Living Word

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity
by Matthew Colvin
As you know, our family lives in Port Alberni. When we first moved there, I met some guys on the tennis court, and when I told them I was new to town, their immediate question was, “Do you fish?” I said no. “Then what are you doing here?” — as though it were inexplicable why anyone would live in Port Alberni without catching fish.
And sometimes, because the Barclay Sound is so pretty, and because I have enjoyed a cruise down the Alberni Inlet on the MV Frances Barclay, and because all my friends own boats, I say to my wife, “Maybe we could get one.” And then she reminds me that I hate doing maintenance on things, and that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into.
But maybe the biggest objection, for me, comes from Psalm 107:
“They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters;
These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For at his word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifeth up the waves thereof.
They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble.” (107:23-26)
That is why I am a landlubber from the fishing capital of Canada. Unlike St. Peter.
We have already met Peter in chapter 4 of Luke, because Jesus has healed his mother in law from a fever. And we know, also, that Peter and Andrew his brother were looking for the coming of the Messiah.
Jesus’s preaching has been in synagogues in Nazareth and in Capernaum in chapter 4. But now, he has a larger audience, and the venue is moved outdoors: the crowd first surrounds him and is “pressing in upon him” — not the last time we will see crowds behave this way: remember the reaction of his disciples when the woman with the bleeding comes up behind Jesus and touches his robe. “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” This is the behaviour of crowds also in our own day in the presence of someone they have come to see. Jesus at first is standing by the shore of Genessaret, but he then finds a solution to the crowding problem: by getting into a boat, and putting out from the land a little bit, he is able to continue teaching, in his usual seated posture that he had taught in also in the two synagogues, but now with a boundary of water between him and the crowds. In the event, it will be those who are with him in the boats who become his followers, as though they were with him on the other side of the waters of baptism.
One might wonder why there is mention of two boats, not just the one that Jesus sat in. This is what we call a narrative seed. Some of you may have heard of the term “Chekhov’s gun.” The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov said, “If you say in the first act of a play that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, then in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” In this case, the second boat will be needed in verse 8 when there are too many fish for the one boat to handle.
If you’ve ever seen a stage magician, you’ll recall how they always take pains to demonstrate how difficult the trick is: they’ll cut a watermelon with the sword they’re about to use on the lovely assistant; or fan the cards to show that the deck isn’t rigged; or bring up a burly member of the audience to demonstrate how the chains the magician is going to escape from are really strong.
God or Jesus isn’t a stage magician, of course. But he does like to demonstrate the difficulty of his miracles. Remember Elijah pouring water three times over the altar before the fire of God fell from heaven to burn it up in front of the prophets of Baal? Or Jesus choosing to heal, not a man who had recently become blind, but one who was more than 30 years old and had been blind from birth? Or Jesus pointedly asking the disciples to show him the five loaves and three fish first before proceeding to feed the five thousand with them?
In the present story, we are told that “the fishermen had got out of the boats and were washing their nets.” This tell us that they were using trammel-nets, made of linen, which needed to be washed after use. If the linen nets were not washed and dried promptly after use they would rot from the various organic matter stuck in them after use. Further, this washing was invariably done in the morning. Why?
Because until the introduction of modern nets made of transparent nylon, fishing with linen nets had to be done at night. During the daytime, the fish could see the nets and avoid being caught by them. So Jesus has found Peter and his partners at precisely the wrong time to catch fish: not only are they done for the day, not only are they already washing their nets, but the sun has now risen, which means it is not possible to catch fish with nets now.
Jesus also isn’t concerned with fishermen’s timetables.  When does he tell them to let down their nets? Nothing to do with with daylight or the schedule of net-cleaning. No, “When he had finished speaking.” At his convenience. Jesus appears to think he is “the main character,” as the kids say these days. Because, well, he is.
Put yourself in Peter’s shoes. You’ve been working all night. Fishing is hard. You’re in a boat with probably three other men. You have to pull in heavy nets; you may have to dive into the water to wrestle them or unsnag them from something. You are drenched, weary, and have caught nothing. You have washed your nets, maybe mended them if they broke. You’re done for the day. And now this Jesus fellow tells you to start all over, and drawing on his vast knowledge of …carpentry? — he tells you to start fishing in the daytime, when you know, from years of experience on the sea, that you will catch nothing.
All of which makes Peter’s address of Jesus a little more amusing. He calls him ἐπιστάτα. The ESV says, “Master,” but it is probably best translated “boss.” “Boss, we have toiled all night and caught nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.”
“Boss” – the Greek means literally the one who is stationed over something, has authority over it. In this case, the something over which Peter acknowledges Jesus’s authority is Peter’s boat and indeed his entire business, his profession of fishing, a matter to which he was likely born and bred – like his business partners James and John, whose father Zebedee was with them in the boat, Peter is trained in a thousand little details of skill and technique: the behaviour of fish, the tides, the weather, the use and care and washing and repair of nets; the handling and maintenance of boats; and likely also the salesmanship required to sell his fish, if not to those who would eat them, then to fishmonger middlemen. This was his life, deeply embedded in the community of his town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Sea of Tiberias, or Lake Genessaret, depending on who you asked for its name. Indeed, we know from the Talmud that “throughout inland Palestine, Tiberias was the only place where wholesale trade in fish was conducted, and (2) that this wholesale trade in fish was in season in Tiberias probably in the months that were most suitable for the loading and export of fish.” So Jesus is there at the Port Alberni of Palestine, boldly giving a command to fishermen who have grown up and make their living catching and selling fish from this lake.
And the command that Jesus gives Peter is, quite frankly, absurd: to dirty the nets again after already cleaning them; to let them down in the daytime, when the fish will have no trouble seeing them, rather than at night, which every fisherman knows is the right time to catch fish; and to do it, moreover, in the same location where, as Peter explains to him, “we have laboured all night and have caught nothing.”
So why does Peter obey him? Because he accepts his authority, which is not the authority of an expert. The thousand details of the fisherman’s trade are indeed matters of expertise, but Jesus does not urge Peter to cast in his nets on the basis of his expertise. The authority of expertise, if you stop and think about it for a moment, is an authority that makes no claims upon our sense of ourselves and our authority to decide things: it rather submits itself for our consideration, as having knowledge of particulars that we could have too, if we invested the effort.
No, Peter’s faith is not faith in expertise. Rather, it is the same faith that we will see later, in what might well be the same boat, certainly on the same sea, in awe at Jesus’s authority: “Who is this, that even the wind and waves obey Him?” It is faith in the Messiah. It is loyalty to Israel’s God.
More than any disciple, his personality shines out in the gospels: he is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, ready, out of love for Jesus, to undertake bold actions and to follow Jesus: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water”; “Even if all forsake you, yet I will not.” “Lord, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tents.” But at the same time, he is not always able to see through his bold beginnings to their end: so we will see him swearing he doesn’t know the man; weeping when the cock crows; beginning to sink in the waves.
But this is not one of those moments of weakness. Here, he recognizes in Jesus the holiness of the Lord: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” Peter does not know that Jesus is Israel’s God yet. But he knows that He is at least close to Israel’s God. Here we recognize the attitude of the prophets of old, for instance, Isaiah 6:5: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
This is the moment when Peter makes a sudden break with his past life. We recall Elijah calling Elisha by throwing his cloak over him while he was plowing. There, too, the master called his pupil in the middle of his work at his job; there, too, the disciple experienced a complete upending of his life. In both cases, the disciple will see His master taken up into heaven; both Elisha and Peter will then be filled with the spirit of their teacher; and from that point, they will show complete fearlessness and boldness.
Yes, Peter stumbles several times. Sometimes he is overcome by fear – of the waves, or of persecution and death. Other times, he stumbles because of his deeply ingrained respect for, and assumptions about propriety: as when he rebuked Jesus for saying that He would be rejected and killed (“Lord, this will never happen to you”); or when he objected to Jesus washing his feet; or when, in Acts, he was told to sacrifice and eat a giant picnic blanket of unclean animals and replied, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” (Acts 10:14) But none of these stumbles is permanent. Why? Because Jesus tells him, “Simon, Simon. Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail. And when you have returned, strengthen your brothers.”
Jesus has just demonstrated that if he wanted to, he could make Peter and the sons of Zebedee into fishing millionaires, the tycoons of the Lake of Genessaret. And because of this, they trust him to the end. But not, notice, in order to get rich: having received the demonstration of Jesus’s ability to provide wealth in the context of their business as fishermen, they now leave that business. Later, in the story of the rich young ruler, after that man goes away sad because he had great possessions, Peter pipes up, “Lord, we have left everything to follow you.” And they have. After they saw the demonstration, they didn’t care about getting rich as fishermen. They saw what their hearts had longed for. They wanted to be with Jesus. Peter does not treat Jesus as a way to get rich. We read in Acts 3, when Peter heals the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, that the lame man first looked at him, hoping to receive something, “But Peter said, “I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” (Acts 3:6) No, Peter is not concerned with silver or gold or catching fish anymore. Jesus has demonstrated that to him a second time when he asked about the Temple Tax, and Peter found a coin inside a fish. Perhaps earlier than any other disciple, he understood well that he should “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” — that is, God’s faithfulness to keep his promises to His people, especially the promise to send the Messiah and to forgive their sins — “and all these things shall be added unto you.”
Jesus tells Peter two things: first, “Do not be afraid.” Second, “from now on, you will be catching men.” The verb for “catching” is a little bit misleading, since we usually think of “catching” men as something that kidnappers do, or the police with a fugitive. But that’s not the connotation of the Greek word ζωγρῶν, literally, “catching alive.” It is not usually a fishing word, though it is an accurate enough description of the usual methods of catching fish: nets and hooks, that result in live fish flopping around. It’s not a word you would use for throwing dynamite in a pond or poisoning all the fish. But its usual usage is in contrast to killing: in the Iliad, it’s the word used for Diomedes or Achilles sparing an enemy warrior’s life and taking him captive for a ransom instead. But in Jesus’s usage here, in connection with the net, it is a vivid metaphor: Peter’s concern now is to seek the coming kingdom of heaven, which Jesus in Matthew 13 says, “is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad.” (I have a running joke with my daughter about how many gross and disgusting things there are in the sea. But Jesus here means the wicked.) At any rate, Peter does indeed “catch men.” He preaches more boldly than anyone in the book of Acts; and he is the means by which Gentiles are first brought into the church.
Peter, thus, trusts Jesus after this demonstration of his ability to provide in a single night the catch of a week or more. He and his fellow fishermen will all be martyrs, after all; yet to them applies Jesus’s promise that they will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. In the end, Jesus will eat fish with them again, likewise on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, but this time without the crowd, after his resurrection. And then we will see him in the book of Acts boldly telling the Sanhedrin to judge whether it is right to obey them or to obey God. We will see him stretching out his hands and going where he does not want to go — to prison at the hands of a king named Herod, awaiting execution during Passover week, like his Lord Jesus. In Peter’s case, we see the truth of George MacDonald’s statement: “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” And no one more than Peter.
In him we see the truth of Ignatius of Antioch’s words in his letter to the Philadelphians around 100 AD:
“For my own part, I know and believe that He was in actual human flesh, even after His resurrection. When He appeared to Peter and his companions, He said to them, ‘Take hold of me; touch me, and see that I am no bodiless phantom’. And they touched Him then and there, and believed, for they had had contact with the flesh-and-blood reality of Him. That was how they came by their contempt for death, and proved themselves superior to it. Moreover, He ate and drank with them after He was risen, like any natural man, though even then He and the Father were spiritually one.”
Have you thought about why we love Peter? It is because he is so understandable, so relatable. And he stands forth as these things because God chose him and made the gospel writers depict him for us — not as the infallible Pope, but as the fullest example and pattern of the discipleship of a follower of Jesus. In Peter we see the longing for the kingdom of God, the fierce loyalty and sense of propriety (Lord, you will never wash my feet!), the wrongness and error that beset us all, but also the gentleness of Jesus in dealing with Peter, in restoring him; and then the mature disciple in the book of Acts, who has fully comprehended Jesus’s teaching and his resurrection, and is able to do great things, including suffering for the name.
Let us pray.
Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.