Luke 5:1-11
February 7, 2010
There is more than one miracle in this story if you ask me. Obviously we have the massive haul of fish. But I think Simon Peter’s succession of responses in this passage is nothing short of miraculous. Each time he speaks or acts he signals a massive shift in his understanding, beliefs and purpose in life. One right after the other, sometimes two dramatic transformations coming simultaneously! All in the span of 11 verses.
Peter’s behavior starts out reasonably enough. He knows Jesus, knows what he has been doing – healing and preaching – and he sees him as important in his own life. In fact, Jesus has just healed Peter’s mother-in-law. So when Jesus asks Peter to row him out in the boat so he can get some distance from the crowd, Peter does as he asks. And Jesus has earned the benefit of the doubt so that when he tells Peter to cast the nets again, even though they have caught nothing after a long night of fishing, Peter does, even if a bit skeptically.
But once the fish start pouring in, Peter experiences quite a rash of varied emotions, and makes huge decisions in what seems like a matter of minutes. Consider, for example, how Peter completely changes his understanding of who Jesus is. In verse five, as Peter is rowing Jesus out to sea, he calls Jesus “Master”. This is a term used for teachers and those you look to for guidance. Then, just three short verses later, after the boats are weighed down by fish, Peter calls Jesus “Lord,” or “Kurie!!” in Greek. We may think this a subtle distinction, but the majesty of the title “Kurie” cannot be overstated. It had religious, political, and economic implications on a large scale.
Lord was a divine title. It was reserved for the one who holds all the power in the religious, social and political institutions of the day – namely the king or emperor. Caesar was “Kurie” for anyone living in the Roman Empire. Prior to this moment, Peter’s life was defined by submitting to other lords and masters. So it is a pretty major event when Peter goes from seeing Jesus as someone to follow and listen to, to placing Jesus as the only ruler of his life – to the exclusion of all others. Jesus as Lord becomes the religious, political and economic leader to whom Peter now will answer – Jesus alone.
This change, though dramatic, can still be seen as fairly reasonable given it was in reaction to a pretty dramatic miracle. But the reasonable behavior starts to fall apart, in my opinion, when at the same moment Peter moves from seeing Jesus as one among many authorities in his life to the only authority, we get an equally strong, equally dramatic, yet almost opposite reaction. “Get away from me!!! I am a sinful man!” He pledges his devotion to and desire for distance from Jesus simultaneously. But it seems the abundance of fish evokes an awareness in Peter that once you are answerable only to Jesus, your life in comparison to what it should be isn’t so easy to look at. Standing next to Jesus, Peter sees himself all too clearly and it’s not a sight he wishes to behold. So he begs Jesus to stand somewhere else. He begs Jesus to leave him alone because it’s too painful to see himself as he fears God sees him.
Peter’s final response in this passage is yet another complete reversal from what he has just said. In this about face, by any sane measure, surely Peter moves from the world of rational to ridiculous; from reasonable to nothing short of miraculous. After one sentence from Jesus – an enigmatic one at that – Peter moves from “Go away,” to “Wait for me! Wait for me!” and leaves everything behind to follow Jesus. Everything! Including this massive influx of wealth Jesus just provided in the form of abundant fish; all because of one sentence.
A sentence with that kind of effect certainly merits a closer look. But first, in order to understand the impact of what Jesus says, we have to understand a bit of what life was like for Peter and the other fishermen. Specifically, their lives were probably not great. Obviously, like any human life, I’m sure there were times of joy and peace. But peasant life was just not easy in Jesus’ day. And that’s what fishermen were…peasants. Peasants were on the edge all the time between subsistence living and abject poverty. It took very little to push people over that line – and those pushes usually came from forces far beyond their control.
Since the rise of Herod the Great as the Caesar-approved ruler over the Jews, which was shortly before Jesus was born, there had been increasing Roman incursion into the Sea of Galilee area. Before Herod, Galilee had been a largely isolated Jewish community focused primarily on fishing, farming, family and religion. Their economy was completely local. Families and small villages “got by” because everyone worked hard, they took care of each other, and they were pretty much off the radar screen of the Roman authorities and Jewish elites.
But Herod the Great, and later his son Herod Antipas who ruled during Jesus’ adult life, wanted to build up their own mini-kingdoms in Galilee, increasing the commercial activity and thus increasing revenue for them – wealth that would trickle up and endear them to the Roman Emperor. This brought a whole new layer of oppression to those living and working in that area. The more commercialized the lake became, the more the fisherman were forced to live by the Roman rules and were subject not to one another but to the tax collectors and increased fees and tolls. They were drafted into a system that had a very different vision of their role in the local and imperial economy than what they were used to.
When Jesus shows up in Galilee preaching his good news to the poor, those living there are not only poor peasants, they are also trapped in a system always bent on exploiting them and their labor in order to increase the wealth of the elite of the Empire.
It is with this context in mind that we can now look at this one sentence that Jesus uttered that had such a powerful effect on Peter. “Do not be afraid,” Jesus says, “from now on you will be catching people.” Or as Mark and Matthew both put it in their gospels, and as most of us remember it, “I will make you fishers of people.” And that’s it – that’s what it takes for Peter and the others to leave everything to follow this man who fishes for people.
When I was growing up, I loved to sing Sunday school songs. I really did. I was a geek extraordinaire. I liked “We are climbing Jacob’s latter”, “Zaccheaus was a wee little man”, “Wade in the Water,” and all the others. Except one. There was one I never really liked, and we sang it all the time. “I will make you fishers of men.” That was really all there was to the song: “I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men. I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.” I’m sorry, but the image just didn’t work for me. It still doesn’t. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I don’t like fishing. I have tried to like fishing…I have friends who like fishing, who find it peaceful and beautiful. I have tried to like the sport, but I just can’t, because in the end, you have a live, floppy thing with a hook in it’s mouth hanging from your line. Yuck.
So, fishing for people is not appealing to me. To be fair, the fishing we read about in the gospel of Luke is fishing with nets, not hooks and reels. But that’s only marginally better. It still seems like we’re talking about ensnaring, catching, baiting, tricking, capturing and hauling in. I assume fish don’t like being caught. Is this really the analogy we want for Christian discipleship. Personally, I don’t want to do that with people.
But when we look at what happens in Jesus’ ministry with the disciples in the rest of the gospel story, we know Jesus wasn’t talking about ensnaring people in a net, or hooking them in the mouth with the hook of the gospel message, reeling them into the synagogues against their will, converting them by whatever means necessary. As one Lutheran minister writes: “The calling is not to hook people and drag them in. It is rather to cast the net of God's love all around--open to all the world--and then wait with patience for the Spirit's work and to see if any are caught by God's vision and grace."
This promise that if they left their current lives to follow Jesus they would become “catchers of people” was a promise that their lives would be changed forever. In this one sentence, their lives were given meaning and purpose – lives that probably plodded along in much the same way every day. As peasant fishermen, they had very little to offer others. They were controlled by others to a great degree. Some scholars have even described their lives as approaching slave labor. Serving the empire was oppressive, not meaningful. Jesus, on the other hand, calls them to serve others; not the powerful but the poor and the hurting. The abundance Jesus shows them in the miracle that day would be theirs, but more than that they would get to offer such abundance to others.
Jesus was offering nothing short of an entirely different kingdom in which they could live right then. This new kingdom is the perfect – maybe only – antidote to the difficult, unjust life people lived in Caesar’s kingdom. And it had implications on every level. Come with me and you will no longer be a part of this unjust economic system of fishing only for the good of Caesar. Instead we will care for each other and the poor by encouraging a return to community oriented economics based on God’s vision. Jesus could provide meaning and purpose of life in a way the emperor could or would not. They were leaving everything behind for a completely new life, and for them that was good news!
An editorial in a newspaper this week told the story of a woman who left everything to go work in the Congo. She heard about the atrocities happening there – especially to women. And so she began to raise money here in the states, and eventually went to the Congo to work with women. She has become a part of their lives – “sisters” she and the other women call each other. But she did leave things behind – important things. She left behind a fiance who would eventually break off the engagement. She left behind a job and financial security. She left behind comforts in the United States. Yet here is what she said of her decision:
“Technically, I had a good life before, but I wasn’t very happy. Now I feel I have much more of a sense of meaning.”
Jesus has pulled us out of our lives of drudgery into a life full of purpose: spreading the net of God’s grace and love. That may mean leaving things behind – or it may just mean we experience life differently because we work first and foremost for God. We are ultimately answerable only to God. That might seem scary at first, but we are catchers of people – we cast the net of God’s love far and deep. Sometimes we see how that affects people, and other times we leave it to God to know how the seeds we plant grow over time. But this is where our lives derive their meaning and purpose. This is more important than any other work we do, any other people we serve and answer to, any other system of which we are a part. We are catchers of people…following Jesus with our whole lives. That is our purpose – and that is amazingly good news. Amen.
