Sunday’s Sacred Scriptures

Pope Francis in his apostolic letter Misericordia et Misera, published Nov. 20, 2016, expressed his wish that a Sunday of the year be dedicated to the Word of God.

"It would be beneficial if every Christian community, on one Sunday of the liturgical year, could renew its efforts to make the Sacred Scriptures better known," he writes.

"Each Sunday, God's word is proclaimed to the Christian community so that the Lord's Day may be illuminated by the paschal mystery. In the Eucharistic celebration, we seem to witness a true dialogue between God and his people. In the biblical readings, we retrace the history of our salvation through the proclamation of God's tireless work of mercy. The Lord continues to speak to us; he dwells in our midst in order to accompany us and show us the path of life," says the pope.

It is this third Sunday of Ordinary Time that has been chosen to celebrate the Sunday of the Word of God.

Meditate

The public life of Jesus begins with a rupture. He leaves his family and his village.

"In Nazareth, family is everything. Outside the clan, the individual is without protection, without security. In these conditions, abandoning one's family is a surprising decision, full of risks. And yet it is the decision that Jesus made one day," notes Spanish Biblical scholar José Antonio Pagola in Jesus: An Historical Approximation (Convivium Press, 2009).

Jesus does not reach Jerusalem, where the Temple, the nerve center of Judaism, is located. He goes to Capernaum, a small popular town on the shores of  Lake Tiberias. The Roman road linking Syria to the sea passes through Galilee, making this region a "crossroad of the nations.”

Jesus comes out of his supportive village to face the world. On the road, he will come across people who recognise themselves in him, more or less at odds with their community of origin, considered impure in the eyes of the law: public sinners, sick, possessed... They are cut off from the very source they so badly need.

In Jesus, the source of living water comes to them, touching their lives. "Be converted, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand." They have returned with this news: mercy comes to meet their misery. Misery is no longer a source of condemnation or exclusion, but the very place where grace comes into their lives.

Jesus offers them a new family open to all men and women who wish to listen to God's word and put it into practice. The healings and exorcisms that Jesus performs restore communion with the Father in heaven.

Jesus is not a self-employed guru. From the beginning he calls disciples missionaries. He does not seek them among the elites.

He calls the common people, the fishermen. The only condition is to leave "their boat and their father", to open themselves to a family larger than their circle of origin in order to be the witnesses of this new Covenant

Nicolas Morin OFM is a priest of the Franciscan Community in Besançon (France).