Today’s Gospel recounts for us how Christ called four of his 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 already met the Lord, we’re told elsewhere in Sacred Scripture, recounted in last Sunday’s gospel in fact: when John the Baptist pointed out the Lamb of God to them, and they immediately felt drawn to him and to his message.   But this time, the call they receive is definitive.  Come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. 

Jesus 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.  He invites them to remain fishermen, but to accept a profound reorientation.  This tells us something very important about how God relates to us: he prepares us to accept him and to serve him, through our everyday lives, our professional experience, and 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, perseverance: these were the skills and personal resources that these apostles would draw on for the work of Christ. 

And the same is true with us: our natural skills and abilities, our talents: we have to be ready to let all our personal aptitudes go: but not so God 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 heralds to explain his truth.  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, but also to build up his kingdom. 

And this is what gives us true joy and fulfillment as well.  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.  We can tend to view religion like so many other things in our lives: we shopped around and picked the one we wanted.  But that’s not the way it is at all: 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, we will know the true joy and the abiding peace that comes from God alone.  Our life of service, and sacrifice, and charity will be a foretaste of the eternal and perfect joy of heaven.