V Sunday C – Fishers of men
Readings: Is 6:1-2,3-8; 1 Cor 15:1-11; Lk 5:1-11
Fishers of men (Luke 5:10)! To what a strange commitment you call us today, Lord! You reveal yourself to us in power and strength, as the “Holy One, Lord of hosts, with whose glory all the earth is full, … the King” (First Reading: Is 6:2-4): we feel “lost, of unclean lips, dwellers among a people of the unclean” (Is 6:5). You transform with a single Word of yours our useless all-night toil into a superabundant catch (Gospel: Lk 5:5-6): and we are left with a great astonishment and a deep sense of unworthiness before your greatness (Lk 5:8-9). We would expect an invitation to perpetual worship of Your name, to offer sacrifices of praise, to continual meditation on Your law, to prostrate contemplation of Your mystery… Instead, You want us … fishers of men! You, the Almighty, Lord of cherubim and seraphim, whose “Word never returns without having done your will” (Is 55:11), need us to spread your Word. You are the God who wants to need his creatures: you are the God who becomes a beggar and asks, “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” (Is 6:8).
Fishers of men! You want us to be the ones to pass on to all other men your Gospel, our joyful personal experience of your Resurrection and victory over anguish, sickness, sin, death (Second Reading: 1 Cor. 15:1-9). You call us, saved from the biblical sea of chaos and evil, to become fishers of men in our turn! You bind your Word to a “transmission” (“paradosis”: 1 Cor 15:1-3), of which we are to be at once the witnesses, the trammels, the guarantors. And if we, all of us, do not do this, the Glad Tidings will not come to others: “How shall they believe, without having heard of it? And how shall they hear of it, without one who proclaims?”(Rom. 10:14).
Fishers of men! It is an invitation, Lord, that you address not only to priests and nuns, but to all your disciples. All of us lay people, moms or dads, immersed in the sea of the world, unafraid to defile ourselves with its iniquity, must also be fishers of men, proclaiming the Word “on every occasion, opportune and untimely” (2 Tim. 4:2). Each of us, like Paul, must be consumed with the zeal to evangelize, and attest, “It is my duty to preach the gospel: woe to me if I preach not the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:18). For we are “called to make present and industrious the Church,” your boat of salvation (Mk. 3:9; 4:35-41; Jn. 6:21), “in those places and circumstances in which she cannot become salt of the earth except through” ours: “for the glorious burden of working, so that the divine plan of salvation may reach more and more every day to all men of all times and of the whole earth, falls upon all the laity” (Lumen Gentium, no. 33). “The laity, therefore …, can and must exercise a valuable action for the evangelization of the world; … it is necessary that all should cooperate in the expansion and increase of the Kingdom of Christ in the world” (no. 35).
Fishers of men! To me you, today, Lord, address the heartfelt call to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in your name and teaching them everything you have commanded us (Mt 28:19-20). I, today, am called by you to “be with you, to send me forth to preach and to have power to cast out demons” (Mk 3:14). May I not remain to bask in my personal salvation. May I understand that your following is mission, that your discipleship is apostolate; that the happiness of so many brothers and sisters who still lie “in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Lk 1:79) depends on me alone. And that I respond to your invitation, at all times, with joy and generosity, “Here am I, send me!” (Is 6:8).