3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021

I am sure that many of us have heard the story of the chap driving in the country who stops to ask the famer which is the way to the city.  Says the farmer to him in reply, “Oh, if I were going to the city, I wouldn’t start from here!”

How often we give this very same reply to our faith, and to our relationship with God, and even with each other.  We get caught in the thinking, that if I were going to relate to God better it couldn’t possibly be from how I am feeling at the moment.  If only I didn’t have to contend with this pain or with this hurt or with this anger, or this anxiety, I would be free to devote my energy to God.  If only I didn’t have this distraction when I pray! I will be able to get back to some prayer once I’ve completed this busy schedule.  With one another we think when things have settled down, we will be able to talk to each other better.  It can go on and on: an endless effort to get to that elusive starting place from which we believe all else will follow automatically in right order.  “If I were going to the city, I wouldn’t start from here.”

But from where else do we start, of course?  We have no other place from which to go.  And it is here where Jesus meets us.  We do not have to go to an alternative place where we might meet him.  He comes to that place where we already are, whatever its quality or its appearance – even if we can’t stand being in it ourselves.

Jesus meets his first disciples in the full ordinariness of their situation.  They were fisherman, trading off the waters of Galilee. There is not expectation on the part of Jesus that they would be anywhere else than where they were, doing anything other than what fisherman do.  It is within their situation, just as it is, that Jesus extends to Simon and Andrew, James and John, the invitation to follow him, to come that to that place of seeing more in their fishing than they could have imagined.

I think of that wonderful account from the writer, Joan Chittester of a German widow who hid Jewish refugees in her home during World War II.  As her friends discovered the situation, they became extremely worried.  “You are risking your own well-being,” they told her.  “I know that,” she said.  “Then why,” they demanded, “do you persist in this foolishness?”  Her answer was stark and t the point.  “I am doing it,” she said, “because the time is now and I am here.”  The time is now and I am here.  We do not need to go to any place to respond to the gospel other than where we are at the moment.  The Good News is being whispered as it gently echoes in the sheer ordinariness of life itself, as it sings in all that we desire.

Wherever we are, however we are, when Jesus meets us, our imaginations are released. We perceive there is more at stake in what we are doing than what we first thought.  We realise that there is more to us than the patterns in which we might be caught. We understand that there is more to our own limited vision of how we have hitherto thought life should be.  When our imaginations are released in this way, when we are set free to dream again, and to delight in possibility, do we not have the feeling of running with a new sense of energy?  This is the vitality of discipleship which Jesus brings to us when he walks to us where we are.

Let us grow then to have the wisdom not of the farmer with whom we began but like another farmer. When this farmer was asked by a traveller the directions to the city, he replied, “Don’t know.” When asked by the same traveller whether he knew the way to an alternative town, he gave the same reply, “Don’t know!”  “Don’t know very much do you?” said the traveller impatiently.  “Ah, but I am not lost like you,” the local observed.