How are you doing?
How are things with you?
Are you managing all right?
How are you faring?
So many expressions that we hear repeatedly – expressions of interest in another person, expressions of concern about what is happening to him or her.
They manifest to others that we care for their well-being, we may even worry somehow about their welfare.
This is the language that the ‘man-on-the-shore’ uses to greet the group of fishermen getting closer to the lakeshore. “Friends, have you caught anything?” The faces surely give the answer as well as the lips: “No.” So the stranger – so he appears – adds: “Throw the net out to starboard and you’ll find something” (Jn.21:3).
The story is well-known to us including the catch of 153 fish. Human concern, so it seems, has provided what every fisherman dreams of! More still, God’s concern expressed in the of the Risen Lord slowly recognised as the Master.
Whenever I read this gospel text, I marvel at many aspects of it but there is one that especially retains my attention: “As soon as they came ashore they saw that there was some bread there, and a charcoal fire with fish cooking on it. Jesus said, ‘Bring some of the fish you have just caught’.”(Jn.21:9-10).
Jesus had already prepared breakfast for his apostles – everything was there ready and yet… he asks them to contribute something.
This is what I call: ‘God’s method’, yes, God’s way of doing – from the first chapters of Genesis (Gn.2:19) when God tells the newly-created man to name the animals, to the moment of the Annunciation (Lc.1:32) when God asks Mary, a woman of our race, to be the mother of his Son – God wants us to collaborate with him. He wants us – poor, weak, unreliable though we may be – to take part in his plan to make the world a better place, that is to save it, literally!
And in this ‘year of grace’ 2016, I do not see God’s method having changed… only his collaborators have… looking very much like you and me!