Today, on the second Sunday after Pentecost, we begin to hear Gospel readings from St Matthew’s Gospel that will take us through some of the key incidents in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
In today’s Gospel we see how shortly after the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, He calls the first apostles to follow Him and to participate in His mission. We are not told much about these men, except that they were fishermen. In other words, they were fairly ordinary people, and certainly not from the well-off or educated classes. And yet, we are told that it is these ordinary fishermen who will become co-workers with Christ and that they will in fact become “fishers of men.”
We know with hindsight that these humble fishermen were transformed by Christ’s teaching, and by the power of His death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, to become great missionaries and, in many cases, martyrs for the faith. Yet at the time, it must have seemed far from obvious.
The call to follow Christ was not only addressed to the apostles in first century Palestine, but it is addressed to each one of us today. We might feel that we are insignificant or inadequate, yet the history of the Church shows us that God can use ordinary people, if they allow themselves to respond to His call. We are not all called to become wandering preachers, but each of us is called by God. We may not all be asked to leave our fishing nets and families, yet there may be things that we need to be prepared to lay aside, in order to focus our gaze more closely on Jesus Christ.