5th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C
Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8; Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 7-8; 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, 11; Luke 5:1-11
Today’s gospel brings me back to Washington, D.C. in April of 2003.
Imagine it, if you can:
cherry blossoms, blossoming; spring, springing;
and President George W. Bush, presidenting;
There I am, driving over the 14th Street Bridge on a Saturday afternoon,
just a few weeks after learning that
I had been accepted to enter the Jesuits that upcoming August.
I took an exit that I had never before noticed, parked my car, walked a bit,
and soon found myself on the banks of the Potomac River,
smack in the middle of a fish market.
At last! I had found the scene!
You see, for the two years I was formally discerning
whether or not I wanted to apply to the Society of Jesus,
I attended a handful of what Jesuits call “Come and See Weekends,”
something like open houses held at different Jesuit communities.
One component of each of those weekends, as you might expect, was prayer.
And the gospel I just read seemed always to be the text upon which our prayer was based.
“Imagine it, if you can,” we were told.
“Imagine the Sea of Galilee;
what it looked like;
what it smelled like;
what it sounded like.”
I had bigger worries than trying to become Steven Spielberg for the story,
so I never gave this part of the prayer that much attention.
But that April afternoon in Washington, with its little detour to the fish market,
solved that minor problem once and for all.
What it did not solve were those bigger worries,
the major questions I was asking in my prayer:
was God really calling me to be a Jesuit,
or was this just something I dreamt up on my own;
was this – what I was doing with my life – what God wanted me to do with my life?
In effect, my prayer was my attempt to take a peek at the Peter Folan script in God’s hands
and to make sure that this was where the next act began.
As time elapsed and that script remained hidden,
I started to wonder if God was calling me to anything at all.
I suspect I am not the only one here to wonder such things,
to whisper in prayer, “God, what are you calling me to do?”, or even,
“God, are you saying anything at all to me?”
And thus, maybe I am not the only one here who has envied Peter.
Imagine it, if you can.
Jesus – Jesus! – enters into Peter’s life,
tells him just what he wants him to do at that lake’s shore,
calls him to a life of discipleship, and walks off with him,
to Jerusalem, to Rome, and beyond.
Your question may be the same as mine:
why isn’t it this way for me?
Imagine it, if you can:
it wasn’t quite this way for Peter either.
And it wasn’t quite this way because
hearing Christ’s call – and Christ is calling us, each of us –
is not a matter of acting out an already-written script,
it is a matter of our trusting in the invitation to co-author a new script.
Initially, this seems to contradict what happened at that Galilean fish market so long ago.
After all, history has named this gospel “The Call of Peter” because, well,
that is what happened: Jesus calls; Peter responds.
His life is set.
Everything is crystal clear.
Or is it?
If you look carefully at the text, you will discover a story that is a bit more complicated.
Jesus calls Peter to do four things:
“Put out a short distance from the shore” (Lk. 5:3);
“Put out into deeper water” (Lk. 5:4);
“Lower your nets for a catch” (Lk. 5:4);
and “Be not afraid” (Lk. 5:10).
In fact, the only other words we hear Jesus speak in this story are his promise to Peter,
assuring him, “From now on, you will be catching people” (Lk. 5:10).
Here are some lines that do not appear in the gospel:
“Peter, this is Jesus, the Son of God. You can trust me.”
“Now let me flesh out a bit what I mean by, ‘catching people.’”
“You can leave the boat behind. You won’t be needing it anymore.”
In other words, only one thing was crystal clear for Peter on this day:
Jesus’ presence in his boat, in his life, demanded a response,
a response that was ultimately of Peter’s choosing.
And choose, he did:
“When they brought their boats to the shore,
they left everything and followed him” (Lk. 5:11).
How do we go and do likewise?
How do we co-author with Jesus the script of our lives,
being neither actors playing a part written for us,
nor free agents who are calling all of our own shots?
2
Three points from this gospel help answer these questions.
First, Jesus comes to Peter in the midst of the ordinary, the everyday.
To be clear, Jesus meets others throughout Luke’s gospel in extraordinary situations,
instances of grief (cf., 7:11-7), of great need (cf., 18:35-43),
and of profound disappointment (cf., 24:13-35).
But today, the familiar ground of our routine, the site that gets overlooked most easily,
becomes holy ground.
What does Christ want to do with you, with me, alongside us, in our regular life?
Second, Jesus honors who Peter is.
This characterizes Jesus’ entire public ministry. He always lets Peter be Peter.
And, boy, does Peter take him up on that invitation time, after time, after time.
Rash now, chastened later, and fiercely loyal tomorrow,
Peter puts on airs for no one, not even for Jesus.
He could well be the anti-patron saint for diplomats and poker players.
And Jesus works with those rough edges, edges that have Peter cry out,
“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Lk. 5:8).
How does Christ want to work with you, with me, alongside us,
not as we wish we were, but as we are?
Finally, Jesus tells Peter what is to be, not how it is to be.
“From now on you will be catching people” was not secret code for,
“One day people are going to be calling you the first pope.”
Peter, in his ongoing conversation with Jesus, had to give meaning to that promise.
His situation is not dissimilar to ours on the day of our baptism, when we were
“Freed from sin, given…a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit,
and welcomed…into [God’s] holy people” (Rite of Baptism, §62).
How we appropriate that freedom, that new birth, and that welcome
becomes the adventure of our lives, one that we undertake with
Christ as guide and as fellow traveler.
What do you want your adventure with Christ to look like?
Sisters, brothers, imagine it if you can.
Hearing Christ’s call is not a matter of acting out an already-written script.
it is a matter of our trusting in the invitation to co-author a new script,
to embark upon an adventure,
to do something great for and with Christ.
3