Monday January 3

Monday After Epiphany

 

The Kingdom of Heaven Is Near 

            The gospel of today speaks of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry. He preaches his gospel of repentance-conversion first to the semi-pagan Jews of Galilee: he becomes their light.

            The signs that the kingdom of God has begun with him are that the sick are cured, that he goes to the poor and the suffering. John says in the first reading that our love of neighbor and our obedience to the commandments will also be signs that the kingdom has come among us.

 

First Reading: 1 John 3:22–4:6

My dear children,

We’re able to stretch our hands out and receive what we asked for because we’re doing what he said, doing what pleases him. Again, this is God’s command: to believe in his personally named Son, Jesus Christ. He told us to love each other, in line with the original command. As we keep his commands, we live deeply and surely in him, and he lives in us. And this is how we experience his deep and abiding presence in us: by the Spirit he gave us.

My dear friends, don’t believe everything you hear. Carefully weigh and examine what people tell you. Not everyone who talks about God comes from God. There are a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.

Here’s how you test for the genuine Spirit of God. Everyone who confesses openly his faith in Jesus Christ—the Son of God, who came as an actual flesh-and-blood person—comes from God and belongs to God. And everyone who refuses to confess faith in Jesus has nothing in common with God. This is the spirit of antichrist that you heard was coming. Well, here it is, sooner than we thought!

My dear children, you come from God and belong to God. You have already won a big victory over those false teachers, for the Spirit in you is far stronger than anything in the world. These people belong to the Christ-denying world. They talk the world’s language and the world eats it up. But we come from God and belong to God. Anyone who knows God understands us and listens. The person who has nothing to do with God will, of course, not listen to us. This is another test for telling the Spirit of Truth from the spirit of deception.

 

Gospel: Matthew 4:12-17,23-25

When Jesus got word that John had been arrested, he returned to Galilee. He moved from his hometown, Nazareth, to the lakeside village Capernaum, nestled at the base of the Zebulun and Naphtali hills. This move completed Isaiah’s sermon:

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
    road to the sea, over Jordan,
    Galilee, crossroads for the nations.
People sitting out their lives in the dark
    saw a huge light;
Sitting in that dark, dark country of death,
    they watched the sun come up.

This Isaiah-prophesied sermon came to life in Galilee the moment Jesus started preaching. He picked up where John left off: “Change your life. God’s kingdom is here.”

From there he went all over Galilee. He used synagogues for meeting places and taught people the truth of God. God’s kingdom was his theme—that beginning right now they were under God’s government, a good government! He also healed people of their diseases and of the bad effects of their bad lives. Word got around the entire Roman province of Syria. People brought anybody with an ailment, whether mental, emotional, or physical. Jesus healed them, one and all. More and more people came, the momentum gathering. Besides those from Galilee, crowds came from the “Ten Towns” across the lake, others up from Jerusalem and Judea, still others from across the Jordan.

 

Prayer

Lord our God,
your kingdom began to take shape
when your Son showed his care for the sick
and for all those who suffer.
Help us to love people and to care for them,
especially for the poor, the dispossessed,
and the misfits of life.
Let this be the sign
that his Spirit is working in us
and that your Son is present among us,
he who is our Lord for ever. Amen.

 

Reflection:

The Lord is Passing by

Today’s Gospel describes the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He does not begin his mission in Jerusalem, the religious, social and political centre, but in Galilee, on the outskirts, an area which the Jews had looked down upon. Jesus began his preaching from where John the Baptist had stopped: “Repent, because the Kingdom of God is at hand!” (Mt 3:2 & 4:17).
From the beginning, the preaching of God’s Kingdom involved risks, but that dissuaded neither John the Baptist nor Jesus. By presenting it in this way, Mathew encourages the communities which were running the same risks of persecution. He quotes from Isaiah: “The people who lived in darkness have seen a great light!” and reminds the persecuted communities of his time that in spite of all the darkness of hopelessness that surround them, they have the light of Christ that saves them. Like Jesus, the believing communities are also called to be “the light of nations!”
Starting from Galilee, Jesus teaches us that no one is excluded from the salvation of God, rather it is from the margins that God prefers to begin, from the least, so as to reach everyone. He teaches us his method, and the content of his Mission: that is the Father’s mercy. “Each Christian and every community must discern the path that the Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel” (Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, n. 20).
Jesus begins his mission not only from peripheries, but also among people who were of a “low profile”. While choosing his first disciples and future apostles, he does not choose them from schools of scribes and doctors of the Law. Jesus calls them from their places of work, on the lakeshore: they are fishermen. They follow him, immediately.
Pope Francis reminds us that “The Lord passes through the paths of our daily life. Even today at this moment, here, the Lord is passing through. He is calling us to go with him, to work with him for the Kingdom of God, in the “Galilee” of our times.
Let us reflect for a moment: the Lord is passing by me today, he is watching me, he is looking at me! What is the Lord saying to me? If you feel that the Lord says to you “follow me,” be brave, go with the Lord. The Lord never disappoints. Feel in your heart the call of Jesus to follow him. Allow the gaze of Jesus to rest on you, hear his voice, and follow him! “That the joy of the Gospel may reach to the ends of the earth, illuminating even the fringes of our world” (Evangelii Gaudium,n. 288).

 

Video available on Youtube:  The Lord is Passing by