This Sunday’s Epistle is a reminder to us of the battle that is continually being waged in creation: all of creation, the natural world, the animals, and of course within us human beings. It is a reminder of what we learnt in Genesis that, as a result of sin, the Original Sin of our first parents, disorder came into the world, literal dis-order: everything in God’s plan had its rightful place in creation, there was a harmony between the different realms of creation with everything functioning in accordance with its created purpose of bringing glory to God. But dis-order came into the world because the gift of freedom that God had given to human beings in order that they might not just serve him but freely choose to love Him. And they chose NOT to love Him: He told them what was and what wasn’t permitted and they chose to “do their own thing” rather follow the Will of God: and the beautiful order in God’s creation was shattered.
Disorder enters in
The result of this disorder is the tail of human history: pride, jealousy, and hate. Now, we know of course that the whole thing didn’t turn completely bad. God continued to offer to mankind covenants; prophets to tell the people of God’s love and His will for them; and the promise from the very first moment of the Original Sin that one day God would send a Messiah, born of Woman, who would take back creation from the hand of the devil and reconcile it with God (Gen 3:15).
Spiritual life or spiritual death
In his Epistle, St Paul talks about the reality of the disobedient inclinations we all have within us, even though we have received the “first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves” as, although washed clean of the guilt of Original Sin by our baptism, and having received the gift of divine grace, we struggle against the inclinations of our wounded nature and try day by day, moment by moment, to protect and nurture that divine grace so that it grows and transforms us: makes us holy, makes us like Christ; rather than choosing what our weak natures asks for and then diminishing that divine grace through sin, or even totally losing it through mortal sin.
Virtue
This struggle is the bread and butter of the call to virtue: it involves our putting to death our old, sinful ways and putting on Christ; living our life in such a way so that He may live in us and through us. Christ has given us the sacraments as the necessary help we need in order to protect and nurture this life and, if we should destroy it through mortal sin, to be restored to life through the sacrament of Penance. The call of the Gospel is a call to repentance and to conversion: away from sin and the devil, and towards Christ.
False love
There is a distortion of the Gospel message being preached currently which masquerades as ‘love’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘pastoral accompaniment’. Priests are told now that they should ‘accompany’ couples who are living in manifest grave sin and allow them to receive Holy Communion, because stopping committing the sin would be too hard for them. Non-Catholics are permitted, by the new Code of Canon Law, to receive Holy Communion if they can’t get to one of their own ministers as long as they believe in the Real Presence: no matter what other errors of faith they might hold or immoral behaviours they might believe to be legitimate.
The work of grace
The redemptive grace of Our Lord works to restore creation to its right order; undoing the disobedience of our first parents by the perfect obedience of Christ even to death. But this grace has to be accepted by us and cooperated with in order to make us fully alive with the divine life that God offers us now, and not only in heaven. And this cooperation involves every aspect of our lives, and not just those areas which are a question of mortal sin.
Attachments
St John of the Cross, in talking about making progress in union with God, dedicates a lot of time to the issue of what he calls “disordered attachments”. The phraseology can unfortunately make this seem far more complicated than it is. These disordered attachments are issues concerning our self-will, our attachment to what we want rather than what God wants. And these attachments may be great or small: the greater ones obviously concern issues of grave matter, but many of our disordered attachments may sometimes seem so insignificant by the standards of the world that it would be easy for us to not even notice them.
Can my soul soar?
For example, in matters of food and drink: is what I consume actually for the service and glory of God, or is it either for my own comfort (e.g. unhealthy, or excessive) or for my own service and glory (through excessive concern on looking good, or being spiritually proud of our self-control). Or, what about the gift of our time. Am I lax with my time because of my laziness or my attachment to entertainments that can consume my time; or am I actually attached to my own control of my time: becoming annoyed when I am disturbed from the things I would rather be doing, or from the appropriately termed “me time”. Small these things may be, but St John of the Cross uses the image of a bird to describe the soul wishing to soar to greater holiness: it does not matter if the bird is tied down by a rope or by a thin thread – it still will be unable to fly.
The call of the Lord
In the Gospel we have the beautiful call of St Peter following the miracle of the great catch of fish. Put out into the deep, Our Lord suggests, and the result is more than the fishermen could ever have hoped for. Peter is so awed by the experience that he pleads with Our Lord to depart because of his sense of his unworthiness. The plans of God are often very startling, and his ways are not what we would expect. Many times in my own life I have said that, had I known beforehand what the Lord would ask I would have run away with a fearful awareness of my lack of strength. But in hindsight we are taught that He has never abandoned us, and never will He do so, no matter what He may ask of us: and if we are faithful the result will be beyond our expectations.
Fishers of men
The Gospel ends with the Lord’s words concerning the new mission of the Apostles, which is a mission shared by all of us who are baptised, each in our own way: “from now on, it is men you will catch.” Despite the further hellish distortion of the Gospel message which is preached today, that we must not try to convince people of the truth about Christ: the fundamental mission of the Church is to be fishers of men and to convert souls. In the times of confusion in which we live, it can be tempting to seek refuge with the few souls we feel confident are on the same page as us, and not open ourselves up in any way for fear of being led astray. Understandable, and based on a holy desire for salvation. However it is not the Christian way to only care for our own salvation: many souls are falling in to hell and we have a responsibility. Sometimes this will mean talking to people about our faith; sometimes it will mean ensuring that the example we give is one that shows Christ to others; often times it will be a mixture of the two. But we must take our mission seriously: when was the last time someone was brought into the Church because of me? What am I doing to share the Gospel. We are certainly not all being asked to spend all our time arguing on social media (be warned!) but we are all called to bring the Truth to the people we encounter: most of whom have certainly never heard the real Gospel message.
We ask Our Lady, the new Eve and Queen of Apostles, to pray for us and bring Her Son to birth in us more and more, so that we may share in that mission of bringing Christ to birth in others.