Where we find the Lord

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 1:29-39) shows us the organic rhythms that underpinned the life of Jesus and those that should underpin our own lives also. Jesus begins by visiting His friends, but His sociability very quickly turns into ministry, as He heals first Peter’s mother-in-law, then the sick from around the neighbourhood, and also delivers those possessed by demons. Then comes a moment of quiet which He creates for Himself, stepping away from the fray in search of recollection, before He is found by the disciples whom He exhorts to join Him in preaching throughout Galilee.

We may begin our reflection with Jesus’ last comment: for this is what I came for. Jesus’ life is our model in a special way because He comes to do the will of the Father, as He told Nicodemus: For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. We may speak in a sense of Jesus’ vocation in this case, for what is the will of the Father but the call He gives to Jesus to fulfil His purposes? We speak in COLW of both the personal vocation and the vocation to a state in life, the former a call to be or reflect some particular beauty of God and the latter a call to fulfil some common purpose in the life of the Church. The personal vocation is what or who we are, while the vocation to a state in life is what we do. In Jesus, the being and doing converge: He comes to give God’s gifts but He in fact is the gift He gives; He comes to redeem us, but He is our redemption; He is the victim for sin and the priest that makes the offering. This then is what He came for: to assume the responsibilities of a Saviour while being by nature the salvation that He offers us. Like Jesus, what we do does not exhaust who we are, but unlike Jesus, we can fail to live up to what we are called to be and what we are called to do. In this sense, what we said on Sunday still pertains: we must allow ourselves to be emptied out of everything unworthy in us in order to be able to follow Him in both His redemptive death and His glorious resurrection.

Another crucial pattern of the Christian life is also inscribed in this gospel passage: the alternation between mission and contemplation. If even Jesus, who possessed the Beatific Vision in His soul, withdrew to a quiet place for prayer, we may not – must not – excuse ourselves from the solemn duty of consecrating time to God in prayer and recollection. In this gospel scene, Jesus undertakes all the healings and deliverances that are required of Him by the local populace, but the very next day He rose early while it was still dark and went out to a desolate place to pray. The location is significant, but it is not necessarily what we think of on the surface. The gospel describes it as a desolate place but that could mean two things. On the one hand, surely, this was a quiet corner where nobody else went – not an easy thing to find in a busy shoreside town like Capernaum. On the other hand, it is not enough simply to go somewhere quiet when we pray, for where, as St Augustine says, can I go where I will not find myself? The desolate place that Jesus seeks in this moment of prayer is that place in our hearts where we are alone with God; where all the noise and bustle of our overstretched, overbusy minds have been let go of, where the tugging at our heart of unregulated needs and desires has been left behind for a moment, and where we can simply be who we are before the Lord. It is perhaps even harder to find that place in us than it is to find an abandoned place in Capernaum.

This too is another dimension of the COLW charism: the call to contemplation before action, or, one might say, the call for action and contemplation to be like the systolic and diastolic rhythms of the heart: the drive of life outwards and forwards, followed by the withdrawal of our energies to renew themselves in the heart’s rest.

And there is one more beautiful lesson of this gospel: that when the disciples look for Jesus, they can only find Him in this moment where His heart is at rest before the Father, in that desolate place of communion where the Father and He could be united in a different way, breathing in their mutual life of the Spirit. This is where the disciples found the Lord and perhaps it is where we should look for Him also.