith. Our relationship with the Lord, like all relationships, can become
routine. The wonder and beauty of it all can cease to make any impression on
us. It is worth holding on to that sense of amazement and excitement about our
relationship with the Lord and his relationship with us. The Lord’s teaching, which so excited the people
of Capernaum, retains the capacity to leave us amazed today. For that to happen
we may need to hear it with new ears, to listen to it more attentively. As the
responsorial psalm today puts before us,
“O that today you would listen to his
voice. Harden not your hearts.”
We may need to sit with the Lord’s
word a little more to allow it to speak to us and to reveal its fullness. Like
the people in the gospel story we may find ourselves asking, “What is this?”
or “Who is this?”
The people of Capernaum were amazed at
Jesus’ teaching; they were also amazed at his
work in liberating the man in the synagogue from the demons that were
tormenting him. The Lord continues to work powerfully among us today. He works
in life-giving ways in and through his followers, the members of his body, in
and through all of us. In various ways, his liberating and life-giving work
goes on in and through those who are open to being led by his Spirit. Despite
the awful things that are happening in our world, goodness is all around us,
and the Lord is powerfully active in the goodness of others. Here again we may
need to step back, to pause, and allow ourselves to be amazed and astonished by
the goodness of others that we can sometimes take for granted. We need a
certain disposition of heart to be open to the wonder and beauty of the Lord’s words and actions among us.
To capture just a little of what it
must have been like to listen to Jesus talk about God, about the world, about
man, and about faith and morality, we can imagine listening to Vince Lombardi
discuss football, the Wright Brothers talk about airplanes, Henry Ford talk
about cars, Thomas Edison describe electricity, Steve Jobs talk about
computers. They can speak with greater authority than most because they were
the “authors” or inventors.
That’s just a glimpse of what it ought
to be like for us to listen to Jesus, who is the author of the world, the one
through whom all things were made. He could command even the seas and the wind
(Mk 4:41) and the demons, and they would obey him because he is the Lord of
all. In the Eucharist, God will does something far more amazing than cast out a
devil or silence a storm at sea. God will change bread and wine into the body
and blood of Jesus. If we recognize what is really going on, if we awaken to
the power of his words, we will be far more amazed than Jesus’ contemporaries
two millennia ago.
Fr. Don, C.P