Homily for Saturday
Week 1 of Ordinary Time
Jan. 13, 2024
Mark 2: 13-17
Provincial House, New
Rochelle, N.Y.
This is the 3d time in 4 years that I’ve been
assigned Saturday of Week 1, here—however it is that happens. But I’m not recycling the homily.
Both yesterday’s and today’s gospels opened with
Jesus teaching—yesterday at his home in Capernaum (2:1), today “along the sea”
(2:13), i.e., the Sea of Galilee. The
1st mission of the Word of God dwelling among us is to preach the word.
His 2d activity is to heal. He did plenty of that on his 1st Sabbath day
in Capernaum—which also began with his teaching in the synagog (1:21). But then he healed a demoniac (1:23-26) and
Simon’s mother-in-law (1:30-31), and after the Sabbath ended, “all who were ill
or possessed by demons” (1:32). Then “he
went thruout the whole of Galilee, preaching and driving out demons” (1:39),
and he cured the most desperately ill person, a leper (1:40-44).
Back in Capernaum, he’s confronted in the middle
of his teaching with a paralytic, as we heard yesterday (2:3-4). By the way, if he was at home, as Mark
asserts, then it was the roof of his house that was broken open for the
paralytic. Maybe that’s an apt
metaphor: by the Incarnation, the Word
of God broke into our world empower us to break into his home, God’s kingdom.
Anyhow, in that episode for the 1st time Jesus
took his healing ministry to a higher level:
“Child, your sins are forgiven” (2:5), an assertion that he backed up
with the physical cure.
Now, today, Jesus follows his teaching by the sea with another cure, another act of divine mercy. He calls Levi (2:14). He invites a social and political outcast—whatever monetary sins he might also have been guilty of—to become his companion. That’s an implicit act of forgiveness. Who can keep the Messiah company except one whom the Messiah makes worthy of his company?
Companion means, literally, one with whom you share
bread. Levi and “many tax collectors and
sinners reclined at table with Jesus and his disciples” (2:15). The text is ambiguous about whether this
dinner is in Levi’s house or Jesus’; for purposes of Jesus’ fellowship, it
doesn’t matter. What matters is that
Jesus is keeping company with sinners and tax collectors.
When challenged about his company, Jesus responds
with one of the most consoling lines in the Bible: he’s come for sinners, because they’re the
ones who need healing. We’re the ones
who need healing. One commentator has
observed that if Jesus doesn’t eat with sinners, he’ll always dine alone.* To
make sure he isn’t alone, Jesus keeps inviting us sinners to the banquet he
prepares, this Eucharist, and he keeps wide open (like the roof of his house)
the invitation to the banquet laid for us in his Father’s home.
*
Van Bogard Dunn, Forming Ministry Through Bible Study: Reader’s Guide to the
Gospel of Mark (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1987), p. 24.
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