“Please, pick me!” That’s what I wished for, hoped for, and sometimes even prayed for (but never ever out loud).
Whether it was for pickup basketball with neighborhood friends or the softball games organized by the De la Salle Christian Brothers who taught us in elementary school, I was almost always the last to be chosen. After all, I was a skinny, nerdy kid with eyeglasses. Often enough, I was the object of bargaining among the team captains as they negotiated, “Okay, we’ll settle for Ruiz, but only if you take so-and-so.” On the softball diamond or on the basketball court, I rarely failed to disappoint my teammates! Over the years, what I lacked in athletic skill I made up for in persistence. As a seminarian in Rome, I played on our soccer team. We dubbed ourselves the “North American Martyrs” because we lost our matches way more often than not.
These memories came to mind as I considered this Sunday’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, imagining myself among the crowd of Jesus’ disciples and hearing him call out the names of the twelve he had chosen to be his apostles, his starting lineup, so to speak. “Pick me,” I would have thought. Please call out my name! Jesus chose two sets of brothers who were fisherfolk from Galilee, along with a tax collector and an assortment of otherwise unknowns, one of whom would even go on to betray him. He didn’t interview them, nor did he ask them for references, nor did he scrutinize their resumés. Jesus simply invited them to follow him, and they did, no questions asked. As for the job description, the most they got was the enigmatic promise that henceforth they would be catching people instead of fish.
What was Jesus up to? St. Paul knew very well, on the basis of his own unexpected and unlikely vocation, reminding the nascent Christian community in Corinth, “Consider your own call, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God” (1 Corinthians 1:26-29). In our weakness, God is our strength!
In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus exhorts his disciples, “The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.”
In our own diocese and in dioceses and religious communities throughout this country and around the world, it is ordination season, so to speak, when many will respond to Jesus’ call to follow him as priests. After careful discernment and extensive formation, these new priests will say “yes” to Christ, keenly aware that, whatever their own abundant gifts and talents may be, they will need to rely on God’s grace for their work in Christ’s harvest to bear fruit. As we pray, through the intercession of the first apostles, that they will faithfully persevere, let us also pray that many more will say, “Please, pick me” to follow Christ in ordained ministry, in consecrated religious life, and as committed laypeople in service to the Church.