St. Teresa of Ávila writes, “Christ has no Body now but yours.”
That single sentence names what is really happening when Jesus walks along the sea and says, “Follow me.”
Jesus begins his ministry after John’s arrest. The story opens in loss, danger, and injustice. God enters what is already wounded and uses it. And if Christ now has no Body but ours, then it is through human lives that God chooses to enter such places.
To follow Jesus is to allow what God, for reasons we may not fully understand, allows and to trust that love is still present and still working there. It is to suffer, ever so slightly, what God suffers eternally: the pain and the hope of loving a world that is not yet whole.
The fishermen are not chosen because they are better, perfect, or more faithful. They are chosen because they are available. They are willing to become the place where Christ continues to live and act. They represent everyone. God is calling not just a few chosen ones, but all people and all creation back to God’s own self.
Following Jesus is not about religious status. It is about consent: consent to carry what God carries, consent to love what God loves ,consent to let one’s life become a body through which Christ can touch the world.
This calling has little to do with believing the right things about God, beyond the one truth that contains all others: God is love itself. Those who respond are not those who are certain, correct, or complete. They are those willing to bear the cost of reconciliation within themselves. They become the leaven, the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed - small and hidden, yet entrusted with the slow transformation of the world.
Something about Jesus captivated these fishermen, and “they left everything and followed him.” We usually hear that as a demand. But it may be an invitation to a deeper question: What am I holding on to, and what is it giving me? We hold on to beliefs and opinions, grudges and resentments, fear, guilt, and shame, old wounds and disappointments, the way things used to be, comfort, control, and familiarity, biases and judgments.
We also hold on to what is holy: people we love, relationships that sustain us, joy and gratitude, faith and hope, values and integrity, meaning and purpose, all that is good, true, and beautiful. We will always hold something. The question is whether what we hold makes us more or less available to God’s love.so the call by the sea is not only “follow me.” It is: let your life become the place where God can love the world again.
- Lilly Pushpam PBVM
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