Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Joe Biden seems to have plenty of tough international negotiations on his plate: the Ukraine, Taiwan, North Korea and Iran, to name but a few.

These negotiations call to mind a story about a ship captain. At sea in a fog, he saw what looked like the lights of another ship. He had his signalman blink: “Change your course 10 degrees south.”

A reply came: “Change your course 10 degrees north.”

The captain answered: “I’m a captain. Change your course south.”

The reply was: “I am a seaman. Change your course north.”

The infuriated
captain signaled: “Change your course south. I’m on a battleship!”

The reply came: “Change your course north. I’m in a lighthouse.”

I guess the moral of the story is: sometimes it pays to negotiate, compromise, have a give and take attitude, agree to disagree. Otherwise, we will make a “shipwreck” of our lives.

The word of God also takes us to the fifth century before Jesus: a time of new beginnings for the Jews. They were rebuilding their lives, much like many Europeans after World War II.

Ezra gathered the Jews together in a liturgical assembly to renew the covenant God had made with them centuries before, summed up in a moving phrase: “You are my people; and I am your God.” The people hearing Ezra cried out, “Amen. Amen” -- So be it. They will not only be hearers of God’s word but doers of that word.

 St. Paul, in his letter to the Christian community at Corinth in Greece, addressed all kinds of problems. He used the metaphor of the human body to describe how different parts have different functions, yet all work for the good of the whole body.

 Paul championed unity within diversity. We are one family, the mystical Body of Christ. God abides in us, and we abide in God within a grace-filled community, made up of saints and sinners.

 How appropriate that we, in this week of prayer for Christian unity (January 18-25), pray, like Paul centuries ago, that the Spirit will make all Christians one. We all profess there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

 In the Gospel, Jesus went back to his hometown of Nazareth in the region of Galilee, and walked into the local synagogue on the Sabbath, and from the parchment of scripture—in particular, the book of Isaiah—he read from the magnificent passage about the jubilee year:

 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … he has sent me to bring glad tidings ….”

Concluding, Jesus rolled up the scroll and said, “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” This was a bold statement. In a real sense, this was the “inaugural speech” of Jesus.

He then set about bringing God’s love to those who are marginalized by injustice, freedom to those who are imprisoned in sin, and healing to those whose very self has been broken. purpose to those who lost meaning. Yes, Jesus challenges us to live an other-centered life, to seek the kingdom of God. This is the program he proclaimed at the beginning of his ministry.

Back to the call for unity: Jesus prayed that his disciples “may all be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you.” That's why we pray for Christian unity.

We are a divided Christianity--about 2.5 billion Christians. A couple of years ago we marked the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther's clarion call for reform in the Church. Luther initially argued for reform, not division. But his call spread like a contagion.

Now we have about 1.3 billion Catholics; 900 million Protestants; and 300 million Orthodox. And until Pope John XXIII was elected in 1958, Christians generally emphasized what divided them. Diatribe was the modus agendi.

Good Pope John XXIII moved Christians from diatribe to dialog. 

He realized that before people can discuss what divides them, they have to get to know one another. This reached a milestone among Catholics with the 1964 promulgation of the “Decree on Ecumenism” which encourages conversations with our separated brothers and sisters about what unites us rather than what divides us and how we can cooperate, especially in humanitarian projects.

Catholics are linked with mainstream Christian churches in many ways: a common creed, baptism, the Bible and many justice and peace issues. Together we have to find ways beyond what divides us to what unites us. 

And so, we pray that we might all be one: open to conversations with other Christian traditions and at the same time faithful to our own Catholic tradition.

We are a worldwide community of believers, multinational, multicolored, that celebrates the presence of the living Christ in all his fulness in the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist.

We are a community that sponsors and staffs shelters, hospices, soup kitchens, literacy programs, day-care centers, hospitals and schools throughout the world.

We are a community of splendid heroes and heroines throughout the centuries, the Mystical Body of Christ. 

But alas we are also a community with tensions. Why is that so? Because we are human, saints as well as sinners. Some people are “messy” and make a “mess” out of things and so, like many other things in life, we have to muddle through as best we can.

As we pray for Christian unity, let us thank God for the faith community to which we belong: a community that calls us to a life with God here and now, and to an indescribable heavenly life where we shall be like God, and see God as God really is. Amen.