Fishers of People

All night the nets have gone down into the dark water. All night they have come up empty. Now it's morning, the fishermen are tired, and a teacher from Nazareth is about to tell them to try again.

Jesus is standing on the shore of the Lake of Gennesaret, the lake most of us know as the Sea of Galilee. People are pressing in from every side, all wanting to hear the word of God, and there's barely room to stand. Pulled up on the beach are two fishing boats. Their owners are nearby, washing their nets after a wasted night. Jesus steps into one of the boats. It belongs to a fisherman called Simon. “Would you push out a little from the shore?” Jesus asks. Simon does. And Jesus sits down in the boat and teaches the crowd from the water.

When he finishes speaking, Jesus turns to Simon. “Put out into the deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.” You can imagine Simon's face. He's the fisherman here. He knows this lake. He knows that the night is the time for fishing, and he has just spent the whole of it catching nothing. “Master,” he says, “we've worked hard all night and haven't caught a thing.” Then he pauses. “But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

Out they go. Down go the nets. And almost at once the water begins to churn. The nets grow heavy. Then heavier. Fish, more fish than these men have seen in one place, crowding into the mesh until the cords start to snap. Simon and his crew shout and wave to their partners in the other boat. “Come and help!” The second boat pulls alongside, and together they haul the catch aboard. They fill both boats. They fill them so full that the boats sit low in the water and begin to sink.

And Simon, standing knee deep in silver fish, suddenly isn't thinking about fish at all. He falls down at Jesus' knees. “Go away from me, Lord,” he says. “I'm a sinful man.” He has just glimpsed who is sitting in his boat, and it frightens him. Everyone with him is amazed at the catch, and so are his partners, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. But Jesus doesn't go away. He says to Simon, “Don't be afraid. From now on you will be catching people.”

They row back to shore, the boats heavy and slow. They drag them up onto the beach. And then they do something nobody watching would have expected. They leave it all. The boats. The nets. The biggest catch of their lives, lying there on the sand. They leave everything, and they follow Jesus.

We actually know what a Galilee fishing boat from this time looked like. In 1986, during a long drought, the lake shrank back, and two brothers from a kibbutz near its shore spotted the outline of an ancient wooden hull in the mud. Archaeologists dated it to around the time of Jesus. It's about eight metres long, roughly twenty-seven feet, and was built and patched from many different woods. It's the kind of working boat Simon and his partners might have rowed out that morning.

Fishers of People. You'll find it in Luke chapter 5, verses 1 to 11. Simon was tired, and he was sure he knew better. But he said, because you say so, I will. So here's a question to carry with you. Where is Jesus asking you to try again, just because he says so?