Monday of the First Week in Ordinary Time [I]
Hebrews 1:1-6  +  Mark 1:14-20
January 11, 2021

“This is the time of fulfillment.  The Kingdom of God is at hand.”

Today is a day of beginnings.  Today as we begin the season of Ordinary Time we hear from the beginning of the Gospel account of Saint Mark.  It points us in the direction of God the Father.

Christ sustains all things by his powerful word, whether those things recognize the source of that power or not.  But for those who recognize Christ as the Son of God, He does infinitely more.  For those who are willing to abandon everything in this world—even the earthly fathers who reared them—Christ confers the gift of everlasting life, to be sustained in the life of God the Father forever.

Such men are the apostles Andrew and Simon, James and John.  They leave everything to go off in Jesus’ company, having received a commission from Him to become “fishers of men.”  They are called to share in the life of Christ, and at this point, they have no idea what this will entail.  This is how beginnings always are:  we have no real idea of what is going to transpire in the future.  If these four men had known that each of them would share deeply in the suffering of Christ—three of them, through martyrdom, and Saint John, at the foot of the Cross—it is unlikely they ever would have left their boats.

At the beginning of this season of Ordinary Time, let us pray for the grace to be faithful to the calling which we entered into through Baptism.