Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica V per Annum C
9 February 2025

 When we have an experience of God, there is a common human tendency to first consider our unworthiness.  It is a common tendency to think of the reasons why we can’t do what God asks, why it can’t be me, especially when that encounter with God involves some mission or task that He wants us to accomplish, or when it involves discovering our vocation, the calling, He gives us.  Our unworthiness to be with God, or to do anything that glorifies God, is an acknowledgment that we are unworthy because of our sins.  We see this common human tendency in the call of the Prophet Isaiah from the first reading.  He discovers God’s call in his experience of a spiritual vision of God’s temple in heaven.  When he sees this vision of God, and the fiery angels worshipping around the throne, and the cry of the angels, “Holy, Holy, Holy”, causing the whole temple to shake, Isaiah does what any normal human being would do.  He says, “Uh, oh!  I don’t fit in here.  And I’m probably about to die!”  To quote him in his own 8th century B.C. words, Isaiah says, “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!”  Isaiah encounters God and he is afraid because he knows he is a sinner.  He can’t imagine that God would allow him to stand in His presence.  He can’t imagine that God would have anything in mind for Isaiah to do on His behalf.

Now, there is something true, and even good, about that common tendency to think of our unworthiness and sinfulness when confronted with an experience of God.  We believe that, don’t we?  It should come naturally to us as Catholics.  After all we start every Mass with some form of a penitential act, calling to mind our unworthiness to encounter God in worship and to express our hope that He grants mercy to make our worship pleasing to Him.  Our unworthy sinfulness is frankly the truth.  There is something very healthy about admitting that.  In fact, you want to know who is spiritually unhealthy and in mortal danger?  It is not the sinner.  It is the sinner who doesn’t repent.  It is the sinner who doesn’t receive the medicine in God’s gift of confession.  Yes, let’s be clear that knowing the truth that I am an unworthy sinner is appropriate and it means that I have a good grasp on reality, that I am not delusional.  But – and here is a lesson the Scriptures drive home for us – when that common tendency to know of oneself as unworthy is coupled with a failure of imagination that God can do something with me… that is a toxic combination.  When we think that our unworthiness means God can’t do anything about it, or that He can’t do something with us, then we are acting as if we are more powerful than God.  But if we repent, that’s a gamechanger!

There is a book I want to recommend that gives some advice on how to counteract that toxic combination.  The book gives an important antidote for combatting this tendency.  It is actually a Catholic book… and it is called the Bible!  (You know the Bible is a catholic book, I hope!  The Catholic Church put it together.)  The lesson throughout the Scriptures that serves as an antidote against our tendency to limit God’s plan for us is simply: listening.  Listening is always the first step in man’s response to God.  Listening is the first step to confronting the truth of my unworthiness, yes, but, if done in humility, it leads to God’s purifying action to heal us (as happened with the purifying ember of spiritual fire on Isaiah’s mouth).  It leads to God’s equipping us for our vocation (as happened on the lake with Jesus giving Simon Peter his calling).  Listening helps us focus not on what we can’t do, but rather on what God can do in us.  What God can do through us.  Listening to God’s Word in the Scriptures, listening to God’s Word in the Deposit of Faith and in Church teaching, listening to God’s Word in personal prayer, and in the ways He moves in holy, faithful friendships… this is an antidote to the tendency to limit God and to think He can’t be calling me to be holy and to do something holy in His Name.

St. Paul is someone who knew his unworthy sinfulness.  But you know he listened when, after listing various people and groups who saw the Lord, he says, “[l]ast of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me”!  So unworthy and such a sinner am I, St. Paul is saying, so unlikely a candidate am I to be an apostle or to accomplish any good for God, that is as if I am born into this mission and vocation abnormally!  He did the healthy thing of acknowledging his sinfulness.  But in humility and obedience he didn’t think that his sinfulness put a limit on God.  St. Paul did not permit the awareness of his sins to be coupled with a toxic failure to imagine what is possible with God.  You know he practiced the antidote of listening to God’s Word when he can say, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective.”

We need to foster an imagination that trusts it is possible for God to interact in the world He made and to interact with us in our experiences such that we can discern the gifts He gives us, how He wants us to accomplish His tasks, and to follow the vocation He gives us.  It would have been easy for Isaiah to not listen, and to dismiss his vision as a crazy dream.  It would have been easy for St. Paul to think only of how he persecuted the Church and was a murderer and so to not listen to the calling to preach the Gospel and to write the words of faith that eventually became books in the Bible.  It would have been easy for Simon Peter, an expert fisherman with a fishing business, to get prickly when Jesus, a carpenter of all people (!), should tell him how to fish.  Had he failed to listen he might have missed his vocation to be a priest and the chief apostle.

In my past assignment as the Vocation Director, I had the enriching experience of working with young men wrestling with a mysterious call to be a priest.  Many a young man will think first of why it can’t be him, why he is unworthy, why his struggles and sins mean God can’t really give him a priestly calling.  One of the excuses I enjoyed the most was when a guy would be interested in the priesthood but would say, “I don’t know, Father.  I don’t think that’s me because I like girls too much.”  I would usually say, “Well, you should.  That’s a good sign.  You can’t dismiss the priesthood because of that.”  If I had a good enough rapport with the guy I would sometimes add, “It’s cute that you think that’s a reason why God can’t call you to the priesthood”.  We might expect the young to have difficulty in thinking God can use them for some holy purpose.  But I am not so sure that is limited to the young.  If you are a husband or a wife, a father or a mother, do you take your faith into the world on mission to share Jesus with others?  Do you think there is some reason you can’t do that?  Or do we adults think there is some place that God does not belong?  Do you bring Him into your work place and your social interactions?  Yes, young men listening today need to know that they can’t put a limit on God’s call and that He might want to give them the grace of the priesthood.  Yes, young women listening today need to know that the Lord might be calling them to religious life, no matter the limitations they have.  No matter their future calling, all young people have the charge now to be leaders among their peers, at school, and in social groups, in order to win many souls for the Lord, following the examples of so many great young saints throughout history.  But it is not only the young.  Those living life as single persons need to trust that God gives them a mission field in their career and in the service they can render to others by virtue of their greater freedom.  Couples who are preparing for marriage and those already married are called to let God’s grace be effective in them and in their faithful and fruitful love, seeing their mission field in the domestic church, a field which can open so easily to many other people, thus leading them to faith and the Lord by the attractiveness of hospitable family life.  You see, we are all purified and saved from our sins by baptism and given a calling in that first sacrament to speak the Good News.  If we are listening to God’s Word we know that our past and our sins don’t prevent God from working.  Repentance is the game changer that avoids the toxic failure to open our minds to what God sees as possible.  Whether you are young or older, if you find yourself dismissing a certain mission or vocation, thinking it can’t be you, know for certain that the evil one is lurking and your response should be to listen more attentively and to give God permission to do what He can do through you.

What godly calling and mission is yours?  What godly calling and mission seems unlikely in your opinion?  What is God asking of you that you might first object to and raise the reasons why you are not qualified?  Like Isaiah, like Simon Peter, like Paul, what is God’s missionary and vocational call to you that you think just can’t be?  You see, a lesson today is that we think more of ourselves instead of God.  That common tendency reveals the error.  Do we really think the source of power for mission and for vocation comes from ourselves?  No, when we listen to God and let down our nets in humility, it is not we alone who are doing the work.  Rather, it is God who purifies us with holy fire and it is God who fills the nets!