Following God’s Wisdom to Put Into the Deep For a Wondrous Catch, 22nd Thursday (II), September 5, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Teresa of Calcutta
September 5, 2024
1 Cor 3:18-23, Ps 24, Lk 5:1-11

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On this day on which the Church celebrates the feast of the great Missionary of Charity, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and on which it’s been announced that I have become the new National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, it’s particularly fitting that in today’s Gospel we have Jesus’ famous encounter with Peter, Andrew, James and John in which he sent them out for a miraculous catch of fish as a sign of how he wanted to make these fishermen true fishers of men. The Church has always taken inspiration for her mission of spreading the Gospel from this scene. In his apostolic exhortation to mark the beginning of the third Christian millennium, St. John Paul II adopted Jesus’ words to Peter, “Duc in Altum!,” “Put into the Deep!,” as basically the motto for the third Christian millennium. And so today, as we celebrate Mother Teresa, pray for her sisters and the work of the missions, ask God for his help for me as I prepare to dedicate myself full time to promoting and supporting the work of the missions starting this January, and focus on the missionary identity that flows from Christian Baptism and Confirmation, it’s important to delve into today’s readings, in which we learn the trust that is at the root of putting into the deep.
• In today’s first reading, St. Paul tells the Corinthians and us, “If anyone among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool, so as to become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God.” We see an illustration of how God’s wisdom turns human wisdom upside down in today’s Gospel. After having borrowed Peter’s boat as a floating pulpit to preach to the crowds, Jesus tells Peter to take his boat and put out into the deep water, lowering his nets for a catch. Peter had already worked all night and caught nothing. He wasn’t just exhausted but discouraged. The command of the Lord was absurd to anyone experienced in fishing on the Sea of Galilee, where people caught fish in shallow water at night time, not deep water in daylight. It would be as if a fisherman had told Jesus, a carpenter, to drive in nails by holding the head of the hammer and striking the nail with the handle. Peter, however, at the Lord’s word, put out into the deep and caught the biggest catch of his life. The wisdom of this world is indeed foolishness in the God-man’s eyes! That trust in the Lord that led Peter to put out into the deep was meant by the Lord to teach him and Andrew, James and John, about the life of faith and the work of evangelization: even when it seems that fishing-for-men “won’t work,” even when it seems like we’ve tried everything and caught nothing — much like St. Jean de Brébeuf worked for three years in his first wave among the Iroquois and had to return to France without one convert — God can bring extraordinary results.
• We see this truth contrasting God’s wisdom versus worldly wisdom throughout this scene and throughout salvation history. Worldly wisdom would choose a good man rather than one whose first words were “depart from me for I am a sinner,” a rabbi rather than a fisherman, a nobleman rather than someone most considered a nobody. As St. Paul told us last Saturday, however, “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise.” If we wish, like Peter, to be Jesus’ followers, we need to learn to trust in his wisdom far more than the world’s. We need to learn how to become a fool for and with him. The question for us is whether we’re wise according to God’s wisdom or the world’s. Many consider themselves wise in this age and judge the wisdom of God by those standards, rather than the other way around. They look at the world through the lens of politics and try to box everything in the Church into conversatives versus liberals. They are beholden to psychology and evaluate the entire spiritual life as a think of the psyche instead of the Spirit. They have a strong notion of the philosophy of history and look at everything as if it’s history repeating itself and as if God can’t do anything novel. They’re empiricists and don’t think anything in the faith is real unless it can be measured scientifically. Or they’re relativists thinking that there’s no such thing as truth and hence undermine any and all moral norms. When we start from any of these worldly perspectives, it hinders our progression in faith.
• Today the Church celebrates one of the greatest missionaries of all time, someone who put out into the deep at the Lord’s command to found the Missionaries of Charity, someone who was considered crazy and criticized by the worldly wise but who became nevertheless, according to a 1999 Gallup poll, by far the most admired person of the twentieth century. The spirit with which she lived, the official “Spirit” of the Missionaries of charity, is loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness as lived by Jesus and Mary in the Gospels. That’s the spirituality of putting into the deep. Like Peter, she had not just faith in God but loving faith, a faith that wasn’t a thing merely of her head but of her heart, which led her not just to surrender to God but to surrender herself completely so that His will, not hers, would be done, and because it was total, it was cheerful, because she knew she was giving what was pleasing to the God whom she loved. She was, in short, a fool on Christ’s account, who sought always to think as God thinks, to love as Christ loves, and to be his light in the midst of the darkness of so much suffering and indifference. Saint Teresa of Calcutta was truly crazy in the eyes of the world and was crazy even in the eyes of many in the Church for the radical way in which she let Christ be her light and his thirst become hers. She was serving God faithfully and well as a Sister of Loreto, teaching and administering schools for those in India who could afford an education. But at the call of the Lord, she left it all behind, going outside the high protective walls of the school compound to begin to care for Christ in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, many of whom were dying alone in gutters with no one to love them with the love of God. With her former students and then other women who would join her, she entrusted herself, with Christian craziness, to God’s providence in everything. One famous example happened in Lebanon in 1982 when Beirut was a terrible war zone with Israelis bombing the area. There were 100 disabled and orphaned children abandoned and trapped in a building near the Sabra Palestinian camp. She asked the officer in charge on one side if she could go to rescue the children. He flatly refused, saying it was too dangerous and reminded her that a priest had just been killed. He said the only way it would be possible to cross from East to West would be if there were a ceasefire. It was August 13. Mother Teresa replied that there would be a ceasefire the following day because she had asked Our Lady to obtain one on the vigil of her feast day, the Assumption. U.S. Ambassador Philip Habib said to her that he was very happy to have a woman of prayer there with him, but that the was sure that Israeli Prime Minister Begin wouldn’t agree to something, all the more on such short notice. Mother replied that she was certain it would happen and, to humor her, Habib said that if it came, he would personally ensure that she would be able to cross Beirut to get to the kids. Habib nevertheless put in the request. To his shock, at 5 am the following day, it was granted. And Mother, together with representatives of the International Red Cross, immediately went to rescue the frightened and spastic children one-by-one. The Missionaries of Charity ever since have been marked by this type of apostolic courage, regularly going to serve the poor in places where few would have the guts to go, like in Yemen, where twice the Missionaries of Charity present have been martyred. But they live out this spirituality of putting into the deep at Jesus’ word every day, basing their whole life on his assurance that whatever we do to the least of his brethren we do to him. That’s what has led them to care for Him in the disguise of the lepers, those with AIDS and HIV, those covered with maggots drowning in gutters in their own and others’ urine, the untouchables, dying, orphaned, abandoned, unwanted and unborn children and so many others.
• The most striking example of the difference between worldly wisdom and God’s wisdom is with regard to the Eucharist, and it’s from there that St. Teresa of Calcutta was strengthened each day in the loving trust and cheerful total surrender that spurred her to put out into the deep each day. To the worldly wise, it’s absolutely foolish to believe that what starts out as bread and wine, after another human being says a few words, turns into God while maintaining all its appearances; it changes into the same Jesus Christ through whom all things were made, who was incarnate of the Virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was killed on the Cross, rose on the third day and now sits at the Father’s eternal right. It’s even more foolish to make this “bread” and “wine” the source and summit of our entire life, arranging entire schedules to come to receive him each day and spend time adoring him. But for those who are wise in God’s true wisdom, we recognize that there’s no more fitting place for us to be. And it’s from here that the Lord sends us out, like he would send Peter, Andrew, James and John, to be fishers of other fools. St. Teresa of Calcutta focused on how Jesus in the Eucharist helped make her so bold in charity.  “If we have our Lord in the midst of us, with daily Mass and Holy Communion,” she wrote to her Archbishop soon after founding the Missionaries of Charity, “I fear nothing for the Sisters nor myself; he will look after us. But without him I cannot be. I am helpless.” She described her union with Jesus in Holy Communion and adoration as the source of her strength to care for him in the poorest of the poor. Christ’s love in the Eucharist would send her out, just like Mary brought Jesus in haste to her cousin Elizabeth. “Every Holy Communion,” she said in Los Angeles is 1977, “fills us with Jesus and we must, with Our Lady, go in haste to give him to others. For her, it was on her first Holy Communion day that Jesus came into her life, and so for all of us also. He made himself the Bread of Life so that we, too, like Mary, become full of Jesus. We too, like her, be in haste to give him to others. We too, like her, serve others.” When asked about the joy that so radiated from her and her fellow Missionaries of Charity, she said it came from the one who came into and remains in the world so that his joy might be in us and our joy made complete. “People ask, ‘Where do the sisters get the joy and the energy to do what they are doing? The Eucharist. … He says come to me.” She added, “The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time that you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus will deepen your union with Him and make your soul everlastingly more glorious and beautiful in heaven, and will help bring about an everlasting peace on earth.” When people would ask her for advice, she would often reply, “If I can give you any advice, I beg you to get closer to the Eucharist, to Jesus.” And I am confident that today, as she joyfully adores the Lamb around his celestial throne, she is interceding for us, that we will indeed draw closer to Jesus in the Eucharist and love him who thirsts for us with the same love with which she sought to quench that thirst, so that Jesus can make us, like he made her, missionaries of his divine lovto  in the world, putting out into the deep, regardless of human wisdom, and lowering our nets for a catch!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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