Ord Om ordet
Vocation
Homily given as part of an Advent Recollection at the Venerable English College.
Isaiah 30.19-26: When the Lord has given you the bread of suffering and the water of distress, he who is your teacher will hide no longer, and you will see your teacher with your own eyes. Whether you turn to right or left, your ears will hear these words behind you, ‘This is the way, follow it.’
Matthew 9.35-10.8: The harvest is rich but the labourers are few
The readings given us today explore the theme of vocation from different angles. We tend, now, to think of a vocation as an obstacle course laid by a mischievous providence to befuddle runners. We offer vocational guidance, discernment, and accompaniment. There are people who spend years working out their vocation, so that discernment to all intents and purposes becomes a vocation in its own right.
This points to a fallacy. It makes no sense to speak of ‘my’ vocation as if it were an acquisition, birthright, or part of a genetic code. A vocation is God’s.
He who, at first, brought something out of nothing by decreeing, ‘Let there be’ — ‘and there was’; he alone can call a person to new becoming in view of a work to be done.
Sometimes he calls directly by name: ‘Come, follow me!’ Sometimes he calls through intermediaries, as when Elisha is summoned through Elijah. Sometimes he uses the liturgy, as when Antony hears a word of Scripture in church and is convinced, ‘That’s for me’. And sometimes he simply uses circumstances, confronting a person with a need requiring a response that, to the morally and spiritually alert, is irresistible.
That is the scenario we meet in today’s Gospel: ‘The harvest is rich, the labourers are few.’ Are you one desiring to pick up tools and go into the field? Have you the required skills, health, and staying power? Then this may be the vocation around which you must, if you decide to follow it, freely configure the rest of your existence.
For a Yes like Isaiah’s, ‘Here I am, send me!’, to God’s call by way of a question, ‘Whom shall I send?’, must be dependable. It’s no good saying Yes today, No tomorrow. Even as Christ, the Son of God, ‘was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes’, as Paul splendidly wrote to the Corinthians, so our life’s task is to nurture readiness for wholehearted, constant consent.
The call is God’s; the Yes must be ours.
A call, I have said, is in view of a task. This is so even for contemplative recluses. Grace cannot be privatised; each member is called to move for the benefit of the whole body. The twelve are sent out to ‘cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out devils’ quite gratuitously: ‘You received without charge, give without charge.’
To learn to live in this way, unclingingly, surrendering all claims to entitlement, is the principal vocational challenge: the application of our Yes in principle to concrete situations and relationships. Patience is called for; and at the heart of ‘patience’, a Latin noun, lurks the root of passio.
To that, too, we must say Yes courageously.
Our Lord who came to set us free did so by way of oblation. His followers will at times, like him, be given the bread of suffering to eat, the water of distress to drink. At such times we learn what it means for us to call him; and that his mercy is sure. ‘Whether you turn to right or left, your ears will hear these words behind you, ‘This is the way, follow it.’
God does not abandon those whom he calls; he is faithful; when they call, he answers. Let’s never forget that. Let’s learn to live trustfully, cheerfully by that remembrance.
