Alison Hudson's Homily (9 June 2011)

A homily from Alison Hudson (MCR) at our Choral Eucharist celebrating St Columba of Iona....

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In the Gospel reading this evening, Jesus helps Peter to catch a lot of fish, and then promises to make him a fisher of men. This is a story we often hear in Western culture.  A brief and informal survey of my friends this morning revealed that almost all of them were familiar with it, including the non-Christians.  However, because this story is so comfortably familiar, it might be easy to overlook how very uncomfortable and challenging the message of this reading can be.

Well, at least for me—your average, over-confident, self-assured Oxford student— the passages we have just heard make for uneasy reading.  For at root, these passages are about obedience, about admitting somebody else knows best.  It doesn’t matter that Peter is a skilled fisherman who has plied his trade for years: God, in the form of Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth, can beat Peter at his own game by telling him to fish in a place it never occurred to him to fish.  The learning of Jewish leaders in the second reading doesn’t matter in the end, either: rather, according to the passage from Acts, their partial knowledge and understanding actually hinders them, to the extent that they will choose damnation for themselves.

For these readings suggest that not only does God know best, he knows so much better than rest of us that it would never occur to us to do what He proves to be possible.    It had not occurred to Peter to keep fishing, or to fish in that place: yet he finds a great many fish.  Similarly, Paul and Barnabas share God’s love with the Gentiles, even though they were not the most obvious heirs of Abraham (at least to human eyes).  And the Gentiles rejoice and are saved. Obedience to God—particularly the call to share God’s love with all you meet— can lead to some totally unexpected outcomes.

As someone who resents all advice, even from all-too-present supervisors and parents, the idea that God knows best—and that we humans often aren’t even close to solving our own problems—is a difficult pill to swallow.  Indeed, the idea of trusting God so completely and loving even the most unlikely people seems so difficult that it is tempting to claim that God is asking the impossible.  However, as we heard at Oriel heard last week, Jesus is a human and ascended as a human, and is perfectly aware of what humans can and cannot do.  He never asks the impossible.  And indeed, there are some remarkable historical examples which suggest that obedience to God is possible. 

These examples are the Irish peregrini, or pilgrims.  One ‘pilgrim’ was St. Columba, or Colum Cille, whom we celebrate today.  As far as we can tell, Columba was born around 521 into an aristocratic family in the north of Ireland.  However, he gave up his status, privilege and wealth in an attempt to serve God and follow his commandments, particularly God’s call to preach his Gospel and share his love with all peoples.  Indeed, he even gave up his home and his family, traveling with a band of followers to the island of Iona, off what is now the coast of Scotland.  Despite attempts to rationalize Columba’s move—linking it to his family’s defeat in battle or to the aspirations of the kingdom of Dal Riata, which was near Iona—it cannot be denied that the inhospitable Iona was not the sort of place you’d expect to find an Irish princeling.  Columba’s move seems to have been acting out of obedience to God’s will (or what he perceived God’s will to be), in order to preach the Gospel and the message of God’s love to new regions. 

Nor was Columba unique in his dedication to and focus on God.  He was part of a larger movement of peregrini, who exiled themselves, leaving their homeland and their familiar comforts to serve God.  Some trusted God’s judgment to such an extent that they would cast themselves adrift in a boat without any oar, so that God would have to decide where they would land.

I’m not suggesting that any of us should cast ourselves adrift.  Nevertheless, the readings we have just heard call us to obey God, and the peregrini’s example shows obedience is possible. So what is the will of God, which we are supposed to obey? 

I think the two passages suggest that one way to be obedient to God is to share his love in unexpected places with unlikely people.  Just as Peter followed Jesus’ instructions to fish somewhere it hadn’t occurred to him to fish, so too did a later fisher of men, Paul, look to a group of people—the Gentiles—who were not the most obvious candidates to inherit the promises which God made to Abraham.  Similarly, even later fishers of men—the missionaries at Columba’s monasteries of Iona—also shared God’s love with unlikely peoples.  In particular, missionaries from Iona went to the Anglo-Saxon Northumbria even after a plague caused many to apostasize from Christianity.  This may have seemed singularly unpromising turf, and, according to Bede, their early attempts to set up a monastery were singularly unsuccessful. Nevertheless, their work in this unlikely place was not in vain: many Northumbrians became Christian and Northumbria eventually even produced a church father: the aforementioned venerable Bede. 

We Oxford students, too, should try to love everyone.  Like Columba, we are the royalty of our own little realms.  Like the intellectual leaders in the passage from Acts, we often think we know better than God; or at least, we think we can rely on our own, partial knowledge and skills to solve all the problems in our lives.  However, this very learning often blinds us to the fact that all humans are equal: all are loveable, all are God’s images, from bedraggled Big Issue sellers to annoyingly clever tutorial partners.  We should not rule anything or anyone out as too unlikely, too unworthy of our attention: for throughout history, fishers of men, from Paul to Columba, have been proving that it’s just those people whom we humans would consider the most unlikely who are actually the most promising in God’s plan.