FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK
Dear St. Mary’s Parishioners:
The front photo on the bulletin this Sunday was taken in the summer of 2008 during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I had just finished my third year in the seminary when the school offered to take a group of us to see the very places where Jesus walked and lived. Oftentimes, when we read the stories in the bible, the places they name can seem utterly foreign and mysterious to us, especially with names like “Zubulan and Naphtali.” They don’t seem real. The moment we landed everything changed. The Bible came alive! As we hear in the Gospel today, it said that Jesus left his small little town of Nazareth in the hill country to live by the Sea of Galilee. What does it look like, we can wonder? Surprisingly, the Sea of Galilee reminded me a lot of Lake Tahoe, without all the trees, million-dollar mansions, and tourists. It seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. What hit me the most was how quiet and still it was. As I stood there with the other seminarians, we must have all thought the same thing – this is the place where Jesus called the first priests. The Gospel tells us how it happened: “Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea…He walked along from there and saw two other brothers , James the son of Zebedee and his brother John.” (Cf. Matthew 4:18-22). As future priests, 2,000 years later, the power of the moment was not lost on us. This was where it all began. We are continuing the same mission of Fr. Peter, Fr. Andrew, Fr. James, and Fr. John.
It’s not by accident that Jesus begins here by the sea. For the first century Jewish person hearing that Jesus began to call his disciples in that land of “Zebulun and Naphtali”, their hearts would have been pierced. Zebulun and Naptali were the first two tribes of the northern Kingdom of Israel that were destroyed by the Assyrian Empire, 700 hundred years before. They were lost and never heard from again. Imagine if you had a family member that was kidnapped or killed, that’s the emotion Jesus is invoking by beginning here. Yet despite this, there is joy and happiness here. That same first century hearer of Jesus would have also recognized the prophecy in the Book of Ezekiel is finally coming to fulfillment: “Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when some of his sheep have been scattered abroad, so will I seek out my sheep; and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. And I will bring them out from the peoples, and gather them from the countries” (Cf. Ezekiel 34:11-13).
God never forgets us! Hear that again, God never forgot about the lost tribes of Israel, even though they were unfaithful to him. God never forgets us, even when we do horrible things and fall into sin over and over again. He is always waiting to forgive us. God never forgets us even in our darkest moments. Jesus begins his mission precisely here by the sea to announce to the world that God has come in the flesh to bring his family back home. Peter, Andrew, James and John will now join his mission and become “fishers of men.”
A Slave of Jesus Christ,
Fr. Brian J. Solive
