Second Sunday in Ordinary time, cycle B

John 1:35-42

Our modern civilization is pretty peculiar. One of the things that's normal for human beings is to progress in physical, mental and emotional development by modeling yourself after various role models. A small boy would model himself after his dad or an older brother; a little girl would look to her mother or an older sister for clues on how to behave. As time went on, the role model might change, and indeed, change many times. Sometimes it would be a teacher or a coach, other times, a movie actor or a famous athlete. Eventually if someone was oriented to a career, a practioner of the craft would take on job of being a role model.

Our western society began to break this pattern down during the Vietnamese war and the days of the Hippies. Young people began to question their role models, and eventually came to the conclusion that modeling yourself on someone of the older generation was a losing game. Even though most of us weren't hippies or war protesters, the attitude was there. Question authority. Look at the older generation with deep suspicion. And those who should have been role models felt threatened by those expectations, and also by the fact that role models had to model how one was to live – ethically and morally, spiritually and emotionally. And as young people grew older, they shunned the job of being a role model.

But we are hard wired, and the need to model yourself creeps out in unexpected ways. I remember a particular time when I was working. The person who was leading my study group had come from another part of the country, and whenever he felt the discussion was getting pointless, he would summarize by saying, “at the end of the day....” an expression I had never heard before. But within a week or two, everyone was saying 'at the end of the day...” before making a summary statement. I'm sure you can think of examples of your own.

I had many role models – my dad, one of my uncles, a priest who taught in our high school – but one person stands out. When I was in medical school it was the first time in my life I was not in a Catholic school. I felt a little lost, because very few of my classmates were religious at all, let alone Catholic. You have to remember that during those years there was a distinct Catholic culture, and that seems to be dying out. Anyway, I learned of evenings of recollection given by an organization called “Opus Dei” and I began attending them. There I met a man who was a dental surgeon, and taught at the University of San Francisco. As I got to know him, I saw that he worked hard to be as good as he could be at his profession and teaching it to his students. At the same time he was totally in love with his faith. For him, the vocation he had was a religious one, or could be made into a religious one, because of his faith. He kind of embodied the whole purpose of Opus Dei, which could be summed up in the words, “your work is holy; it is the way you will become holy; and it is the way you will make the world holy”.

John the Baptist has been proclaiming that he was just a forerunner, he wasn't the Messiah. Nevertheless he attracted a lot of disciples. There's a tiny religion in Southern Iraq who call themselves Mandeans. Their origin is lost in history and they are very secretive, but they believe that John the Baptist was the Messiah, and will come again. I suspect during the early days of the Church there were still followers of John, and in fact they may have been seen as rivals to the Christian movement. Our Gospel tells us that John points to Jesus and says he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The two disciples get up and follow him. At this point we have the dialogue: Jesus says, “What do you seek?” and the disciples, oddly, answer, “Where are you staying? And Jesus replies, “Come and you will see.” It turns out that the best translation of what the disciples said is “Where do you abide?” and that was an expression that in modern English probably meant something like “What makes you tick?” or more politely, “we want to know what is special about you”. And Jesus does not stop and say, “Well, I'm the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity and the Word made Flesh.” He says, “come and you will see.”

The disciples did, and over the course of three years they had ample time to model themselves on Jesus – and the author of the Acts of the Apostles takes pains to show us that Peter and Paul preach, work miracles, and even raise the dead – so well have they absorbed the pattern set down by their Master. And that's really the whole story of Christianity – people noticing something special about another person, and resolving to model themselves on that person. Our role models, who in turn had role models, are the saints and other holy persons.

We've just finished celebrating the Incarnation – the fact that God became a human being. It's a mystery that we'll never fully understand, but maybe one of the reasons was so that we would have a role model for how to be a holy human being. I could tell you that getting to know Jesus requires careful study of the gospels, but that's not really true. After all those who knew Jesus best didn't even have gospels to study. Gospel study is good, but it's not for everyone. Before literacy became widespread, Christians knew the story of Jesus' life, death and resurrection from what they heard in church, or saw depicted in the stained glass windows. Getting to know Jesus does require knowing about his life, but it also requires role models. Because when we meet a real Christian, we meet Jesus himself. And just as we need role models, we need to be role models, and be conscious of the fact that we are role models for other people.

When I met my friend in Opus Dei, I was attracted to how he blended his medical vocation with his religious vocation. There were some things about his life that I would not want for myself, and that's ok as well. No role model is perfect.

Saint Paul understood this very well; he told the Corinthians “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ”. So who is your role model? And if you don't have one, maybe having one will help you progress in your Christian life. And who are you a role model for? I'm reminded of another quote from the gospel of Luke: “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.”