In today’s reflection on the daily mass readings, Fr Richard considers how God is continually searching for us, but also how we have a role in searching out others whom he is calling to serve him.
Readings for Saturday of the first week of ordinary time (memorial of St Anthony, Bishop): 1 Samuel 9.1-4, 17-19, 10.1; Psalm 21.2-3, 4-5, 6-7; Mark 2.13-17. Text of readings can be found here.
You return home and there are several messages on the answering machine. Or you switch on your phone after a service or meeting and you see a number of texts or emails that have come through. Or even – unusually in this digital age – there’s a letter on the doormat with a handwritten envelope in writing you don’t recognise. All of these are examples of people searching us out, trying to make contact because they need us or want us for some reason or another. We are intrigued, perhaps, by the nature of the enquiry, and are keen to find out why we are being sought out.
Our readings today feature two people whom God is seeking for a particular role. Both of them are ordinary people, doing seemingly ordinary things, when the invitation comes. Saul, the son of Kish, is searching – unsuccessfully, as it turns out – for his father’s lost donkeys. But then he meets Samual, who has been looking for him, and who later anoints him as God’s chosen king for Israel. In the Gospel, Levi (also identified with Matthew) is having an ordinary day sitting at his tax booth. As a tax collector, he was someone that others looked down upon. And yet Jesus seeks him out, calls him to follow, and he responds without delay.
God is continually searching for us, in the midst of the ordinariness of life, even if we think we aren’t worthy of his attention. We need at all times to be attentive to that call. But equally, we also need to be on the lookout for those whom God is calling, especially those who may not be the most obvious candidates, those on the margins. We can all be God’s messengers, seeking out those, like Saul, or Levi, whom he is calling to serve him.
Mass today is in St Mary’s at 11.30am
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