Luke 5:1-11
A Communion Meditation by Robert E. Dunham
University Presbyterian Church
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time February 7, 2010
I haven’t always liked that story. In fact, for much of my ministry I wanted to avoid it. It is not because the story is controversial. On the surface, at least, the tale is simply Luke’s version of the calling of the first disciples, the moment when Jesus summons and invites them to leave much behind and to follow him. If we hear it rightly, by extension it is also a story that still calls, summons and invites us to discipleship all these centuries later.
But it is an odd story. A pastor friend says that this story is so familiar in the church’s teaching that we may forget how ludicrous its internal logic is.
Jesus and the disciples, with Peter occupying the foreground, are out in boats because the crowds following Jesus have essentially pressed him to the edge of the lakeshore, and the only option he has is to teach them from a seat in Peter’s boat. When the teaching is over and the crowd is presumably shuffling away, Jesus gives Peter some fishing advice. Peter, with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, does what Jesus says – he puts out the nets for another try. What he expects is a validation of his expert opinion that today’s fishing is lousy, but the catch is so great as to risk sinking the boats and drowning all who are in them. This prompts Peter, having recognized Jesus’ power, to fall on his knees (which means, probably, to fall knee-deep in the smelly fish still flopping around on board) and to beg Jesus to depart from him. Does he really mean that? He’s sinking, nobody’s wearing life-jackets, and if anybody has the power to fix that immediate situation, it’s the One whom he has just asked to go away! Ignoring Peter’s entreaty and taking little note of the imminent danger they’re all in, Jesus soothingly says, “Do not be afraid; from now on you’ll be catching people.” As if to say, “Sure, this situation is tough, at least in the short run, what with all these fish and these leaky boats; but don’t worry – the job I’m about to give you is a piece of cake.” The job he’s about to give Peter is that of netting a church. And to that overwhelming prospect he says, “Do not be afraid.”
Is he crazy? …If we think about this story for even a little while, the apparent coherence of it that comes from having heard it so often starts to unravel, and a question fairly shouts itself: Why shouldn’t Peter be afraid? Why shouldn’t anybody be afraid of being given such a task?[1]
Indeed, if we get a glimpse of what Jesus has in mind, this is fairly radical stuff that he is asking Peter to undertake and that, all these centuries later, he is asking us to undertake, too. This is a call, a summons, an invitation to a new life and a new way of life shaped by Jesus’ teaching. The text ends with a rather dramatic note that “When they had brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.” Moments after their greatest professional success ever,[2] they walked away from it all to follow Jesus. Think of everything to which we cling. From start to finish in Luke’s Gospel we will see the disciples wrestling with what it means to relinquish in order to follow.
William Alexander Percy once captured the power of this scene in the opening verses of a very fine hymn: “They cast their nets in Galilee, Just of the hills of brown; Such happy, simple fisherfolk Before the Lord came down. Contented, peaceful fishermen, Before they ever knew, The peace of God that filled their hearts Brimful, and broke them, too.”[3]
I said I haven’t always liked the story, but it’s not the pathos of it or the danger of it or even the power of its compelling call that sets me off. It’s the metaphor. To these fishermen, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will be catching people.” I don’t much like that metaphor. My friend Patrick Willson recently helped me to put my finger on why, as he noted the way Luke differs from Mark, who remembers Jesus saying, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.”
I have never been comfortable with that [metaphor] to describe evangelism. “Fishers of people.” You drop the net over the side of the boat, circle around, then pull in the net, haul it up and over the side, and what do you get? You get a mess of living, flopping fish. But wait a minute. They will stop flip-flopping. They will be quiet and still…and dead. The nets of “fishers of people” are hardly a happy image of evangelism. Is that it? We transform bright, shiny, flip-flopping creatures into something grey and still and dead? A lot of people look at the church that way. Is that what we think of when we think of evangelism? Giving up things bright and alive for something dull, drab, and deadly?
I shudder with such a view of evangelism. It is not only a professional matter; it is a personal one for me. It does not square with experience…. I am uncomfortable with any vision of evangelism that suggests being caught up by Christ diminishes vitality or destroys life.
In my discomfort I am not alone. Luke consoles me. Writing his Gospel, Luke had on his desk a copy of the gospel of Mark and the story of calling the disciples to become “fishers of people.” Apparently, Luke found himself uncomfortable with that phrasing, or perhaps Luke knew another way of recalling Jesus’ mandate. Whatever else, when Luke wrote his gospel, he phrased Christ’s call in a significantly different way. “Do not be afraid,” Jesus says; “From now on you will be catching people.” You might have thought that was just some new contemporary translation. Not at all.
One word Luke uses [zogron] is obscure, almost never used in New Testament Greek, but with a root so simple [we can’t] miss it: zoe, life, from which we get zoology, the study of living creatures. Museums contain stuffed and mounted animals, but the zoo – the zoe – teems with living creatures. Luke used the word zoe as a verb. To enliven? To vivify? To bring to life? … The word Luke uses is utterly specific. It means “to take alive; “to capture alive.”[4] [Indeed, in the Greek Old Testament the word is used to describe saving the lives of people who are in danger.]
I might suggest that even more, what Jesus intends here is that his followers will help bring fullness of life to those they encounter. As Willson says, “Jesus comes for the sake of life,” real, authentic life…full and abundant life… Jesus invites his followers – invites us all – to embrace life. He commissions the church for the sake of life. Jesus calls us and sends us forth to seek out others with what we have seen and heard. Luke begins his gospel with the angels proclaiming “good news of a great joy,” and it is that joy we are summoned to share. We become fully alive, says Willson, when we offer this life, this joy, to others.[5]
When we turn to someone we may not know this morning and offer bread and a cup with words like “the body of Christ” and “the cup of salvation,” we aren’t asking for some stultifying, deadening conformity to doctrine or practice; we are simply saying zoe – “here is life, abundant life, gracious life, joyful life…and it is for you.”
When a Christian doctor extends care and healing to a Haitian villager crippled by earthquake debris, she is not considering how to make a convert; she is offering the healing she has known at Christ’s hands as a sheer gift of life and hope.
When one of you invites a neighbor or a co-worker to join you here for worship, you’re not trying to snare another member for the church. You are saying, “Here is where I have found life, and it is for you, too.”
When a campus ministry student says to a suite-mate, “You know, PCM is where I find balance and laughter and sheer joy,” she’s taking a risk, frankly, because who knows what that suite-mate will think? But she is offering the abundance of the community she has come to know…and life itself.
“Don’t be afraid,” Jesus says, “from now on you will be catching people.” From now on zoe. From now on, there is life and joy to share.
Not everyone wants such life, to be sure. And there’s risk in accepting the summons to share such joy, to invite others to such life. Otherwise, Jesus would not have had to say, “Don’t be afraid.” Knowing what befalls Jesus later in the Gospel, and what befalls Peter down the road – how the peace he experienced with Jesus filled his heart brimful, but broke him, too – knowing what befalls Peter, it is tempting to read this story about those who left it all behind to follow Jesus and then wistfully go back to our nets, to our ordinary lives, as if this story were not about us, and this summons were not ours, too.[6] But don’t you see? It is about us. And the summons is ours. There is joy to share…for the sake of life… for the sake of life. From now on, zoe. Don’t you see?
[1] Ted Wardlaw, in a paper presented to the January 1998 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Memphis, Tennessee. This sermon draws partly on his insights in that paper.
[2] Wardlaw.
[3] Percy, “The Cast Their Nets in Galilee,” 1924.
[4] Patrick Willson, in a wonderful paper on this text presented to the January, 2010 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Chapel Hill.
[5] Willson; cf. note 4.
[6] Kate Huey, “Into the Deep,” http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/february-7-2010.html
Share this page:
