“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.  For previous Green Room entries, click here.

This morning’s Gospel reading is Mark 1:29–39:

On leaving the synagogue Jesus entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John. Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever. They immediately told him about her. He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up. Then the fever left her and she waited on them.

When it was evening, after sunset, they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons. The whole town was gathered at the door. He cured many who were sick with various diseases, and he drove out many demons, not permitting them to speak because they knew him.

Rising very early before dawn, he left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed. Simon and those who were with him pursued him and on finding him said, “Everyone is looking for you.” He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I come.” So he went into their synagogues, preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole of Galilee.

This passage from Mark, and last week’s as well, speaks to many subjects, but what strikes me in this reading and in the reading from Job today (Job 7:1-4, 6-7) is the sense of the dawn, and of beginnings. Job speaks of “troubled nights” being allotted to him, and that he is “filled with restlessness until the dawn.” Jesus, having begun his ministry in earnest the day before, seems to have the same anticipation as Job. He rises before the dawn and leaves everyone behind to find His strength through prayer. When dawn comes, the restlessness passes into the action of a new day — and in this case, a new age of salvation.

In Mark, this is the launching point of that salvation. Jesus will spend the next three years fulfilling what He started in Galilee, tirelessly and patiently criss-crossing Israel and Judah to open hearts for the forgiveness of sins and establish a new covenant with God. Israel had waited for eons for its deliverance, and the Israelites had grown more and more despondent and desperate under Roman domination. Job speaks of how a man’s life becomes a drudgery and his days like “those of hirelings,” surely how the Israelites felt in that era. Job had months of that existence, while Israel had centuries of it.

When Simon Peter tells Jesus, “Everyone is looking for you,” those words apply to just more than the crowd at Capernaum. It applied to everyone in Israel, who had suffered through the restless darkness struggling and waiting for the dawn of salvation, even if they didn’t comprehend what form salvation would take. It was true of the whole world at that time, even if they didn’t know quite what that yearning meant.

And it’s still true to this day. A little over a year ago, my wife and I went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and spent a few days around the Sea of Galilee. This is where Jesus began His ministry, and where it came to an end after the Resurrection as well. Galilee in the Gospels is a place of beginnings, a springboard of possibilities and hope.

We didn’t start our pilgrimage in Galilee, choosing to enter through Jordan into Israel first, but in some ways our sense of pilgrimage began there. We walked in the steps of Jesus to the various sites of His ministry, from Capernaum to the site where tradition holds that Jesus cooked breakfast for the Apostles just before His ascension. At one point, a wooden boat took all of us to the site of the Sermon on the Mount, and the connection to the lives of Jesus and his followers seemed very real.

Why do we go on pilgrimages at all? In the context of Christianity, the true Holy Land is our hearts, where the Holy Spirit dwells. We can love and serve the Lord without coming within 5,000 miles of where He walked in this world. For many, though, we want to feel that connection to Christ and His mission, to see the landscapes that He saw and to have some echo of His experience in this world. None of these experiences are perfect, of course, because the landscapes have changed, the places have changed, and the world has changed in cultural and political ways that put the Holy Land in a very different context.

Still, there is no doubting the power of that connection when made, and the sense of anticipation as the pilgrimage unfolds. We come back to the dramatic sense of dawns, and the darkness that precedes them, and of our own restless natures that both hamper us in sin and push us toward salvation from it.

We are looking for Him. We rise early on pilgrimage — very, very early on most days, believe me — and seek out the sites where Jesus preached, lived, died, and was resurrected. Whether we find Him or not depends on our own commitment to faith and to keeping a pilgrim’s sense of the mission rather than a tourist’s. Still, thanks to the focus and support within the group, it’s easier than one might imagine to stay in the pilgrim frame of mind.

And … really, that’s what we do every day of our lives as people of faith. We have our usual struggles in the here and now, but we try to live those in the context of our faith. We seek His path through those struggles, looking for the dawn of salvation as we restlessly navigate the darkness that precedes it. We are on a pilgrimage to find Jesus at prayer, one with the Father and Holy Spirit, and have that sense of joy and relief that Simon Peter and the disciples had when they heard Him say, Let us go together on this journey. In the end, that is the purpose for which we all have come.

“Everyone is looking for you.” Indeed they are. Let us hope always to find Him, and to help our brothers and sisters to do the same.

The front page image is dawn at the Sea of Galilee. I took this in November 2013 from my balcony during our pilgrimage to the Holy Land.