Today’s Gospel recounts for us how Christ called his first four disciples: Peter, Andrew, James, and John.  These four were fishermen, and they were at work, going about their normal business, at this moment when their lives changed forever.  The moment that Christ reached out to them and invited them to follow him.  These apostles had actually already met the Lord.  We’re told elsewhere in Sacred Scripture that they were there when John the Baptist pointed Our Lord out as the Lamb of God, and these men immediately felt drawn to Christ and to his message.  But this time, they receive a personal call directly from him.  Come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. 

Our Lord sought these men out while they were engaged in their regular daily work, and he used their own language, their own vocabulary to explain what he was calling them to.  They are fishermen, and he uses fisherman’s language.  He even invites them to remain fishermen, but to accept a profound reorientation of what that means.  This tells us something very important about how God relates to us: he prepares us to accept him and to serve him, through what we do in our everyday lives, our professional experience, our skills and talents.  Our Lord didn’t ask these men to stop being fishermen.  He asked them to transform their profession into a life of service.  The skills of any good fisherman: watchfulness, attentiveness, patience, strategy, perseverance: these were the skills and personal resources that these apostles would draw on for the work of Christ.  They really are still fishermen; but the catch they will pursue now includes souls in need to salvation. 

This call is also for us: our natural skills and abilities, our talents: we have to be ready to give God our personal aptitudes: not so he can destroy them or ignore them, but so that he can transform them.  Whatever natural talents God has given us, he wants to transform into things of supernatural power and meaning.  If we’re naturally good fishermen, he wants to make us fishers of men.  If we’re naturally good teachers, he wants to make us teachers who explain the truth of who he is to others.  If we’re naturally good businessmen, he wants to use our diligent and competent work ethic to serve those in need.  And there as many examples as there are people.  Whatever God has given us, he wants us to use, both for the business of this world, and also to build up his kingdom.  And oftentimes those things go together, by the way: the work that we do in our secular careers, the work of building up the society that we live in: if we do it well, if we do it ethically, if we do it with a real concern for the people involved: this is already the work of God.  And it’s work he wants us to do.

The Lord tells his disciples that, despite what they might think, they didn’t chose him, he chose them, so that they could go and bear fruit that will remain.  And he’s chosen each one of us as well.  This is important.  He has chosen us.  We can sometimes view religion like so many other things in our lives: we shopped around and picked the one we wanted, especially those of us, like me, who are converts.  But that’s not the way it is, at all, for any of us: God has chosen us, and he’s chosen us for a purpose, to go and to bear fruit, fruit that will endure beyond this world, fruit that will matter in eternity.  This is the most fundamental call from the Lord.  This is the call that we all have: whether priest or layman, man or woman, adult or child: at the most fundamental level, each one of us has the same vocation: we are all called to holiness and we are all destined for heaven.  The Lord looks at each one of us and says, I see you.  I see that you have talents and abilities that you use for good in this world.  Come use them for me as well.  Bear fruit that will remain.  If we can respond generously to the Lord as he calls, if we try to use what we have not just for our own good, but for the good others, for the good of the world, in service to God, then we will know the true joy and the abiding peace that come from God alone.  Our life of service and sacrifice and charity will be a foretaste of the eternal and perfect joy that awaits us in heaven.  And we have will born fruit that will remain and that will matter in eternity.