The Word Changes Us
We are swamped with words. Some poisonous like gossip; some devastating like slander; others unsettling like rumors and criticism. Most of them, though, are empty and meaningless, hot air—precisely.
How many millions of words have invaded our being this past week? Printed words, broadcast words, casual words from friends and passerby—words, words, and more words.
Almost screaming, we take refuge in our churches and say: “No more words…we need facts!” There we get more words. But we do not mind that, as we are greeted by words of a different, a supernatural reality:
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
We hear and we share words of glory, of thanksgiving, of prayer, of faith…. All welcome words. Then, there is THE Word. The Word of God. Our natural attraction to it is due to a combination of comfort, enlightenment and inner peace, as it has given us in the past. We are here for more of the same to neutralize and to balance the emptiness of a great deal of hollow, mere human words.
For us westerners, words convey ideas. For the Hebrews words convey energy, power, an uncontrollable force. For us words inform, for the Bible they create; they raise up; they heal; they transform; they rebuild. For the Bible, the power of the Word flows from the Person who speaks it. And the One who speaks it, is non other than God himself, the Almighty. Hence, the Word is a release of divine energy that produces whatever it means. It is the reason why we should be drawn into a church every weekend.
It is the reason why the crowds pressed around Jesus. They could not get enough of him and his words. The Word of God, Jesus, is sought after with incredible eagerness because as soon as it is spoken, people are healed; storms are quelled; bread is multiplied; nets are filled with fish; dead are raised to life; sinners are sanctified.
On the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the verses given us from the Gospel of Luke (5:1-11) show that the Word is active in three awesome ways.
First, it makes people see that God has revisited them and filled their hearts with hope and the certainty of his constant, unfailing care.
Second, it makes people, like Simon Peter and his shipmates, trust in Jesus, even against their best judgment as skilled fishermen.
Third, it produces the Great Reversal: from catchers of fish to fishers of people.
Now, this is designed by God to happen to us as well lest ours would be a simple recalling of a nice event from the past with little or no impact on our lives. Jesus is always ready to unbridle his words to perform miracles of all sizes to benefit us as individuals and/or as a community.
Knowing Jesus’ MO, I submit to you that he has lots of miracles ready to perform as soon as our fears, lukewarmness and myopic self-interest allow him. The time spent cleaning and mending nets gave Simon Peter and his helpers time to think about their failure. That must have been very painful.
We do not know how Jesus’ Word reached Simon Peter’s heart, but we know the result. What we must secure for ourselves from this event is the certainty that Jesus is aware of our failures and of the pain that accompanies them. We must learn that Jesus loves us so much that our pain becomes unbearable to him! Not only that but he creates in us the need for moments of reflection so intense and so enlightening that we begin to open our minds to consider adopting his suggestions over our cherished human judgments.
Simon Peter was willing to put aside his knowledge of how to fish and to listen to the words of a carpenter who knew how to pound nails and saw boards but knew nothing about fishing. “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets.” (Luke 5:5)
Simon Peter and all of us must be open to the big and small miracles which Jesus is eager to perform for us the moment we humble ourselves before him and we sacrifice our mindset and judgments to his word, to his command.
My dear brothers & sisters, it is so hard to sacrifice our mindset and our “sound” judgments to Jesus’ word! That is why, occasionally, the Lord leaves us no wiggling room for doubting his presence, power and knowledge over human sound judgment and in the wake of embarrassing failures. “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.” (Luke 5:4)
Recalling larger size miracles from our past, we should wonder what was the violence to our “sound” judgment equivalent to lowering nets for a catch in broad daylight? And how baseless proved our fear of deep water when we dared to trust firmly in the Lord?
Here is a most precious lesson we ought to treasure dearly: whenever our “sound” judgments prove wrong, a sense of unworthiness and sinfulness will take over our soul: “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” (Luke 5:8)
However, in the Lord’s eyes, our genuine humility guarantees his closeness and many future successes.
