Thought for the week - 25 January 2026

After the testing in the wilderness, which annoying we have not got to yet but the readings jump around in this strange time between Christmas and Lent, Jesus is ready to begin his preaching, but everything seems to go wrong. John the Baptist is arrested and so Judea, the heart of the Holy Land, becomes too hot for Jesus. He even leaves his home territory of Nazareth for Capernaum, “the Galilee of the Gentiles”, as it was called.

But as so often, this apparent setback is a new beginning. It foreshadows the community which will come to be, of Jews and Gentiles. It is here Jesus meets and calls his first disciples – pointedly not in an established Jewish area, but in a new land. When we are forced out of our “comfort zone”, God’s grace brings new things into existence. This too is the experience of those whom Jesus calls. These fishermen are called to leave behind the familiar life they inherited from their ancestors, taken out of their depth, and be caught up in the life of this alarming stranger who comes from nowhere. Eventually they will be despatched beyond the boundaries of the world they know.

Becoming a disciple of Jesus can be and often is thoroughly unsettling. One has no idea what will be asked and how one will cope. It is a perilous adventure, especially alarming for our timid culture with its fear of risk and obsession with health and safety.

God’s love often propels us into deep waters where we must either sink or trust in him. To love anyone is risky. Who knows what it will involve? How much more dangerous to fall in love with the one who is love incarnate. This is an invitation to lose control of our lives. So the Christian imagination should defy the timid neuroses of our time. At Pentecost, much further on in their journey but with the same people we meet today the disciples received the Holy Spirit that propelled them on a mission to the whole world. But they were reluctant to go and leave the small and familiar community of the early Church in Jerusalem, which they could not even imagine today, as they are called in Capernaum. Finally it was persecution that dislodged them. God sometimes resorts to desperate means. We must dare to grapple with questions to which we have no easy answers and try ways of being a church that may well fail. Let us not be afraid, as Peter was in the boat a few years later.

Jesus commanded the disciples to get into the boat and go before him. We cannot remain on the beach saying, “Myself, I would not go sailing today” or “I would choose a different boat.” Jesus is alone on the mountain but Peter must not be unaccompanied, he is supported by his fellow disciples, called this day, many of whom he would not have chosen, we too must not be unaccompanied, but also we cannot choose who accompanies us!

Sometimes we too shall feel alone, burnt out, exhausted. But Jesus is watching and will come closer to us than ever before. So we need not be afraid. We live in a time of terrible storms too, of growing violence, from knife crime to war. The chasm between the rich and the poor is ever wider. The world order which came into being after the last world war is breaking down. We have no idea of what Artificial Intelligence will yield. If we are not nervous, we ought to be. But we are called and we are fed.

For here is a shared meal, our Eucharist, the feeding of the 5000, the absence of Jesus, and his sudden appearance among us. Already on the Sea of Galilee after the call of the fishermen when they were on a boat again the disciples are living in anticipation of the death and Resurrection of the Lord. It will be repeated after the feeding of the four thousand. We will encounter it again on the road to Emmaus, we will find it in the Kingdom yet to come, so do not say ‘what can I give the world’, but ‘how can I let God feed others through me and us’, say ‘yes’ as the disciples did when they were called, step away from the comfortable. Step away from yourself and into Him.

The disciples, called today in the Gospel, would later feed the five thousand but they were stuck in the old logic of calculation, of what to do next, of doubt. The Lord of the harvest works miracles with what they offer and with what we offer when we first learn to trust Him.

We may feel that, faced with the vast challenges of our world and Church, we have so little to offer as Disciples. What can we say and do that will make a difference? But with God’s grace, our little will be more than enough. So let us not harden our hearts but be open to the incalculable gifts of God, who bestows upon us grace without measure if we open our hands and our ears to Him and to each other.