Why our primary call is to friendship

FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME | 9 FEBRUARY 2025
ISAIAH 6:1-2,3-8 | 1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-11 | LUKE 5:1-11

The theme common to all three readings at Mass today is the mystery of God’s grace at work in our lives: specifically, the mysterious working of grace that renders us receptive and responsive to the call of God which began at our conception and birth, was made explicit at our baptism, and will be brought to completion when we are called from this life to the unending happiness of heaven, for which we were created. The readings show God’s call in the lives of three very different individuals, each invited to fulfil a specific task that would change their lives and, in due course, influence the lives of us all. Isaiah, the young prophet, is summoned to bring back Israel to the path of life. Paul, the zealous Pharisee and former persecutor of Christians, is called to preach the gospel to the world beyond his native Judaism. Peter, the impulsive but fearful fisherman, is invited to switch from catching fish for the table to catching people for God. Despite their differences in almost every other way, what these individuals have in common is their profound sense of unworthiness.

Isaiah speaks of himself as “a man of unclean lips”; Paul, given his past hostility to Christ, candidly confesses: “I hardly deserve the name apostle”; and Peter, in one of the most affecting phrases uttered anywhere in the New Testament, shrinks in shame from his Master: “Leave me, Lord, for I am a sinful man”. But, in the face of their genuinely felt inadequacy, God offers the same reassurance to all three: “I will be with you.” They are called to rely, in other words, not on themselves, but on Him. “Your sin is forgiven”, Isaiah is told. Paul is given to realise, “By the grace of God, I am what I am”; and in answer to Peter’s paralysing self-doubt, Jesus tells him, simply and directly: “Do not be afraid.” As with these very different individuals, so with us. In the wellknown words of St John Henry Newman (1801-90): God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission; I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

But aside from any specific task allotted to us, there is an even more fundamental call, a call that underlies and is presupposed to whatever else we do and whatever subsequent commitments we make. By calling us into existence, God called us into a relationship such that, as Aquinas so clear-sightedly sees, to be at all, is to be in a relationship to God, the source and creator of our being. Moreover, this is a relationship not of subservience or subordination, but intimacy and mutuality: friendship, in other words. A friend, according to Aristotle and Aquinas, is “another self”; and friendship is founded in equality. Astonishingly, despite the infinite abyss between God and man (Barth), God has made us his equal, not only by sharing our human life, but by sharing with us his divine life, in order precisely that we and he might live as friends. Another distinctive mark of genuine friendship is that with our friends we are free to be ourselves. God called us into existence as utterly unique, never-to-be-repeated, one-off individuals and it is precisely in friendship with him that we are enabled to be and to flourish as our true selves, the selves created by God. Every human being bears the same image and likeness of God, but we body forth that likeness as the unique selves he has created by becoming sharers and bearers of his life and love in friendship, with him and one another.

Our primary call, then, is not to a work or task, not even to an apostolate, much less a career, but to friendship, which is the key not just to our own happiness but the happiness of us all in a peaceful and just world. As the formidable, fiery St Catherine of Siena (1347-80) once said: “When, and only when, we are what we are called to be, then, and only then, will we set this world ablaze”.