Readings of the day: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
When was the first time God called us? If we have ever been aware of God calling us, when was this?
When we speak of somebody calling us, specifically God calling us, especially in this religious sense we may speak of such a calling as a vocation. This word is from the Latin verb vocare, which means “to call.”
Our readings today are all about call, or vocation, events. I imagine most if not all of us are familiar with the Old Testament story of Jonah. What does Jonah do when God calls him to go to the “exceedingly large city” of Nineveh to urge the people living there to repent “from their evil ways”? Well, Jonah flat-out refuses to go where God calls him. And, before the part of the Book of Jonah from which we hear today, Jonah is thrown overboard from the ship on which he is trying to flee God, and spends three days in the belly of a fish for his efforts!
We also hear a more obvious call or vocation event in Mark’s Gospel today: Jesus calls the fishermen “Simon and his brother Andrew” and then “James son of Zebedee and his brother John.” Both pairs of brother fishermen respond to Jesus’ call to be “fishers of people” in completely the opposite way to how Jonah had responded to God’s call for him to set the Ninevites right. Simon and Andrew, James and John “immediately” drop their nets; leave the lives and family they knew behind and radically choose to follow Jesus’ call.
And, even if our reading today from St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians is less obviously about vocation events than today’s Gospel, it still centres on God’s call to us. St. Paul anticipates the imminent full realization of the reign of God on earth (as we should still anticipate today, since we do not know when this fulfillment of God’s reign will take place; we can only hope joyfully for it). St. Paul invites the Corinthians (and us) to examine and adjust our priorities; to live as if Jesus could return as he promised at a moment’s notice. God’s call or vocation through St. Paul to us is simply to be ready in joy for this event.
Yet how many of us think of a vocation as something related to the ordained priesthood or maybe joining a religious order of brothers, sisters, or nuns? How many of us have a broader understanding of vocation as any calling, specifically any calling from God? I invite us to think of vocation in this broader sense of any divine calling. This broader understanding of vocation, I think, will help us to answer the very first question I asked a few moments ago: When was the first time God called us? Whether or not most of us were aware of our first vocation—and I suspect most of us were unaware of when God first called us to anything, because probably most of us were infants at the time—we received our first vocation, in the religious sense of this term, at our baptism.
Right after the baptism itself, the pouring of water, we are anointed with a sweet-smelling oil called chrism. During the anointing with chrism at baptism, the priest or deacon prays over the newly-baptized: “God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his holy people. He now anoints you with the chrism of salvation. As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet, and King, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life.”
This prayer speaks profoundly of our first Christian calling; our first Christian vocation. It is the same calling that Jesus Christ received from God the Father. The name “Christ” is not a surname, but means “anointed.” The Christ, Jesus who is anointed God’s own Son, receives a threefold vocation; a calling as “Priest, Prophet, and King.” We, in imitation of Jesus, the Christ, are called a priestly people, in a broader sense than the ordained priesthood, which is its own specific vocation. We are priestly from the moment of baptism in the sense that we are given a vocation “to glorify God by our lives”: To live holy lives, which involves worship of God and prayer, but certainly is not limited to worship (such as the Mass) and other forms of prayer. To be called priestly is to be called to orient everything we do and are toward God and toward our ultimate vocation, which is eternal life, never as disconnected individuals but always together, in and through Jesus Christ.
We, like Jesus, the Christ, are called a prophetic people. We are the voice of God on earth, not only by how we speak that attracts other people to God, but by how the way we live is coherent with the words we speak. Do we love one another, especially people we find difficult to love; disagreeable, in line with what we speak and hear from the Lord himself in our Scriptures: “Love one another as I have loved you.” No exceptions! To live up to our prophetic calling of our baptism is difficult but essential.
We, like Jesus, the Christ, are called a royal people. Our royal calling is not what many people may associate with royalty: Sitting on a throne, maybe distant from the people of a kingdom, with servants to wait on us. Or maybe, especially in Canada, where our official head of state is the Queen of England, we may associate with royalty what we see and hear of the British royal family or other world monarchies. But still this notion of royalty is distant from our everyday reality. Jesus and our Church mean precisely the opposite of this aloof sense of royalty when we speak of our royal calling.
To be called royal means for us to be called in some way to give ourselves in service to our sisters and brothers, somehow in memory of Jesus who gave his very life in service to us, for our salvation. Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, whose focus is to answer the question, “What (or who) is the Church”?, beautifully defines Christ’s and our royal vocation as one by which we lead, again by the example of our lives—specifically acts of self-denial; self-restraint, even from what may in some ways be good, in favour of a greater good and in imitation of Christ—to the King who gave himself for us so that servants might be made kings like him. This is the heart of our royal calling, sisters and brothers in Christ: “To lead [one another] to that King for whom to serve is to reign,” as Lumen Gentium says; to give of oneself for the good and salvation of one another “is to reign.”
In all this, then, what does “vocation” mean, specifically to be called by God somewhere or to some activity in our lives? I think one problem (a good problem to have) is that “vocation” is such a broad term. We may define it along the lines of the priest, prophet, king motif, which connects nicely with baptism as our primary Christian vocation. We hear many professionals of all kinds speak, I think very rightly, of their professions not as jobs but as vocations. For me, as a priest of a religious order, it is easy to speak of having responded to a vocation, because our world, especially within the Church, is more likely to understand religious life and sacramental orders as vocations. But what about marriage, single life, the vocation to be a deacon, or lesser-known states in life like consecrated virginity, or liturgical service as lectors and acolytes (all of which are recognized with liturgical rites of our Church as true vocations)?
Do we understand how defining “vocation” can become very complicated, very quickly? And then how do we respond to a vocation if we discern that God is calling to us? Have we ever refused God’s call, as Jonah did, before he accepted to go to Nineveh? Were we immediately eager to accept God’s vocation to us, as Jesus’ first apostles seemed to be according to our Gospel? Or have we been somewhere in between refusal and immediate acceptance of God’s calling when we have discerned it? Was our response something like that of the Biblical Samuel, who wisely waited to be sure it was God and not his beloved priest Eli calling him? (We heard last week about God’s call to Samuel, and John’s Gospel version of Jesus’ call of his first apostles. Have we not been blessed with the richness of vocation events in our readings over these last few Sundays)? Maybe there is no “right way” to respond to a divine vocation, except, if I may say, to strive to orient our whole lives and conduct toward God, and toward eternal life in heaven, which is the ultimate vocation for each and every one of us.
