HOMILY: 3RD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 2021
My grandfather is a very religious and prayerful person. He was very glad to invite his grandchildren to pray with him the Angelus every six in the evening. Each one of us will receive a blessing by tracing the cross on our foreheads and of course right after we will have a treat of fresh cooked hot potatoes. Some were not regularly attending and late and others would never attend at all. He told me one time, I really want you to become a priest someday because you are so respectful to me and love praying with me. From that time onwards, I would naively ask him about priesthood to whom he said is a man who knows, loves and serves God his whole life through. He remained in my memory because we passed away right on my 11th birthday and I owed him my vocation.
The 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time invites us to reflect on the purpose of our life which is to know, love and serve God. The primary purpose of our life is to know God. The gospel according to Mark tells us about the call of the first disciples of Jesus. He invited them to follow Him because He wanted to make them fishers of men. Followers of Jesus are called Disciples of Christ. They abandoned everything because they want to discover and wish to spend the rest of their lives with Jesus. Getting to know Jesus in our life takes time. This is the reason why Sunday is not enough to have mass, we want it every day. Reading the whole content of the bible needs to attend mass daily for three years. We have to listen and talk to Him by using your five senses. Read between lines, feel when Jesus is happy, sad, angry, distressed and stressed.
The second is to love Jesus. Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians encourages us to reset our lives. Let those who have wives as though they have none, those who mourn as though not mourning and those who are rejoicing as though not rejoicing for the present form of this world is passing away. To know Jesus certainly leads us to love Him and the more we love Him, the better we get to know Him. For a person who is passionately in love with Jesus, everything is always new and not fading away. When we love Jesus, we can easily forgive those who offended us and forget transgressions. We will always say, let’s start all over again. When we love Jesus, we will never be slave of the past but always optimistic of the present and hopeful for the future. Things are always beautiful when we love Jesus.
The third is to serve God. The Book of Jonah tells us about the mission of Jonah to convert the city of Nineveh. This is an extremely dangerous mission just like a Christian being sent to convert to Christianity the followers of Osama Bin Laden. It is a pagan and highly terrorizing city. He went off and courageously preached repentance in that city which eventually heeded his call for renewal. Serving the Lord is accepting unfamiliar task because it is in this way that we rely totally on the help of God. It is going where we would rather not go. We will go because we know that the one who sent us loves us so much and will never forsake us.