Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for February 2025

Vocation and Expertise: Homily on Luke 5:1-11

All four gospels tell us the story of the calling of the first apostles. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus walks along the shore and calls, first Peter and Andrew, and then James and John. They immediately leave their nets and follow him. In these cases, we see Jesus, the Son of God, commanding, and others simply dropping everything and following Him, as is proper for One Who is God. Even so, already in the early Church, there were concerns that this seemed unrealistic. Perhaps John and Luke were aware of those concerns, since they fill in quite a few details.

In Luke’s gospel, we’ve already met Simon by the time of the calling of the apostles. After Jesus is rejected by the people of Nazareth, he goes to Capernaum, the city where Simon and Andrew live. He stays for a time at Simon’s house, curing his mother-in-law. Simon has already seen Him work a sign. So it’s interesting that, when Jesus goes to the seashore to preach, He ends up asking Simon for the use of his boat. That morning’s fishing was finished, and the results hadn’t been good. When Jesus tells Simon to put out into the deep and let down the nets, Simon’s first reaction is perhaps typical of an expert whose expertise is being challenged a bit. Aren’t you a carpenter? We’re the fishermen, and we’ve already been out there! No fish, I assure you. But…if you say so!

It’s a bit impudent on Simon’s part. He’s already seen Jesus work a sign of healing on his mother-in-law, but he doesn’t seem to believe that Jesus can just as easily work a miracle in the sea.

So here we have a lesson. It’s often in the places of our own comfort where we are most apt to lose sight of Jesus. Where we are the experts, we don’t see the need for God to interfere and upend our predictions and forecasts. Even when our own efforts produce no fish! We are only fruitful in what matters most when we are obedient to Jesus’s commands and seeking to do His will. The fruits of our labors may be quite unexpected. So while we can be a bit critical of Simon for his resistance, we should ask ourselves, where am I resistant to Jesus’s commands? In what area of my life do I think, “Well, I’ve already tried that, and nothing came of it; so even though I know it’s what God is asking me, I don’t see the point”?

Now Simon’s reaction is quite telling. When he witnesses the sign, he’s completely overcome with a sense of shame and guilt. He sees in a moment just how worldly his thoughts are, how limited is his sense of what is possible with God. So he falls to his knees and asks Jesus to depart. Jesus will have none of it: this sign is about Simon’s true vocation, not to be a fisherman catching fish, but to catch men and women in the nets of the gospel!

And from this vantage point, I want to enter the story and say to Simon, “Hey, stand up! This isn’t about you! Stop focusing on yourself, and listen to what Jesus is saying!”

In relating the call of the first apostles, the gospels give us the pattern of all vocation in the Church. Every one of the baptized has a vocation. This was one of the great teachings of Vatican II that we haven’t internalized enough. The laity have an indispensable vocation to spread the gospel in the workplace. We need this more than ever as work gets more and more specialized. We need the expertise of the various professions to understand what is compatible with the gospel and what needs purification. The priests and religious are partners in this work, needed to help work through some of the more challenging situations of the modern world, but the vocation of the laity is surely of grave importance.

So watching Simon Peter being called today, let’s review what this story tells us about vocation. The first point is that we may already feel like we know the Lord: He’s been to our house, He preached from our boat. But then we may sense that He is asking something a little more difficult, something that perhaps calls into question our expertise. Will we at least go along with it, simply out of obedience, as Simon did, or will we delay, resisting because of the threat to our comfort and know-how?

When we, or even more, the Church, comes to the conclusion that we are being asked to put out to the deep, to rely on God alone, will we focus on ourselves? “Oh, I could never do that. I’m too weak, I have no training, and maybe, at heart, I’m just afraid.” Well, our vocation is not about us; it’s about Jesus Christ and His mission. And if He is calling us, He knows best why and how it’s going to work. Our job is fidelity and trust. As Saint Paul reminded us in the second reading, “Not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” Let us call to mind all that God has done for us, and seek to go deeper in our personal vocations.

The faith of a child

Many years ago, when I was a young adult and attending a family event at my grandparents’, I had an amusing “discussion” with my four- or five-year-old cousin. He had just discovered the word “why” and was asking me an endless stream of questions. “The sky is blue. Why?” When I gave whatever answer seemed suitable for his age, he repeated what I said, and then added, “Why?” I found the exchange rather enjoyable, at least for awhile. I can’t quite remember, but I expect that the conversation ended at the point that I decided to say, “Just because,”…and that was good enough for him. An adult said so.

Faith is the virtue of allowing God to propose to us ideas and plans of action for which the question, “Why?” is more or less irrelevant, at least for the moment. To a child, what I understand about the color of the sky (electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency causing corresponding events in the cones of my eye and brain) is well beyond his cognitive ability at that age. Imagine how much more God knows—He Who knows everything that ever was or will be—than even the most intelligent human. It is clear that sometimes when we ask God, “Why?” He can only respond, “Just because; trust me!”

“Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” May we have that serene and childlike trust in our heavenly Father that Jesus did.

The Feast of the Presentation

“Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand? For there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” [Mark 4: 21-22]

When the Son of God, the light of the world, was sent by God into this world, He arrived in a surprising, even hidden, way. Rather than manifesting power, He embraced smallness and dependency, becoming an infant, a child of the Virgin Mary. This unspectacular entrance upon the world scene meant that, without jubilant angels singing before shepherds and miraculous stars drawing astronomers from the East, the presence of the Redeemer among us would have gone almost entirely unnoticed. Today’s celebration is the capstone on what used to be called “Epiphanytide,” that period of time after January 6 in which the Church meditates on the various ways in which Jesus Christ’s divinity was revealed in the flesh.

This points to an important reality about the Gospel, and in fact, the entire created cosmos: it is a revelation of things previously hidden. The inner meaning of the human person is only fully understood in the discovery that we are meant to share life with God, just as food and drink, bread and wine, find their full meaning in the Holy Eucharist, God feeding us with His own life.

In theory, God could have saved us without our knowing. There is something potentially mischievous, even manipulative, in that idea. What we see, rather, is that God invites us to be His coworkers in bringing mercy and healing to the world. For this to happen, we need to recognize His presence, how to read “the signs of the times.” The “ true light which enlightens every man” has entered the world, and now illuminates all of God’s creatures from within. The Word of God, through Whom all things were made, is revealed to be the life within all things, making them holy and lovable.

When the aged and devout prophet Simeon takes the infant in his arms, he not only proclaims Him to be the long-awaited salvation of Israel, but “a light for revelation to the Gentiles [Luke 2: 32].” Salvation and reconciliation with the great Creator of the cosmos is being offered to all, though it is Israel’s special “glory” to be the nation that prepared the way and who calls Jesus a son of the tribe of Judah.

Let’s turn to another aspect of today’s mystery. When the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C., the ark of the covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was removed from the temple. What happened to it remains an unsolved riddle–Indiana Jones’s adventures notwithstanding. When the temple was rebuilt, the ark was no longer in the Holy of Holies (when the Roman general Pompey entered the Holy of Holies after taking Jerusalem in 63 B.C., he was puzzled to find it empty of any idols or statues). God was not entirely absent; nor yet had He fully returned after His dramatic departure narrated at the beginning of Ezekiel’s prophecy, dating from the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Malachi, writing perhaps in the fifth century B.C., indicated the God would suddenly appear in the temple. In the arrival of the Virgin Mary and the boy Jesus, the early Church saw the return of the true Ark of the Covenant (the Mother of God, whose womb was God’s resting place for nine months), and the long-awaited sudden arrival of God in His temple. The long exile of the chosen people was finally ended, that moment for which holy Simeon and Anna had kept vigil with such love for God.

In the second antiphon from First Vespers of today’s feast, this arrival is seen as the consummation of the marriage covenant into which God had entered with Israel: “Adorn your bridal chamber, O Zion, and receive Christ the king; him whom the Virgin conceived, the Virgin has brought forth; after giving birth, the Virgin adores him whom she bore.” Now, if we remember back to the Exodus, and God’s claim on all first-born sons, we see that this espousal is intimately connected with Christ’s self-offering on the Cross. He returns to claim His bride, at the cost of His own blood. There is indeed a certain sorrow to this, but it is that of those who sow in tears, only to reap in joy. In the Presentation is encapsulated the whole of the story of salvation. God the Father, in receiving back the Son of Mary, liberates not only Israel, but through her, all humanity—and not from political slavery in Egypt, but from spiritual slavery to sin. It is significant that, at today’s Mass, we bear candles in procession, just as we will at the Easter Vigil. It is one and the same Passover that we celebrate, from differing perspectives. As such, today’s feast marks the perfect nodal point between the Incarnation and Christmas, and the Paschal Triduum that looms in the future.

 

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