The Gospel we have heard this morning is about the call of the disciples: First come Simon and Andrew. We know that Jesus will rename Simon “Peter”. It’s important to notice that Simon comes first because we believe that Mark was Peter’s companion and that his Gospel is mainly made from Peter’s memories. We also know many of Jesus’s disciples were fishermen and that Jesus made this call on them to become fishers of people. Unfortunately, this image has been used and abused in the church and we don’t like it so much anymore. Fishing for people, it sounds like forced enrollment, like luring, trapping people.
We often forget to realize though that the call of the disciples is also the call of James and John.
They’re not called while they are fishing but when they are mending their nets. It looks like a small detail but a commentator made a remark I really enjoy: As Jesus told Simon and Andrew they would fish for people, I wish Jesus had told John and James: “You will mend people“. Well, maybe Jesus did say that! (After all, we just have Peter’s memories!) At any rate, this second part of the story could bring a balance to the fishing for people thing. The disciples are also called to mend people. (In fact, fishing was done at night, while mending nets was done during the day. So these are two activities that complements each other.)
I really like this idea of mending people, or rather mending relationships because this is exactly what we pray for when like today we do a service of healing. We pray: Mend broken relationships, and restore those in emotional distress to soundness of mind and serenity of spirit. We don’t necessarily pray for the healing of a disease of the body. We also pray for the hearts. Whatever is broken we pray that God will make it whole. Whatever is divided, we pray that God will unite again. The Christian vocation is about seeking togetherness and reconciliation.
And this is all there is to it. Really. In our world, everything that is made to work together seems to be pitted again each other. As Christians, and following Christ, our call is to seek reconciliation between God and people, people with people (men and women, children and parents, bosses and employees, reconciliation between classes, races, generations, nations…) and we also should seek reconciliation between people and creation. It seems odd to say and yet we are in dire need to be reconciled with forests, oceans, and even with the air we breathe.
Mending is a patient work you cannot hurry or force. I don’t do needle work but I like to do jigsaw puzzles and there is something similar about bringing all the pieces together. You can’t force them, make things fit where they don’t, you have to find the harmony, figure out how the pieces work together.
Back to our first image, I think this is how we need to understand the fishing for people. As with all images, it has its limitations, you cannot push the metaphor too far. Indeed it’s not about trapping or luring people. It’s not about consuming them! You cannot trick people if you want to talk about truth, you cannot force people if you want to talk about freedom, you cannot disrespect people if you want to talk about love.
The image of fishing for people has its limitations because there is a big difference between fish and people, and the difference is that when you take a fish out of the water it dies, but when you take a person out of the water, they live. But I think this is what Jesus meant actually, when he called Simon and Andrew to fish for people. Maybe he had in mind Psalm 69:
Save me, O God,for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold.
I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me.
I know this psalm is one that is often on my mind because I have memories of hearing it at seminary a day I was feeling like I was literally drowning under papers to write. It made me smile because it felt exaggerated yet bringing me comfort in the same time. It was certainly not written by someone who was overwhelmed by homework, but it can apply to the many ways we can feel overwhelmed from everyday tasks to our deadly anxieties: adversities, diseases, broken relationships, whether we are drowning under debts, drowning under the lies we have been telling, under our addictions, or whether we feel crushed by people’s demands and expectations. Maybe just getting up in the morning can feel overwhelming.
This is out of those dark waters that Jesus has come to fish us, to rescue us, out of everything that leads us to spiral away from God, from our community and from our true selves. The whale at the center of Jonah’s story (too bad we have such a short passage today!) wasn’t put there only to make the joy of Sunday school students. We talked last week about how humor in the Bible can help us understand things that are actually quite important. The whale does not get Jonah because God wants to punish Jonah. Rather God is trying to save Jonah. Because he is swallowed by the whale, at least Jonah does not sink to the bottom of the sea (the sea is often an image of evil in the Bible). Jonah can breathe and pray in the belly of the whale and the whale brings him back to his original destination, before Jonah started running away from God hoping on the ship.
Often we don’t recognize our salvation. The whale brought Jonah to his knees, to repentance. Sometimes this is what hardships do to us if we accept to look at them in a different light. It’s like repentance is the thing that matters the most to God, our immediate well being less so. Jonah was not comfortable but he was brought back. Before preaching repentance, he had to understand it! All prophets preached repentance, John the Baptist and Jesus included. We don’t like to talk about repentance today because we often equal repentance as acknowledging we are bad people and we’re in a culture where we don’t want to feel bad about ourselves, or make others feel bad about themselves. I think it’s a good thing. If you have friends who make you feel bad about yourself, they are probably not very good friends. Jesus didn’t make people feel bad about themselves. If anything he showed people how precious they were in God’s sight (You are worth much more than the birds Matthew 6). If he pointed out sins (like he did with the Pharisees) he also showed the way out.
Repentance isn’t about feeling bad about ourselves but rather it’s being able to remember where we belong, to whom we belong. Jonah is running away from God and God quite literally fish him to bring him back. Look at the image on the first page of the bulletin: Is the whale swallowing Jonah or is she bringing him back to a new birth, a resurrection? There is a famous preacher who said: Atheists say we believe in God because we are weak…Well yes, we are weak. Meaning: Indeed, human beings are weak. We are not made to function without God and without one another. You can acknowledge that you are weak without feeling bad about yourself. Especially if you know you are held in God’s hands. if you acknowledge that, actually you are made whole.
And so Jesus fish for people and he looks for people to help him do the work. You can read all the Gospel like that: Jesus is fishing. He also uses the image of the shepherd bringing back his sheep. Jesus does not fish looking his personal advantages (he will lose them all in the end on the cross!), his mission is to bring back people to themselves, to community, to God. It’s like he puts the piece of the puzzle exactly where it is meant to be, if you will. It’s a patient work we cannot hurry or force, but as we follow Jesus we will participate in this work of fishing that is a work of healing and restoration, we will receive it for ourselves and we will learn how to do it for the world until we are all brought into fullness of life. Maybe all we have to do is to acknowledge our need of him. I think this is what the disciples understood when they saw Jesus and that’s why they dropped everything on the spot. They hadn’t figured out anything yet, but they knew they could not make it without him. May we understand that also because this is where it all started!