3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time – 23 January 2022
Over the last week or so we have once again been struck by the enormous power of nature and the destruction that it can create. Our hearts have gone out to the people of Tonga in their experience of the volcanic eruption and the subsequent tsunami. We think too of the people of Afghanistan, of Myanmar, of Ukraine – in so many places, people live with violence and fear.
The stories of the world’s grief can be overwhelming for us. There is every instinct for us to close off, to close down, to retreat into what Pope Francis calls the ‘globalisation of indifference’, to become as unaffected as possible. Perhaps we realise that we can easily allow the busy-ness of our life, our preoccupation with our own daily concerns, to blunt our responses to these images about the “big picture’ of the nature of life.
Regretfully, media does not help to counter this . . . it has us move from story to story without allowing us to stay too focused on any one situation. As the Australian writer, David Malouf once commented about newspapers.
“A daily newspaper demands just as much attention from us as will allow its contents – all the universal spectacle it offers of food, fashion, famine, travel, motoring, atrocities, IT, TV, celebrity gossip, ads, restaurant reviews, film and theatre reviews, book reviews, politics, sport – just as much attention as will allow all this, for good commercial reasons, to pass straight through our heads into instant oblivion, since Tuesday’s paper, like Tuesday night’s TV programme, has to be cancelled out and dumped into the litter bin of history so that Wednesday’s paper can move in. A daily paper, like a day’s TV, is a black hole that has, every twenty-four hours, to be filled with substance of just enough consistency as will offer no obstruction to what must fill the same hole the day after. . . We are smothered by words. By product. Mountains of writing that will inform – but only in ways we do not need and do not need to retain – or will divert or titillate or disturb – but not too seriously.”[1]
How do we allow the world’ tragedies to affect us? Are we any different because of them? Does our view on life, on ourselves, on God change at all because of them? It is our choice as to whether they do affect us or not beyond a mere glance.
For the world’s images to have a genuine effect on us we would have to have given them thought; we would have to have allowed ourselves to ponder on them whilst we are driving, whilst we are going about our ordinary business and so forth. Ultimately, we would have had to be prepared for them to allow them to affect us, to move us, to cause us to think.
If none of this has been present, then this week will start for us just like any other week, even in the face of such suffering and misery. The world will go on for us just as last week and the week before. We will be no different; we will not have grown. We will not be living; we will simply be resigned to existence.
Just as we must choose to be affected by what happens around us, and therefore to grow from our response, so we must choose as to whether we are going to be affected by the Word of God as it is proclaimed to us in the liturgies we attend or in the reading we undertake. We must choose to spend time pondering on it, as we would on any other significant event that occurs around us.
Today, we hear of two accounts of the Word of God being proclaimed in people’s midst. In the book of Nehemiah, we hear of the community of Israel who have given their full attention to the message as it is proclaimed to them. They were particularly moved by what they heard. As they reflected on it, it stirred them into a whole new way of living. It became a day of national conversion.
Then in today’s gospel we hear of Jesus announcing the kingdom. But, Jesus, who is alive in our presence today, announces this kingdom just as much to us in this gathering as he did to the people in the synagogue at Nazareth. He announces to us sitting here that a new day has dawned, that a new way of living is possible – a way of freedom which comes through commitment and love for something other than ourselves, a way which enables us to see ourselves and others more clearly.
As Jesus rolls up the scroll and sits down in our midst today what will our response be? Will we allow ourselves to be more deeply affected by the extraordinary news we have heard? Or will this week be just like any other? The choice will be ours.
[1] David Malouf, “Attending to the Word,” Address on the Occasion of the 2001 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
