The Holy Moments of the Fishermen

Doug plans to preach on the tax collectors at the end of Luke 5, I’m choosing to blog on the fishermen at the beginning of Luke 5.

I love this story of the fishermen. Peter and his mates were cooked; done for the day. They were cleaning their nets. They had been fishing all night and catching nothing. After a night of fishing and a morning of cleaning nets, I can imagine the begrudging groan of Peter and his co-workers when Jesus, the carpenter…NOT the fisherman, says, “oh come on Peter, just give it one more try!” Luke says, Peter responded to Jesus’ request, “Master…at your word.” If I know fishermen, after a long night of catching nothing, Peter probably said some things under his breath that Luke kindly did not record in the Gospel. The story continues, “And when they had done this, they enclosed a great shoal of fish…But when Simon Peter saw ‘It’, he fell down at Jesus’ knees saying, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” “It,” was a net full of fish. Fishing was Peter’s work. “It” was something Peter and his fellow fishermen probably saw every day. A net full of fish probably was the result of mundane work for these men and catching them meant more routine work to get all the fish out of the net, put up, nets cleaned, etc… Why was this such a Holy sight to Peter? Why was he moved to fall on his knees?

Sport fishing can be sublime. I have joyful memories of catching Salmon with friends and family. However, I believe the more appropriate illustration of Peter’s experience in Luke 5 is commercial fishing or fishing for work. I grew up fishing on a commercial gillnetter around Lummi Island with a friend of mine. The rule in the 1980’s was that gillnetting had to be done between sunset and sunup. We fished in the dark. Don’t get me wrong, part of this fishing was amazing. I loved the feeling of being out on the water, under the stars. Watching the twinkling lights (red over white) from the other gillnetters, feeling the excitement when we fired up the engine to power the hydraulics, wind in the 300-fathom net to see what our luck brought us in the form of Sockeye Salmon. However, gillnetting is also hard tedious work. As the 1800-foot-long net wound into the boat at the end of each set, our job was to keep the sinking lead line separate from the floating cork line, pick fish, and clean the net. Cleaning the net meant picking “junk fish” out of the net, sometimes it meant, pulling bales of seaweed from the cork line; flopping giant red jellyfish with long stinging tentacles out of the net, etc… Cleaning a gillnet can be dreadful. One night we dropped our net into a school of dogfish. It took us hours to bring in the net because we had to pick hundreds of dogfish out of the web as the net came in. We could not throw the dogfish back into the water, because they are attracted to the bow lights on the boat and they would swim right back into the net. By the time we had cleaned the whole net we were literally standing in the cockpit of the boat, up to our knees in wiggling, flopping dogfish. I suspect that catching fish that morning, for Peter, was more like being up to your knees in dogfish and not so much the awesome treat of catching a beautiful salmon on a sport line.

What did Peter experience of God in that moment at work? In the ordinary of life, the Holy Spirit moved Him. Why? How?

Yes, I love this story, because it is a Holy moment for Peter. I’m fascinated by Holy moments. I think these moments are a glimpse into the Kingdom of God. A privileged moment of clarity about our life, our creator, our savior, our God. Sometimes these moments make perfect sense: The birth of a child, a wedding day, the death of a loved one, singing a hymn, or an insightful conversation with a deer friend. However, I seem to experience holy moments that are not as clearly…Sublime. Do you have those moments? Do you ever find the holy in the doldrums of daily life? Do you find the Kingdom even in the hard parts of life; when you are suffering with fear, anxiety, sickness, grief, pain…and then suddenly something pure and holy breaks forth in you? We can stifle the moment and ignore the holy, or like Peter, we can fall on our knees and recognize that the God of the Universe is near, loves us unconditionally, and brings Joy into even the most mundane moments.