In Ordinary (counted) time each year, we are invited to move more deeply into the mission of Christ – to become more practically one with Him in saving the created order.

When I prayed with these two texts from the book of Hebrews and from Mark’s Gospel, I was reminded of two key points that I will need to keep in mind throughout the slow process of grasping more deeply this invitation and the right response to it in my own daily life:    In Baptism I was given the gift of living in Christ’s priesthood, his prophetic work and his authority or kingship over my own decisions.   The priestly work of Christ is to reconcile us with the Father and with one another.  To be joined into Christ is to be united in this priestly work. 

You and I are each called to attend to the Word of God to know good from evil - to embrace God’s plan and God’s way of accomplishing that plan in large and small ways.  To do this we need to know the real world around us – how it works, how all creation collaborates in existence in order to accomplish God’s plan.  Thus, the presence of Christ and the meaning of his spoken word is always growing in us.

The second point that emerges for me today as foundational for living more deeply in Christ, is the dual call of today’s Gospel passage.  Like Levi, we are called to make everything secondary to following Christ – to coming and seeing what he has in store for us.  Saint Ignatius of Loyola calls this invitation the capacity to discern what God is doing and to join God in that doing.

Like Levi we are also called to bring our friends and acquaintances close the Jesus.  To share our goods with them and with him and to experience the community of nonjudgmental love.  The Church accomplishes its mission most perfectly when, like Jesus, we share compassionate relationship with sinners as easily as we do the saints in our lives.  Jesus (and we) answers the call to serve the sinner, the ill, the broken; not those who do not want or need God’s help.

If you and I can each find a way this New Year to hear today’s double call from Jesus, we will accomplish all that God asks of us to be joined in Christ as the Word made flesh.