‘Catchers of men’ [Luke 5.1–11]Sermon preached at All Hallows by Isobel Rathbone on 8 February 2004Jesus said to Peter: ‘Don’t be afraid; I am going to make you catchers of men’. I am going to preach about the gospel story, so let’s just run over it first. Jesus has started off his ministry in Galilee by preaching in the synagogue. He now moves on to speak to the people outside, and a large number of them are listening. We might note that amongst the ones who are not listening are the potential disciples Peter, James and John — they are busy washing their fishing nets instead. Jesus wants to find a better place from which to address his audience, so he borrows Peter’s boat and pushes out a little way from the shore, and sits down and speaks to the crowd from there. He teaches with authority, as is emphasised in the passage. When he has finished speaking, he decides that he has not actually finished with Peter, James and John, and he tells Peter to set out in his boat again to see if he can catch some fish. And Peter says, well why, because there aren’t any fish out there, but something makes him do as he is told, and when he does set out in his boat again, this time he catches so many fish that the nets can’t cope, and he has to get the others to come and help him. Peter then falls at Jesus’ feet and says ‘Leave me, Lord, because I am a sinful man.’ But Jesus just says — to all of them, not just Peter — ‘Don’t be afraid, in future you will be catching men.’ This story is Jesus’ call to Peter, but I want also to discuss it in terms of what ‘call’, or vocation, means today. I would suggest that this call has two aspects — of which one flows from the other — although those of you who have been Christians for a long time have probably forgotten about this. There is the realisation that there is more to life than consumerism, or in my case than attempting to be a moderately successful lawyer, that there is a deeper dimension, or in other words that God exists — aspect 1 — and then the realisation that you have to do something about it — aspect 2. When I had finished organising my thoughts around this in relation to the gospel passage, I realised that they had coalesced around three themes: fear, freedom and fish. This was not actually intentional. Jesus said to Peter ‘Don’t be afraid’. It is a biblical motif; it’s what the angel said to Mary. I was looking at a website yesterday which told me that there are 99 places in the bible where someone tells someone else not to be afraid, and those saying it are God, angels, Jesus and St Paul. I’m not sure what this says about Paul — maybe just that he had a bad track record of persecuting Christians, before changing his mind on conversion. ‘Don’t be afraid’ is a saying which is at once both comforting and challenging. On the one hand, ‘Do not be afraid, for I am with you. I have called you by your name; you are mine.’ On the other hand, the request to try to see clearly what defences you have erected against other people, and look at society and see what defensive power structures have been erected there. ‘Don’t be afraid’ is what the Holy Land today most needs to hear, and I sure it wasn’t any different in Jesus’ time. In autumn last year I went on a peace and justice pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine and found a place made desperate by fear. Bethlehem is in Palestinian territory, and Palestinians are more or les imprisoned there. We went through the checkpoint to get from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. We went through, but the Palestinians can’t — they have to walk round through the fields, and we saw Israeli soldiers giving them hassle whilst they were doing it. We met Palestinians who had been involved in the siege of the Church of the Nativity, and Palestinians who had had their homes flattened. We visited the wall which is being built between Jerusalem and Bethphage, between the Palestinians and their places of work, and we acted out there the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead, to show that you shouldn’t keep people imprisoned in tombs for ever. We saw Israeli soldier with guns escorting groups of school children round the ruins of Masada, and talked to Israelis who were afraid to use the buses in Jerusalem because they were afraid of bombs. We talked to a Jewish theologian who said that the land belongs to Israel because God gave it to them, and so they have the right to keep other people out, as well as to another theologian who said more sensible things. On the way out we had hassle at Ben Gurion airport because we said we had been to Palestine. We also met people who were trying to obey the demand not to be afraid — to Susan Barhoum, who works with the Galilee Society, which masterminds projects to rectify some of the ecological damage done by the conflict, and is involved in a Human Rights Group as well, and we met a community worker who is fundraising for a hospital in the Gaza strip. ‘Don’t’ be afraid’ is a radical demand in that sort of situation. Until people start trusting God and stop being afraid of each other, it’s never going to end. I said I was going to talk about vocation and freedom, and of course freedom comes when fear goes, or you could look at it as freedom from fear bringing freedom to do positive things. Thinking about this, I realised that the biblical text deals with freedom in a way that I had not realised. There is another description in the gospels of the call of Peter, found in the gospel of Mark. Mark’s account is shorter and simpler, and quite different at the end, because Mark gives Jesus’ words to Peter as ‘Don’t be afraid; from now on you will be fishers of men.’ But this message in Luke is quite different, because instead of the word ‘fishers’ Luke uses a Greek word which has nothing to do with fish. The word Luke uses in fact comes from the Greek word for ‘life’ — zoe — and it is used for catching people, but catching them in battle and then — this is the point — not killing them but setting them free. From that, an extension of the meaning is ‘nurture, enable to grow’. So what Luke has Jesus telling Peter to do, is not to catch people in a net which will somehow entrap them, but to catch them in order to free them from death and to enable them to grow. Vocation is bringing to life, and of course this doesn’t just mean other people, it means yourself as well. If only it was a bit easier to explain, I think this — catching people away from death in order to enable them to experience life more abundantly — would be a really important metaphor for Christian vocation, because the way I am experiencing vocation at the moment is having really heavy demands made on me, at the same time as being enabled by people here, and also hope fully putting a bit back.. So finally, to fish. This fishy miracle, which marks the call to Peter, James and John, is one you can explain away if you want to, by saying that a shoal of fish happened along at the right moment to be caught, but I don’t think that is what matters. The fishy part is about abundance of life, which is apparently what fishes were for in the Jewish story-tradition. It’s a trademark of miracle-stories that when Jesus decides to feed people, he always gives far too much. In the story of the wedding at Cana, when Jesus turned water into wine, there was far too much left over, and when he managed to feed several thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, there were seven basketfuls left over. It’s rather as if, when Jesus decided to have a party, he decided to do it properly. More significantly, however, our fishy motif seems to derive from a passage in Ezekiel, which is referring to the restoration of the temple after its destruction in 587 BCE, and talks about the river of life flowing out of the temple:
This is an apocalyptic vision of the coming of the Kingdom — a long way from Peter’s call by the Sea of Galilee. But that’s all right, because the aim of vocation is realisation of the Kingdom, whether inside yourself, or in this place generally, or in Palestine, or wherever. I want to end with a prayer about vocation which I wrote some time last year.
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