Today’s feast might be an appropriate occasion for the inaugural post on this new website. The Abbey in which I spent truly formative years as a monk is under the patronage of this Saint and, while I am no longer affiliated with it in any way, it remains one of those places-of-the-heart for me. St Andrew is the patron of Scotland, the country from which a few of my ancestors hail, including (at least according to Hazlet lore) Robert the Bruce – and of whose national dress, the kilt, I am a great fan. More somberly, today’s saint is the patron of Ukraine, a country embroiled in terrible conflict at this time.
Most relevant, though, to the purpose of this website is that St Andrew is regarded as the first of Jesus’ disciples, the “Protoclete” or “first called,” and discipleship of the Lord will be an underlying theme here.
Today’s Gospel, Matthew 4:18-22, contains that puzzling summons of Jesus, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” “Fishers of persons” might give a better sense of what is intended here. Jesus is evidently presenting this fishing for human beings as a good thing, yet when fish are pulled from the sea, they die and are eaten. We could have a long discussion about how or whether this might be justifiable in terms of human stewardship of Creation, but as an analogy for what the disciples of Jesus do it is certainly puzzling.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is a controversial figure. His ministry contained many tensions: having been a rather progressive theologian and peritus or adviser to the Second Vatican Council, he became known for his conservatism as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. His papacy was characterized by encyclicals, homilies, and audiences of often quite striking theological and pastoral – even mystical – insight, an over-the-top approach to liturgical splendor and pontifical haberdashery that verged on camp, and, alas, some decisions and policies that can only be called regressive and and that were in some instances genuinely harmful. Then, in a highly ambiguous and much-discussed gesture, he resigned, becoming the first Pope to have done so in nearly six hundred years.
In any case, his homily on the occasion of the inauguration of his papacy contains what I find to be a very helpful insight into this reading from the Gospel of St Matthew – an insight, he says, that is of Patristic origin. (One doesn’t cite sources in a homily, but I do wish he had done so in this case – I’ve been unable to track down the source in question! Perhaps one of you, dear readers, might help me here.)
The saline environment of the sea is splendid for the fish who live there, but aside from the occasional swim (or free-dive, or snorkel, or scuba excursion), it is most inhospitable for human beings. Immersed in it, we die. It becomes a place of alienation from which we need rescuing. So, to go fishing for human beings is not to entangle them in a deadly net, but to seek to draw them from alienation and death into community and life. In the person of Jesus, and, through him, in the embrace of the Holy Trinity, we have found both.
Our vocation as disciples, and, together, as the Church, is thus not to try to persuade people of an idea, but to live in relationship with one another, with Jesus, and with the world in the way Jesus both proclaimed and enacted. If sin has scattered and alienated us from one another and from God (even, indeed, from our own true selves), Jesus, simply in virtue of who he is, draws us back toward the Center which is himself, and the closer we are to him, the closer we are to one-another and to every being made by God.