2/09/2025 - 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Moving from Unworthiness to Holiness

As we come to the 5th Sunday in Ordinary time we accompany Jesus well into His public life, His Galilean ministry, the one He began in Nazareth. But this Sunday contains a surprise development. Isaiah, Paul and Peter are each expressing themselves as worthless! These are three of the greatest witnesses in the Bible!

We are familiar with the modern "I am OK" mindset which asserts that individuals are fundamentally whole and valuable regardless of external validation or achievement. As articulated in contemporary thought, "OK”-ness means that every single part of me is valid, beautiful, and acceptable. The tension between human self-acceptance and spiritual humility portrayed by our Biblical heroes forms a profound paradox in personal and spiritual development. 

In the First Reading, Isaiah receives a vision of heaven itself and is confronted with the feeling that he is a man of unclean lips. He knew he was in the presence of some reality higher and loftier than any human or earthly throne. In response, an angel swoops down with a burning coal to cleanse his lips!!!! He is doomed alright, but doomed to be made clean through suffering, to be made able through it, to speak of God and become a great messenger of the Almighty God.

In the Second Reading, St. Paul says that Christ appeared to him last of all, as to one born abnormally. "I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle",  Paul would declare in 1 Corinthians 15:9. Despite being a persecutor of the early disciples of Jesus, Paul undergoes a transformative change when he falls from a horse upon seeing a bright light, that then frames his identity through grace rather than merit.

In the famous Gospel story, Jesus tells Peter, James and John to fish in the deep water (where they had been fishing and fishing and fishing all night with no result). They were seasoned fishermen, while to them, Jesus was just a carpenter from Nazareth. Without warning, their nets are bloated with fish, their fishing nets nearly ripped apart. They caught more than their craft could hold. Their boats almost sank.  In the presence of this superb show of power beyond human reckoning, Peter adores the awesome mystery he has witnessed and is suddenly conscious of his sinfulness, like Isaiah. “Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man.”

Each of our heroes from the Scripture is forced to compare himself directly with the presence of God. When people meet the holiness of God head-on, they are therefore able to glimpse by contrast the humanness in themselves. Just as we can be blinded by a bright light in the dark, so too,  our nearness to God’s presence can unnerve our self-sufficiency.  A falsely supposed importance cannot make us holy. But God can make us holy. We should be proud to be unworthy if reception of God’s love is the result. 

The moment we recognize our inadequacy, our sin, our smallness before the greatness of the transcendent God, we are capable of truly being called out of ourselves. When God is heard to say, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Isaiah responds, “Here I am. Send me.” He is empowered, not paralyzed. Our willingness becomes our qualification to be a true witness of God’s message.

Human encounter with the transcendent God has always met with resistance down through the ages. But the idea of a God, wholly independent of our sway, is especially repulsive to contemporary taste. After all, it requires a terrible admission of our insufficiency. It demands a recognition that we cannot rescue or save ourselves. It commands a yielding to, a humble listening for, an obeying of an ‘other’ utterly beyond our mere human minds and wills. Just before our communion at every Eucharist, we echo that famous Roman centurion: “Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my servant shall be healed” (Mt 8:8).

We must all realize we're both good and bad, generous and selfish, big-hearted and petty, gracious and bitter, forgiving and resentful, hospitable and cold, full of grace and full of sin, all at the same time. Moreover, we're dangerously blind to both, too unaware of our loveliness as well as our nastiness. To recognize this is both humbling and liberating. Both goodness and sin constitute our real identity. Not to recognize the truth of either leaves us either unhealthily depressed or dangerously inflated, too hard on ourselves or too easy on ourselves.

 Sometimes we approach the Sacrament of Reconciliation with the mind-set, “I feel so guilty: I do not believe God will forgive me, and I cannot forgive myself.” So often, we make God in our image and likeness, we think He judges like us. And when we do that, He becomes a very small God. Our God is bigger than our sins, then all our transgressions, we have only to turn to Him in sorrow and repentance, and like the father in the Prodigal son, He rushes at us, puts a robe around us, and the family ring back on our finger. He brushes aside our guilt, our feelings of unworthiness, our feelings of failure, our uncertainty of future faithfulness and says to us what He said to Peter: come, follow Me. Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O.