Homily by Thomas Gaunt, SJ
Given at Baltimore Carmel
February 4, 2001
Readings from the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C:
Periodically I co-teach at course on Civil Rights and the issues of race in American society at St. Joseph University in Philadelphia. The course entails an eight-day pilgrimage through the South to the major sites of the Civil Rights Movement and many conversations with men and women who participated in the Movement. The students who sign up for the course were all born in the late 70's, some 10 years after the death of Martin Luther King. King and the Civil Rights Movement are all historical figures for them, people and events that they read about in their history books from grade school on.
As a teacher I am very interested in how the students understand the particular realities and motivations of the individual men and women who made up the Civil Rights movement. I want the students to realize that the leaders and the participants in the Civil Rights Movement had little assurances of success and had little idea that they were transforming the United States and the world by their actions. These individual men and women made courageous choices because of their faith and convictions. And these men and women were, and are, just like us.
This understanding is all the more important because in reading the history of the Civil Rights Movement the students (and ourselves) usually assume a linear and rational sequence of events. In reading history we are reading an account of people and events that have been synthesized, organized, and made purposeful by an historian. When we read history it has already been organized to tell a story that makes sense!
But we must remember that in living out history, in making history through our actions each day, we do not know what is going to happen next! We do not know how all of this is related. We do not know what is a hapless, futile false start and what is the final act in a great historic change. So, we must be careful not to read into particular historic events motivation or knowledge that only comes to us after the fact. To do so makes people's choices and actions appear far more reasonable and clearer than they ever were.
We are here this morning not to discuss how we historisize, but to proclaim God's Word, allowing it to pierce our hearts, and to share in this Eucharist. But how we historisize makes a big difference in how we understand God's Word and how we are impelled by it.
How do we hear and imagine this scene between Jesus and Simon? Do we see this in light of the resurrection and Simon Peter's later leadership of the early Church? Or do we see this more starkly as it happened that day removed from its future context?
I suspect most of us imagine Simon and his companions as being tired from fishing all night, listening to Jesus and comforted by Jesus' teachings, when Jesus asks them to set out again. Simon's response is: "Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets." Simon is tired but wants to respond to the request of this moving teacher. Once Simon witnesses the great catch "he fell at the knees of Jesus and said: Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." Simon beholds God's power and acknowledges that he is a sinner, he is not worthy. Simon's declaration is that of a humble person before God.
But let us try to re-imagine this scene outside of the context of the Resurrection and Jesus' revelation. Simon and his companions are tired from fishing all night, and frustrated and angry at having caught nothing. These men make their living from fishing and have been doing it for years. They listen to Jesus and let him teach from one of their boats because it is a distraction from the tedious work of cleaning their nets after a fruitless night of work. Jesus then asks them to set out again on the lake. This itinerant teacher who slept while they worked all night, is telling them to go back to work?! Simon is angry at the nerve and gall of Jesus' request. And his response to Jesus is sarcastic and mocking.
"Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, …but at your command I will lower the nets!" He and the others go to lower their nets and to make a fool of Jesus before the crowds.
When Simon witnesses the great catch of fish he falls before the knees of Jesus and said: "Get away from me! I am a sinful man!" Simon is frightened and terrified by what he sees. This is not a moment of comfort and humility, but of fear and confusion. It does not make sense and Simon's world is being torn asunder. Simon wants to flee for his own safety and protection. And in that moment of fear and panic - Jesus calls and Simon responds!
If we see comfort and humility in this Gospel scene of Jesus and Simon it is because we view it now through the lens of the resurrection, because know how things will turn out. But if we place ourselves with Simon at that particular moment (with the future unknown) then it is fear, and confusion, and panic that is most real and prominent.
Simon, and Isaiah in our first reading, are confronting fear in their lives. A fear of the unknown, a fear of the future, a fear of their own weaknesses. And this fear grips them and holds them tight.
One commentator on this Gospel says: "It is not good to be too near to God; God wants too much. God knows too much. God is too single-minded. It is not good to touch God. It is too dangerous. You are going to lose your life, you are going to lose your life." (Donders, p.171)
I want to return for a moment to the Civil Rights pilgrimage I was on last month. When we visited Nashville we were able to meet with Bernard Lafayette and John Seigenthaler. John Seigenthaler described to us a conversation he had with Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler was an aide to Robert Kennedy, who was then Attorney General. Kennedy had sent Seigenthaler to Atlanta in 1961 to meet with the Freedom Riders to educate them about the dangers and hostilities they were going to confront in Alabama and Mississippi. Seigenthaler met with the student Freedom riders, and then telephoned Kennedy. Kennedy was convinced that these 19 and 20 year old students were nieve waifs who were about to be consume by a violent racism that they did not understand. In their conversation Seigenthaler said to Robert Kennedy, "No, we are the ones who don't understand… I met with the students and they just told me that they made out their Wills last night. They are expecting to die in Alabama and Mississippi."
That was not the response that Seigenthaler or Kennedy expected from these young students. And they did not know what to do with it. Clearly these young women and men were responding to something far more real and powerful than the Department of Justice and the Attorney General. Something impelled them to willingly accept the reality of a violent death. Those students had a conviction that God's grace was present in their lives, and they had little doubt of it. That conviction of God's presence and grace could only be made real, by their acting on it.
Bernard Lafayette was a seminary student in Nashville who helped organize the lunch room sit-ins, participated in the Freedoms rides into Mississippi, and later began organizing Voter Registration in Selma. His fellow seminary students nicknamed him "the little Ghandi" because non-violence was a way of life, not just a tactic for him. When one of our students on the pilgrimage asked Lafayette about his motivations and suggested that he had done these things out of a desire to win civil rights and justice, Lafayette answered: "No, I did it to test my convictions as a Christian. Did I really believe that God was with us?"
This was not the expected answer. The history books present the picture of idealistic young men and women moved by civic virtue, and of a nation that recognized the rightness of their cause. That is a very different image than that of a 20-year-old student testing a radical Christian faith.
St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and God's grace to me has not been ineffective." A simple and bold statement by St. Paul that expresses his conviction of God's presence and grace in his life.
One experiences not comfort and humility but fear and confusion prior to being convicted by the Holy Spirit and coming to know deep in ones heart the grace of God. This happens because one apprehends the power of God and fears what God might ask. And I respond to God, not because I know what is going to happen, but because I am convinced of God's grace. Only later, will the historians tell me what the results are!
We do not know what will become of our choices and actions each day. We do not know if our confrontations with evil and suffering will change anything in the near term. And so we are tempted to inaction or half-hearted action because we don't know how it will turn out.
Isaiah, Simon, and Paul speak to us today not about results, or calculations, or happy conclusions. They speak to us about allowing ourselves to be convicted by the grace of God. They speak to us about how in their fear and confusion their hearts were touched by God, and God's touch did not reveal a plan but gave them a conviction to live by. Am I willing to let God get so close to me? Am I willing to be convicted by God's grace?
"But by the grace of God I am what I am, and God's grace to me has not been ineffective.
Tom Gaunt, SJ
