Answering the call

Gospel Commentary Jan. 21 Mk 1:14-20

Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John are all very much out of place. None of them remained where the world would normally have placed them. Like most Galilean fishermen, their tombs should have been near the little towns on the shores of the lake where they plied their trade, like Capernaum, Magdala or Bethsaida. Their families would have remembered the places for a few generations before time inevitably swallowed up all memory of their lives. This is what happened, of course, to all other Galilean fishermen who stayed where normal life led them.

Yet, these four apostles followed quite a different path. John is buried today in the town of Ephesus, beneath the ruins of what had been a glorious sixth-century Byzantine basilica, built at the command of the Roman Emperor Justinian. James rests on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, in the crypt of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, his bones the destination for thousands of pilgrims walking on foot from all over the world. Andrew passed through several places, his remains traveling from Greek Patras, where he was martyred, to Constantinople, to Rome and Amalfi, then finally back to Patras. And of course, the bones of Simon Peter, far from an unknown fisherman’s grave, lie underneath the largest and arguably most important church in the Christian world, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

We can trace this incredible displacement back to the very moment the Gospels present us today, when Jesus called to these four men, saying, “Come after me,” when they “abandoned their nets and followed him.” Their meeting with Christ and their decision to respond to his invitation completely, leaving all else behind, changed their lives in more than just a moral fashion. They did not simply become better people by meeting Christ. They did not merely come to healthier understandings about themselves, abandon vices or develop better habits. Rather, Christ changed the whole trajectory of their stories, in such a way that only his intervention could have explained the places these four eventually arrived. Any good teacher could have helped Simon, Andrew, James and John to improve the way they lived. Only Christ our God could set them off on missions of evangelization that would scatter them across the earth, leaving new and vibrant disciples everywhere they went. Only the living Christ could have given them the courage to give witness even unto death in foreign lands.

So then for us, the question is, what mark has Christ left on our lives? Let’s imagine that someone is reading our biographies far in the distant future. If all mention of Christ was removed from our stories, would they still make sense? Could the place of Jesus be filled just as well by a good teacher or mentor? Would someone years after our deaths still be able to see in what we leave behind the undeniable sign of our having been uniquely Christian, and not just spiritual? If Christ only serves to help us live our normal lives a little more healthily, with a little more kindness, then, as good as those things are, perhaps we haven’t quite met him yet as deeply as he wants to meet us. An encounter with him might not send us halfway around the world into a martyr’s glorious grave, but meeting the living God on his own terms, letting him lead us, responding to his invitation as the Apostles did, will absolutely leave a mark on us. The choice is ours: to fear that possible change, or, by grace, to trust the one who calls us. Courage in that decision wins everything.

Fr. Rampino is studying at the Catholic University of America with residence at Blessed Sacrament Church in Alexandria.