3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 26 January 2025
Every day the images of people who suffer are put before us – whether it be in Gaza, or Ukraine, or even in our own country. In some ways we become inoculated against what we see. We turn over the channel, and go back to what we were doing. We look for something more entertaining, not perhaps alluding to the fact that news broadcasts on television and social media are edited in such a way to keep us entertained in the first place. The problems are too big for us to think about, the places of which they speak too far away, too foreign. And even though we shake our heads by the images of despair and brutality we see, sanitised by the comfort of our living rooms, our life can go on largely unaffected by what we see and hear.
However, given the constancy of the misery of so many people, we have to face the question how do the stories of human tragedy truly affect us. Do they change our view on life, on ourselves, on God at all?
Hopefully, we are different because of what we see and hear; hopefully our perspective on life changes even a little because of them. The images are often too stark for them not to affect us. One cannot but be moved by them, at least. But, perhaps, we have also realised that it is very much our choice as to whether they do affect us or not beyond a mere glance. Perhaps we have realised 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.
For the images that we see every day of the suffering of others 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. In other words, we would have to have made the decision for our hearts to open in mercy. 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 and 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.
