5th Sunday of ordinary time, 9th February, 2025

 The encounter with Jesus is always personal and requires us to leave the anonymity of the crowd to meet him face to face. Happy Sunday!

Doctrine and Faith

(Is 6:1-2a.3-8; Ps 137 (138); 1Cor 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11; 5th Sunday of ordinary time, 9th February, 2025)

In Nazareth, the rejection of men is unable to stop the journey of the word of God which in Jesus continues to be fulfilled elsewhere. Luke's story, which we listen to today, describes to us the effective fulfillment of this word in the life of Peter and the other disciples, who, unlike the Nazarenes, welcome the word of Jesus and give it credit. In fact, they have the poor heart of those who recognize themselves not only with empty nets, but even as sinners, as Simon Peter does. Or as Isaiah does, who-encountering the holiness of God-cannot help but confess his own impurity: «Alas! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips" (Is 6:5). On the contrary, the Nazarenes, we remember, had revealed the hardness of a rich heart because it was full of demands towards Jesus. And those who demand do not know how to trust.

The text that Luke offers us this Sunday is not just a story of vocation; it is the dramatization of what happens when the word of God releases its transforming power in the lives of those who know how to welcome it with faith. We can in fact divide the passage into three small scenes, connected by a common thread whose protagonist is the word of God which becomes flesh in Jesus. In the first scene, Jesus announces the word of God and the crowds listen to it. People crowd around his word, because they understand that it is not like other words, but is capable of giving authentic meaning to life, redeeming it from any illusion or emptiness.

In the second painting the evangelist takes us deeper. From the anonymous and impersonal face of this crowd some faces and some names emerge. The encounter with Jesus is always personal and requires us to leave the anonymity of the crowd to meet him face to face, letting him call us by our name so that we in turn can call him by his name. In particular, for Peter this personal encounter takes place through a different relationship with the word of God. Until now he has listened to it, like the others, confused in the crowd; now this word demands from him a personal and responsible decision, which only him, in his freedom and in the first person, can and must make: "At your word I will cast the nets". Jesus had used a plural: "cast your nets"; Peter responds in the first person "I will cast the nets" (see Luke 5:4-5). Now for Peter it is no longer a question of listening to the word of Jesus like the crowds do; now this word involves him personally and asks him to become the ultimate criterion of his discernment, his judgement, his action. Peter decides to trust Jesus' word and in this way he will be able to see its effectiveness: the nets, previously empty, are filled with an immense quantity of fish. Our relationship with the Lord becomes personalised, and we emerge from the anonymity of the crowd to meet him face to face, every time his word becomes for us a criterion of judgment and action, the foundation of our life; in addition to listening to it, we decide on it, even when it appears useless, ineffective, contradicted by our experience. However, Peter's story does not end at this point, there is a third scene, very short, in which the words of Jesus still resonate, which take on a new and further aspect. From a criterion of judgment and action, it becomes a powerful word that transforms Peter's life, calls him to conversion, promises him a different future, for which it offers itself as the only guarantee: "from now on you will be a fisher of men" (v. 10). After having noted the effectiveness of Jesus' word in the sign of fishing, Peter will have to find it in his own life. Just as that word transformed empty nets into full nets, so it will transform Peter's life: from a fisherman he will become a fisherman of men.

What Peter experiences is an Easter passage. It is being born into a new life; it is the passage from night to day, from empty nets to full nets, from being a simple fisherman to becoming a fisherman of men. Luke also uses the Greek term zōgreus, which means "he who captures the living", and perhaps we can understand: "he who captures men to return them to life". In the Bible the sea is a symbol of death and of every other evil that threatens the life of man. Peter's mission will be to tear men away from this sea which evokes all that is darkness, anguish, negativity - to return them to that fullness of life and joy that only the encounter with the Lord can bring about in the existence of every person. Announcing to the Corinthians the resurrection of Jesus and his revelation to the disciples, Paul goes so far as to exclaim: "By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me was not in vain" (1Cor 15:10). Meeting the Risen One, living the experience of Easter means precisely this: allowing his new life to transform our existence. The grace of Easter always fills our empty networks. We have the responsibility to welcome this gift and make it mature as disciples of Christ. The Christian life, as a vocation, is much more than the simple response to a word that calls us. It is welcoming and making effective in us the ever new grace of Easter. 

+ John I Okoye