Today we hear Saint Luke’s account of the calling of the first disciples. After preaching on the shores of the lake, Jesus Christ approached some fishermen who had been fishing all night but had caught nothing. On hearing this, He challenged them to cast their nets into the deep waters. When they obeyed Him, they caught so many fish that their nets could not contain them.
The call of Christ can often upset our normal ways of looking at things – after all, the fishermen knew that there were no fish around. And yet, when they responded to Christ’s initiative new possibilities emerged. Their experience was to prove so overwhelming that it was to reshape their whole lives.
In this incident we see how the disciples came to recognize who Jesus is. From calling Him “Master,” a common term of address for a teacher, the Apostle Peter came to recognize Him as “Lord” as he fell at His knees, saying: “Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man.” He recognized his own sinfulness because he had glimpsed something of Jesus’ true identity. And this recognition would reshape his entire life.
Like the Apostle Peter and these first disciples, we too are called to respond to Christ and this may lead to us to entirely unexpected things, for God seeks to use each of us in our own way to carry out His mission in our world.