3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 22 January 2023 – Lunar New Year
One of the most characteristic features about Australia is its light. Visitors often speak of its clarity and its intensity. Even our forests with the eucalyptus canopies allow a great play of light to filter through below giving them, too, a unique character. At this time of the year the experience of light is at its strongest: we are midway through summer. Summer, according to the Australia poet, Les Murray, is in both fact and image the dominant season of the Australian year. Even in our southern places, where it is usually mild, the weight of the imagery often obscures local conditions. Although it may not be our experience this year, summer, he asserts, is the blazing core of the year, and the other seasons can be seen as its surrounds. Murray talks about the aching heat, the immense, factual light, the glare that belongs to summer that bleaches timber and cloth and countryside till the days are hollow and life is conscious only in the early morning and the evening.
Light is in fact for us an ambivalent experience for us: it is that which warms us and generates life, but it is also that which breaks us out of our complacency with an energy which purifies and destroys that which no longer is needed. In short, for us, in Australia, light and fire, are nature’s transforming symbols. They are symbols of nature dying and rising, undergoing change and renewal. The light bleaches, hollows out, reduces, confronts us with our limits; fire purifies, regenerates. This is why we can celebrate Easter in Australia at no better a time than we do – at the end of summer, after everything has been dried up by the light and when everything awaits new life.
Just as the natural light at this time intensifies to bring about change and renewal in the landscape, to dry off old growth and prepare for new, so, too, does the light of Christ. In the Gospel today, Christ is affirmed as the light of the nations. A light has dawned. The call of the Gospel is to place ourselves constantly in the light of Christ, to allow this light both to confront and change us. It draws us into a process of change. And so, in the text we have heard, the declaration of Christ as a light to the nations is immediately followed by the account of the call of the first disciples.
We cannot follow Christ by standing still, as Pope Francis has said.[1] We cannot watch things from a balcony. Rather, we must be prepared to join him, to leave the safety of the balcony and set out on a journey with him. And this is a risky business. As the pope asked,
Do I take risks, or do I follow Jesus according to the rules of my insurance company? If this is your style, it’s not a way to follow Him, because you don’t end up moving, just like those who judge. Do we follow Jesus because we need something, or do we follow Him because we are ready to risk? Do I put my faith in Jesus? Do I entrust my life to Jesus? Am I walking behind Jesus even if sometimes I seem ridiculous? Or am I sitting still, watching what others are doing? Am I watching life with a soul that is static, with a soul that is closed with bitterness and lack of hope?
The account of the call of the first disciples speaks of this kind of risk – the risk of letting go of the status quo, the risk of letting go of the past, the risk of letting go of the familiar – but it also speaks of a sense of immediacy. Those first disciples don’t workshop what Jesus puts before them! They don’t say, “this is an interesting idea, let me go away and think about it and I will get back to you in a few days.” No, they hear the call, and they act now.
There is a wonderful theme that runs through the New Testament: it is summed up in the Greek word, Kairos. It simply means, “now.” Now is the day of salvation. Not tomorrow, but today. As Pope Francis has also remarked, the temptation is always to think there is a tomorrow.[2] But all we have, in fact, is today, this day. And so, we must ask ourselves, “How ought I be living this day?” What is Jesus uniquely and personally calling me to today? This is the question with which we must leave the church. Otherwise, we go out, just as we came in. And then we would have to ask, why did I come in in the first place?
We do so as a new lunar year begins. It is a moment of opportunity and possibility. We wonder at all this new year might begin under the sign of the Rabbit. As we hold the potential of the coming year in our hearts and minds, we seek enlightenment – that wonderful word that speaks of a light dawning in our consciousness, so that we can see our life in a new way, in a deeper way.
So let us bring all we are experiencing at the moment before the Lord. Let us bring also, before the Lord, all our hopes and expectations for the new year head. We pray that the Spirit might shed light on what we are doing, and where we are going.
And so, whilst we might be most conscious of protecting ourselves against the sun, let us not protect ourselves from the light of Christ and all that it wishes to reveal to us today and throughout the year ahead.
[1] Pope Francis, Homily at Morning Mass, Casa Santa Marta, 13 January 2017.
[2] see Pope Francis, Homily at Morning Mass, Casa Santa Marta, 12 January 2017.
