Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 10 February 2013

Sunrise on Sea of Galilee

We forget sometimes how ancient parts of our liturgical tradition can be, rooted as it is deep in Judaism amongst other sources. Isaiah’s vision of the Lord is accompanied by a chant we use at Mass, the ‘ Holy, holy,holy ‘, that is tradition!

That great encounter with the presence of the Most High, the mystery of the Lord filling the Temple can only evoke a response of praise and wonder but also of deep humility when Isaiah realizes that even a sinner can have access to God and receive forgiveness in that moment of acceptance. For me, and I hope for you, this theophany ought to remind us that the mystery of God, those moments when we are taken out of ourselves into the presence of God are not for a few elite spiritual people but open to all if we choose to accept God’s invitation and are always connected to life especially those moments when are very conscious of our frailty.

Luke brings the immediacy of this open encounter with the Divine to us in the story of Jesus telling Simon Peter and the fishermen to put out into deep water and then cast their their nets. What we need to note is that before they did this Jesus had opened the Word of God to the crowds. Perhaps the fishermen also heard him. But the meaning is clear: a first step to meeting God is to encounter the presence of the Lord in the Scriptures. We open our minds and heart and then, as the fishermen found, we go out into the depths of our own sea, our own lives and discover that our sinfulness (as Peter discovered) will be no barrier to our connection with the love of God.

Then we begin to find the Lord in so many other different presences! We are fortunate, for in the sense of living tradition found in the community of disciples of Jesus, we have handed down to us a key to understanding just what the mystery of God is really all about. What is this tradition? Paul describes it in this way, it was the experience of the appearance of the risen Christ to so many witnesses that impelled those first Christians to proclaim their faith and in prayerful worship and to open the mysteries of God to the world.

Gathered together in Christ’s name, where he has promised to be with us always, we find that the real mystery of God is that there is no barrier to his love for us except our own refusal to accept it.

As we begin Lent this week perhaps we should remind ourselves that God uses us to gather others into knowledge of Christ and his salvation.

We should not be afraid but cast out into the deep!