Homily
for February 4, 2007
Liturgical Year C - Cycle I
5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Fr. Tom Franxman Topic:
Being
insturments of the Lord
+ + +
Reading
I
Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8
"
In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and
lofty throne, with the train of his garment filling the temple.
Seraphim were stationed above. They cried to one another, 'Holy, holy,
holy is the Lord of hosts! All the earth is filled with his glory!' At
the sound of their cry, the frame of the door shook and the house was
filled with smoke. Then I said, 'Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man
of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!' Then one of the seraphim
flew to me, holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the
altar.
He touched my mouth with it, and said, “See, now that this has touched
your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.”
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will
go for us?” “Here I am,” I said; “send me!”
Gospel
Luke 5:1-11
"While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of
God, he was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret. He saw two boats there
alongside the lake; the fishermen had disembarked and were washing
their nets. Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon,
he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore. Then he sat
down and taught the crowds from the boat. After he had finished
speaking, he said to Simon, 'Put out into deep water and lower your
nets for a catch.' Simon said in reply, 'Master, we have worked hard
all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the
nets.' When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and
their nets were tearing. They signaled to their partners in the other
boat to come to help them. They came and filled both boats so that the
boats were in danger of sinking. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at
the knees of Jesus and said, 'Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful
man. For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and
all those with him, and likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee,
who were partners of Simon. Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid;
from now on you will be catching men.” When they brought their boats to
the shore, they left everything and followed him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is probably obvious to those who are even superficially acquainted
with the Gospel and the Old Testament background to it, that when God
began to communicate with the human race, originally, or early on when
He was dealing with the so-called Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
it was man to man. Later on, beginning with Moses, it began to be a
communication to a community through a person, and a later terminology
for this was prophecy.
The first reading this morning has to do with one of the four
descriptions of a prophetic vocation. Although, it doesn’t seem at
least by date, to be the earliest, it certainly is the second of such
description. Isaiah describes his vision of the Lord in the temple. His
first reaction to this is fear, because as he says to himself, “I am a
man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips.” The divine
response to this is not direct, but indirect.
A seraph, one of those mysterious presences that the Israelite
community thought inhabited the temple, probably due to the fact of the
swirling smoke. Seraph means burn by the way, the swirling smoke over
the altar of incense and the altar of sacrifice. As we all know, smoke
takes shapes. There, within the shape of the smoke, flittering about
across the sacrifices and across the altar, the seraph, the seraphim
were supposed to have their residence. A coal is taken from the altar
and purifies Isaiah’s lips. Then another communication directly from
God. “Whom will I send on my mission?” Then the response. “Send me.”
That is of course, the vocation of Isaiah, and that is where today’s
reading stops. I wish to comment on this, however, in a very brief
fashion by reading what follows because what follows is that it is OK
to volunteer. What have you volunteered for? God didn’t tell Isaiah
that. The description is as follows. “Then I said, ‘Here I am. Send
me,’ and Yahweh said, ‘Go and say to this people, hear and hear but do
not understand. See and see, but do not perceive. Make the heart of
this people fat and their ears heavy and shut their eyes, lest they see
with their eyes, hear with their ears and understand with their hearts
and turn and be healed.’ Then I said, ‘How long Lord must this go on?’
He said, ‘Until cities lie waste without inhabitants and houses without
men and the land is utterly desolate and the Lord removes men far away
and the forsake places are many in the midst of the land.” The response
is that, well, they won’t listen to you and therefore they won’t listen
to me and this is going to bring down upon the nation, the kind of
consequence that is going to, at least temporarily, will destroy the
structure of civil society.
That’s what ‘s going to happen. I think we find this, of course, in the
Gospel reading as well, although it isn’t plotted out so carefully, We
all know what happened to the apostles and it wasn’t a happy conclusion
to their happy self-giving at their calling. The whole purpose of the
public life of the Lord seems not so much to be preaching in order to
get converts but preparing a group of people to carry that message on
in the power of the Spirit. We are their successors. I’m sure it’s
occurred to you often, why didn’t Jesus stay on earth and lead the
church himself. That’s the way things seem to be going. The whole
purpose of the public life was to see to it that after the
resurrection, the group took over. It was not always with the perfect
assurance, the perfect knowledge that they needed for this particular
enterprise. Constantly, in the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is
telling them things that they hadn’t heard of before. One of them was
that other people besides Israelites are going to be Christians. Peter
seems not to have contemplated that at all. It was only through the
grace of the Spirit that eventually he came to see that. The
responsibilities of the grace of Christ in the Gospel evolve upon us.
That’s pretty clear. How do we actually shoulder that responsibility?
That’s what I want to finish by commenting on this morning.
The first part of one of the first chapters, in fact, verse 14 in the
Epistles of the Galatians, Paul has something interesting to say about
just that. It certainly will resonate with most of our personal
experiences in being a Christian. “Am I now seeking the favor of men or
of God.” Paul had been accused of currying favor with people who were
like-minded in order to get a group about him, so jockeying for
position that way. “Am I now seeking the favor of men or of God or am I
trying to please men. If I were still pleasing men, I would not be a
servant of Christ.” Listen to that very carefully. “If I were still
trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Therefore,
the call to follow, whether it is Isaiah, or the 12 apostles at the
Lake of Genezerate, had rather disturbing consequences for the
individual. Consequences, which are really hidden and not really given
to the individual. It’s part of the nature of our cooperation with God,
to follow His lead. That’s what cooperation means. He operates; we
cooperate. Not the other way around. The other way around is what we’d
like to do, to put our actions first and let Him follow suit. It’s the
old distinction between pride and submission. Although, putting it that
way is too abstract. It really comes down to being a friend, a
cooperator, with God. Friendship. We all know what friendship is. God
help us if we don’t. The first great gift to us is existence. The
second great gift to us from our Creator is faith. And the third is
friends. Friends. It is through our notion of and experience of
friendship that we come to know what our relationship to God should and
must be. If we don’t look upon Him as someone who is closer to us than
our closest friend then we have some way to go in being the kind of
instrument that God calls us to be.
Instrument Isaiah was. Instrument the apostles were. Instrument we
strive to be. Our whole Christian life is summed up right there. “Thy
will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” “Help me to see and to do
your will so that I might cooperate with everything that you are and
that you wish us to be.” In that cooperation we find our identity.
Everything that the Creator has put in us to actualize has some kind of
potency, is actualized there. Our peace is in his will. It is there we
strive to find it. With these few remarks this morning, let us through
the next week, try to be more mindful of the fact that it is
instruments of the Lord that we are.