FISHERS OF MEN

North Wind Pictures

January 22 2023

Third Sunday after the Epiphany

Isaiah 9:1-4, 1 Cor. 1:10-18, Matthew 4:12-23

When I was a kid we used to spend every Fourth of July down in New Jersey, at my grandparents’ house, in the town where my parents lived as teenagers. The town is built around a big lake with beaches and docks all around the perimeter, just a short walk from my grandparents’ house. And on the Fourth of July, after we’d had a big hot-dog cookout and eaten our traditional American-flag cake, my cousins and my grandparents and my family would all load ourselves into Granny and Grandpa’s boat, and head out onto the water to enjoy what I like to think was northern New Jersey’s finest fireworks display.

And then the next day, sometimes, we’d do something very special. We’d take Grandpa’s fishing rods, and go down to the dock, and we’d take the leftover hot dogs that we’d cut up into bait-sized chunks, and we’d cast our lines into the lake, trying to see what little fish we could catch and release.

This is pure Americana: fishing off the dock with Grandpa on the Fourth of July, with leftover hot dogs for bait. And this is what a lot of people love about fishing: standing together by the water, hanging out, passing the time in leisure and reflection in the great outdoors while you wait for something to bite, immersed in that ancient dance between fish and man, as the fish wonders whether this time, the hot dog might really be a worm. (Fish are really not that smart.)

This is not what life was like for Peter and Andrew and James and John, these soon-to-be-famous “fishers of men.” Commercial fishing is a very different beast, even in the ancient world. It’s “they cast their nets in Galilee,” not “they cast their lines.” When Jesus calls James and John, they aren’t cutting up bait or comparing lures; they’re mending their nets. In this kind of fishing all the romance is gone. They sail out into the Sea of Galilee and cast their nets into the lake, and then they drag up whatever they can drag up and haul it on board. It’s hard, sweaty work. And it’s smelly work; you’re not just hoping to catch a couple fish, you’re surrounded by fish, all day long, in the sun.

It’s to this kind of work that Jesus is calling the apostles when he tells them that soon, they will be “fishers of men.” 

Now, to be clear, I don’t think this is so much about the sweat and the smell of things. While anyone could tell you that church leadership, lay or ordained, can sometimes get a little messy, you’d hope that nothing too fishy is going on, especially as we approve our budgets and prepare our Annual Reports. No, I think what’s more interesting is the distinction between the line and the net. In our spiritual lives, are we like the fish I used to catch, engaged in a back and forth dance with God, intrigued by the shimmering lure or the nice fat chunk of hot-dog on the hook but cautious about getting too close? Or are we like the fish that John or Peter caught, trapped in a net with a few dozen others and dragged onto the boat, with no say in the matter at all?

Our gospel reading this morning is strange. It seems to combine two very different images. In the first section, there’s this motif of darkness and light, which Matthew draws from the same passage of Isaiah that we just heard. In the second half, we shift from light and darkness to fish and nets, and it’s such a change that some scholars have actually identified the middle of this passage as one of the great transition points in the gospel, suggesting a gap in time and a transition in the scene with the words, “From that time Jesus began to proclaim” (Matthew 4:17), such that everything before those words—from Jesus’ birth to his move as an adult from Nazareth to Capernaum—forms the beginning of the story, and everything after it the middle, as Jesus’ ministry really begins.

But I think there’s more to it than that. These two, very different halves of the story are in fact united by the theme of sudden and radical change. Jesus travels from the inland town of Nazareth where he was raised in the Jewish heartland of Galilee, to Capernaum by the sea, a lakeside town on the border of Jewish society, with the Gentiles just on the other side of the lake. He comes to these two pairs of brothers, who’ve spent their lives preparing to take on the trade of their fathers and their fathers before them, to pass their days hauling nets in the sun, and he calls them to a very different life, “and immediately, they left their nets and followed him.” (Matt. 4:19) These young fishermen would become the bishops and martyrs and visionaries of the church, and their lives would never be the same: “Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless, in Patmos died. Peter who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified.” Jesus comes to these disciples-to-be and suddenly drags them out of their ordinary lives, and it is as though they are the fish whom they’re accustomed to catch, suddenly transferred from the murky depths of ordinary life into the brilliant presence of the God who is walking among them.

Now, there’s always been a certain tension between the abruptness of these conversion stories and the ordinary rhythms of life in a parish church. Not many of us have had such radical moments of transformation in our lives, and many of us never will. In fact, there’s a pretty profound irony: the more faithful a member of any given church community you are, the less your faith seems like a sudden and transformative change in your life. If you’ve been a pillar of the church for decades, as some of you have, you’re probably not exactly the leaving-your-nets-and-immediately-walking-away type. And even if you’ve only been in one place for a few years the abruptness of these transitions, from darkness into light, from fishing for fish to fishing from men, from ordinary life into radical discipleship, probably seems strange, even irresponsible. I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who can or should drop everything and go off somewhere else to follow Jesus, without leaving a trail of ruined relationships behind.

But I wonder whether that’s really just a matter of your perspective on time. Because when you are sitting in darkness, as Isaiah says, and day breaks, it isn’t really such a sudden thing; there’s a long, slow change before that sudden light. When you are a fish, and you are dragged out of the sea, it isn’t by teleportation. And with God, as Peter himself would later write, “one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). We are all being transformed, in God’s own time. We are all being brought out of darkness into light. We are all slowly being reeled in toward God. The metaphor isn’t perfect. God has no plans to salt or cook you, that I know of; and more important, you do not have gills, you have lungs, and it turns out that you were always meant to be up on that boat. But to the extent that the metaphor works, we are all like fish caught in a net, slowly but surely being drawn up out of the depths. You can spend your whole life swimming, convinced that nothing is happening. Or you can turn and start to swim toward the light.

So what is it, I wonder, that God is dragging you out of this year? Or what is it that God is dragging out of you? What are the murky depths you’re swimming in, from which you need to be removed? Or what are the dark corners of your own soul, that need the benefit of a little light?

Whatever they are, Jesus is here with you. He has left his hometown to come down by the sea. He has come to you and called you out by name. He has cast his net into the waters of your life, and he is drawing you toward himself, however gradual a process that may be. And you may find, when you are hauled up on that boat, whenever it is, that finally, you can breathe.

For “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them, light has shined” (Isaiah 9:2).

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.