Left Everything and Followed

In the conversation within our Gospel text this week, we learn that it hadn’t been a good night for Simon. Fishing was done at night in those days. The fishermen would spend the night in the shallows, tossing their nets and pulling in the catch. Then as dawn broke, they would bring the fish to shore and sell them at the market. Because of a lack of facilities for preserving fish, this was a daily event. Except this day.

This day, for Simon, was a hungry day. He had nothing to sell, nothing to take home for his family. Nothing. It might have been that he was still sitting in his boat because he didn’t want to go home and tell his family that he had nothing. It might have been that he was sitting there feeling empty, worthless, and shallow—until that man came and asked him to go out into the deep.

Luke says that Jesus was teaching, and everyone kept pressing closer and closer. The crowd grew and pressed in to hear. So, Jesus looked around for options and saw Simon Peter sitting there in his boat with failure on his hands. So, Jesus stepped in and asked if Simon would mind rowing out a little way so that Jesus could teach without risking getting wet.

Isn’t that an amazing thing? A little invitation, a small inconvenience, and before you know it, Simon was in over his head. Did Jesus show up that day looking for followers? Or was that a bonus? The catch of the day?

What was the lesson that day? I find it interesting that Luke doesn’t say a word about what Jesus taught. In Luke’s haste to get to Simon Peter’s story, he skipped over Jesus’ words. That’s typical, I suppose. We sometimes miss what is right in front of our faces because we want to get to something more personal. We skim over an article to see if our name is there; we glance through the program to find someone familiar; we scan the crowd to find a certain face, and in so doing, we miss everything and everyone else. Jesus may have been talking about paying attention. That was a common theme in his teaching elsewhere, so there is no reason to think it would have been absent here. “Consider the lilies,” he would say, “Look there, wheat and weeds growing together,” that road, this seed, those fields – Jesus was always asking us to pay attention to what was around us. Like a preschool primer, Jesus said “Look and see.”

It was never just the appearance of things that interested Jesus. He was really saying to look deeper. That is what he said to Peter when the teaching was over. “Let’s go deep.” That’s where the drama is, isn’t it?

Peter was open. He didn’t know it, because he wasn’t paying attention, but he was. He was open to going deep, even though it was against his better judgment, even though it wasn’t the way things were done in his business, even though he had been unsuccessful the night before. He was open, and that small opening is all it takes for miracles to occur. We need to be willing to look deeper and live deeper. There is so much right in front of our faces, and we miss it.

Peter knew he was in over his head. “Go away from me,” that’s the first thing he thinks to say in the face of someone who lived so much more deeply than he did. “Go away, I can’t handle it; I’m not good enough for it; I don’t have the strength.” Remember, Peter had been up all night, struggling with his failures. Someone once said that Jesus doesn’t come when we are well-rested and ready all that often. Usually, it is when we have labored all night and caught nothing; often, it is when we want to give up, when we think there is nothing left, and we aren’t any good at life. Then Jesus comes and says, “Go deeper.”

“From now on you will be catching people.” As he did that day on Lake Gennesaret, as he did because he lived deeply. As he has done for the past two thousand years, he gathers up those who long to live deeply and to live aware of life. It is no wonder that when they came to shore, they walked away from the fish, the biggest catch in their careers. They walked away to go deep.