There are two things worth pondering as we prepare to gather for Mass this weekend; two things that God has to say to us as we ready ourselves to celebrate the Eucharist and as we prepare, too, for the coming week.
The first is revealed in the behavior of Jesus as He begins His mission and His public life. He has no intention or any thought that He could or should carry out His mission alone. He not only shares His message, He shares His power as well. He emerges from the desert (earlier in the Gospel), and He begins to form the Church through the Apostles. It is with this Church that He shares His power to forgive, to heal, to comfort, and to feed the hungry. We can hardly miss what St. Matthew puts before us. To fulfill the Father’s will, to complete the restoration of paradise, to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, Jesus needs us – and we need one another. There are a lot of people these days who don’t think they need anyone and some who do not think they need the Church. Their lives are an endless “desert” of loneliness and a hunger for food that perishes. We gather faithfully around the Table of the Lord because we know we cannot and should not try to “go it alone.”
The second thing worth pondering is that the creative Word of God meets us where we are. Peter, Andrew, James, and John met Jesus in their everyday lives. They were not in the Temple or the Synagogue. They were doing what they did every day. Their daily living provided them with a readiness for the Messiah – it made them curious and open to the “stranger” who walked by. They did not meet Jesus in this episode in the Temple or the Synagogue, but they were ready because they had been in the Synagogue and Temple often – listening to the Prophets and the Wisdom of the Scriptures. Again, they were ready to meet the Lord in an admittedly unmerited and unexpected moment of grace. He then called them, moved them, and freed them to walk in His way, with their lives changed forever. Do we dare to walk in their footsteps? Are we ready for our moment of unmerited and unexpected grace?
