Fr Timothy Radcliffe – Fifth Sunday of the Year 7th Feb 2010

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time – C
Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy 7th Feb 2009
Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP

Today’s gospel tells of Peter’s vocation. He is called to leave everything and follow Jesus. And so you might expect me to preach about vocations to the priesthood or religious life. Might you be called to leave everything and become, a Dominican? But that is not what I want to do, and not because it would only upset the Jesuits.
The point is that each one of you has a vocation, otherwise you would not exist. We only exist because God calls each of us to be. Let there be there be John, let there be Eric and Timothy and even Hubert. And God calls each one of us to share his life. So the question is not whether you have a vocation but how you are to live it. Everyone one of us is Peter in this story.
But Peter is distinctly reluctant. Everyone is pressed around Jesus trying to catch his every word but it seems that Peter and his friends deliberately hold themselves apart and wash their nets. They are trying not to listen. Maybe they already know that it is dangerous to get mixed up with this man. And then when Jesus does call him Peter is very upset: Depart from me. I do not want anything to do with you.
Peter’s reaction is understandable. C. S. Lewis said that looking for God is like a mouse looking for a cat. He wrote: ‘You must picture me all alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted for even a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed.’
Why is God so dangerous? Look at Peter. It begins harmlessly enough when Jesus wants to borrow his boat to talk to people. It’s a cunning move, since Peter hardly say No. And then comes the crunch: ‘Put out into the deep.’ If you get involved with God then sooner or later you will have to put out into the deep. Every vocation is being called to get out of your depth. In that awful phrase, you will have to leave your comfort zone, and swim in the bottomless depths of God.
Responding to that call will affect everything that you do. How you love, how you think, the choices that you make. They are all part of that journey towards the unknowable mystery of God. This will happen whatever form your vocations takes, whether it is to religious life, or to be married, or become an academic or an actor, or even if you take the adventurous high road of becoming an accountant. God calls everyone us to stop splashing around in the shallows and get out of our depth in him.
Let us imagine that you are one of the happy people called to be a Dominican, oops ..or a Jesuit. If your brethren love you, then the day will come when they will ask you to do more than you think possible. They may send you to China, ask you to learn Hebrew or elect you Master of the Order. They will ask you to pull out into the deep.
If you get married, your love for the other person will break open the safe little bubble of your own self. The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk wrote ‘the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region. ’ Surrendering to the other in love is all part of pulling out into the depths of God. Falling in love is part of your journey into the inexpressible mystery of love which is God.
If being an academic is part of your vocation, then means that you cannot spend all your life polishing your nice little answers to questions that you have already solved. If you are a Christian academic, then you will have to dare to get out of your depth, and grapple with questions to which you have no answers as yet. Otherwise you are just paddling into the shallows. Someone asked Yves Congar, one of the great theologians of the Council, if his theological answers were right. He replied: I do not know, but I know that the questions are right. Put out into the deep.
If you are called to be an actor, then one day you may have to give up playing Dr Who and have a go at Hamlet. And if you are an accountant…..you may have to sort out the finances of Blackfriars.
Having a vocation means that your life is not just one event after another. It has a shape. It is a story. Everything is part of your journey towards the one who calls you to share the mystery of his happiness.
Jesus says to Peter, ‘Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching people.’ This does not sound very nice. Having been a mouse trying to escape the cat, now we must side with the cat and go hunting.
We are all in the business of catching people for Christ. One of the ways in which we do this is by inviting people not to be afraid, and venture beyond what they thought possible.
A fish can be happy just being a fish, swimming around and nibbling at plants. That is its complete fulfilment. If it gets pulls out of the water, gasping in the air, that is the end of the fish. Being caught is bad for fish. But human beings can only really flourish if we dare to be more than merely human. We are made for more than we can imagine. We can only be fully human if we get caught up in God.
Did I ever tell you about the man driving along the top of the cliff? I checked the last three sermons at the Chaplaincy and I think that you have been spared so far. There was a man…