It is often said that one cannot go to seminary as a way of trying to do penance for the sins of his past. I agree with that and do not believe that that is why I am going to seminary and looking to become a priest. But the sins of one’s past certainly do lend a certain poignancy to the decision. Jesus says very plainly, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
I am certainly one of those latter. I have been thinking a lot lately about my past mistakes. The darker moments of my life. There are people in my life, even pretty close friends, who don’t know the extent of them, and may never know them. But I know them. They are in my memory forevermore. I don’t beat myself up about them, at least not anymore. But I do on occasion look back on them and marvel at what a good God He must be to be able to use such a scoundrel as myself to do the work to which he has called me. It is enough to move one to tears at times.
I am a sinner who deserves hell. But not only is God calling me home to him; He is calling me to bring the message of his love to other people. To go to the people who have suffered and sinned just as I have, and to tell them when they doubt that there is a God who loves them that he is and he does. And not only does he love them, but he is calling them by name to go and tell the rest of the world about that love, to bring glad tidings to the other spiritually starving people of the world.
That’s the crazy thing about Jesus. He doesn’t just go to individuals and make his relationship right with them. He then calls those individuals to go out and love other people the way he loved them. He makes us whole, but that’s just the beginning. He sends us forth. He gives us the gift of participating in his work. And we ask God, “Why me? Why have you chosen me for this? There are so many other people out there who could do this work. Better people. Holier people. Smarter people. Prettier people. Funnier people.”
God doesn’t buy that line. He made his Son ordinary, just like all the ordinary people who wondered in the desert for forty years and waited for a Messiah for centuries more. And when this ordinary flesh and blood man began to do extraordinary things, he chose other ordinary flesh and blood men and women to help him do so. Surely they must have asked themselves why he called them. But when the time came, they knew the voice of the shepherd, and they responded. I pray I can do the same.
Leave a comment