OMELIE / Omelie EN

09 feb 2025

09/02/2025 - 5th Sunday in O. T. - year C

09/02/2025 - 5^th Sunday in O. T. - year C

Reading 1 IS 6,1-2.3-8 Psalm 137 Reading 2 1Corinzi 15,1-11 Gospel LK 5,1-11

“I will give thanks to you, o Lord, with all my heart because of your kindness and your truth”: so the Psalm in between readings makes us pray. And really all today’s readings help us to see the Lord’s kindness, He who is faithful to His promises.

Isaiah is fearful because he has seen God’s glory: in fact, he is afraid of dying, because he realises he is a sinner and he is part of a people of sinners. He knows that God’s purity and holiness cannot go hand in hand with the man’s sin. The same sin is preventing him from making himself available generously at once for the mission God Himself is calling him to accomplish.

In this humbling and serious situation, God let him experience purification. An angel sears his lips, which, uttering faithless words, have given the sin space. In this way the prophet can experience the fact that we cannot purify ourselves with our own means, but we always need God’s intervention. And God does it! He is not possessive of his holiness, on the contrary, he makes us part of it. Purified by His fire, we can put ourselves at His service to announce the Word, which is so much needed for men and peoples.

Simon’s experience is similar. He is not thinking of his sin, but when he realises that Jesus’ presence next to him is like God’s very presence, the Lord of earth and sea, then he awakes, recognises his distance from him, which is his sin.

How could Simon Peter get to this knowledge? He got there through an act of obedient faith: “At your command I will lower the nets”. He had laboured all night without results, then he had lent the boat to Jesus, not in order to go fishing, but so He could reach everyone with His teachings, and at the end he trusted Him, by obeying a command, which he believed, based on his experience, would have no results. For Peter must have been very difficult to cast the nets again, and even more so at a time of the day in which fishermen are sure they are doing so without hope, and, even worse, following the advice coming from someone from Nazareth, who had never worked on a lake.

“At your command”: these are the news. Jesus’ word is a sure thing, it is truth which has no need for corroborating, it is a certainty.

Which is the fruit of the obedience to Jesus’ word? Is it a net full of fish, which fills one boat, nay, two, so much so they both are in danger of sinking? Not really. The fruit of the obedience to the Word is Simon throwing himself at Jesus’ feet and recognising himself as a sinner. This is the miracle: the man recognises Jesus as sent by God, humbling himself in front of Him, admitting his status of sinner, throwing himself at His feet and waiting for His Word.

This is the miracle we see in this page from the Gospel, this is the miracle which today too the Word is performing in our heart and in our community.

This miracle is also the one which happened in Paul’s heart, who, despite the hardship he faced because of the Gospel, recognised himself as the least of everyone, the first among the sinners. He makes myself realise that admitting to be a sinner is not disgraceful, it is instead the starting point to experience and enjoy the Father’s mercy, and to be called by Jesus to cooperate with Him.

He, Paul, had persecuted the Church: every each one of my sins is tantamount. When from my mouth are coming faithless words, when my steps are taken in opposite directions from God, when my thoughts are full of superficial things, when my time is rolling on without any meaning for the salvation of anyone, when I do not offer my works to the Father, or even when I do something He specifically cannot approve of, I am persecuting the Church.

In front of Jesus’ love, I will recognise I am a sinner, and I will ask the Church to grant me the forgiveness He has put in her heart and on her mouth. I will become suitable to work for the kingdom of heaven!