Today’s Gospel of the first miraculous catch of fish in Luke chapter 4 was the obvious choice: after the octaves of Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart, the memory of the Church, which is the Holy Spirit Himself, brings back to our minds what happened on Pentecost, and which was already prefigured at the beginning of the public life of our Lord: The Saviour sends out his disciples, transforming them by the power of the Holy Spirit, from fishers of fish into fishers of men.
It is not without significance that the miracle takes place after the Lord has nourished the people with His word, for the marvels of God’s triumph over the world and its vices come about when we spend time listening to Him, in reading the Holy Scriptures, meditating upon them, letting them sink into our minds and hearts.
Then are ready to obey the Lord’s command to launch out into the deep. St Peter tells the Lord that they have laboured all night without any success. Obviously, there can be no fruit of eternal life as long as the Lord is not with us. It is only at His behest that the harvest of souls becomes possible.
Peter has laboured all night already, but Peter has the humility to do what he’s told. And that is how he is given the grace to preside, for all ages, over the apostolate that will bring the Word of God to souls.
In John chapter 4, Our Lord tells the Samaritan woman: “the fields are white, ready for the harvest”, and here we see that the sea is full of fish, waiting to be caught with the net of truth and love and thus transported into the eternal shore of Heaven.
Just as in those days, the Lord today is looking for labourers to go out there and catch His fish: the souls He created, and wants to bring into HIs kingdom. Let us pray that more and more souls, the souls especially of young men and young women, will hear the call to go out there, to launch out into the deep, the deep first of all of their own hearts, to examine them and confess their sins, and then the deep of a life given entirely to Christ and His Church in the religious and monastic life.
Never before in history have there been so many souls out there, ripe for the harvest. Lord, send labourers onto Your harvest! Raise up legions of souls who will dedicate their lives to listening to the wonderful Lady of Cana telling the servants: “Do whatever He tells you”. Then will there be plenty of delicious wine, that is, the sweet love of God, of which our world is in such dire need.
