There is one irrefutable fact that can be substantiated in science and experience and that is that life is not static. It doesn’t matter how content you may be in your life at any given moment, there is never a sense in which you have now arrived in a place from which you will not at some point move. Even if you are in the home that you like and you are content in the home that you are in and you love it and you are surrounded by it, you can’t count on it being your place forevermore. Or the job that you have finally attained and the positions that you have reached, there is no stopping or staying there in perpetuity: infinity does not apply to the workplace. Or even in terms of your relationships, things move on, people move on.
There is never a point in which you can say, “I will now just stop because I have reached the place where I want to be.” For indeed, whether or not you like it, you are going to change: genetically you are going to change, physically you are going to change, there is nothing to prevent the hands of time having its effect on you. You cannot just say, “Stop! Hold back the waters!” Nor do things around you stay static. Societally, we are constantly in ebb and flow and flux.
Just at the moment when you think – and don’t you find this – that there is a sense of peace in the world and that a major conflict has been solved a new one emerges. Or just when you think scientifically that you have everything that you need technologically, something new comes along and trumps it. Even things that are going on around you are changing rapidly and are not static. Yet as I read the self-help books that are so prominent on the bookshelves in the book stores and available on electronic media and other things, it seems to me that one of the things that the try to sell you on is that there is a moment in which you can “find your bliss” a moment when you will have actually sort of “arrived” and you will have that ultimate gift of peace, as if somehow you can stay there.
I recall, and maybe on a very snowy February day my mind this week went back to playing a game of golf a couple of years ago at Toronto Ladies Golf Club, and it is where I used to go and play my rounds of golf – great, great golf course. I was there and I just happened to be paired up with a lady. I was the odd one out in a foursome and was invited to join and play and I was on the cart with this dear lady and I will never forget, she looked over at me after having put her first shot somewhere in a bush and she said, “You know, I think this is one of the most frustrating things about life. Only now have I really come to understand the game of golf! Now, my husband is retired and we have time to play. Now, I have enough money to be able to play on the courses that I want to play on. And now I have to have a knee replacement. All my golf swings have swung straight over to the right no matter how much I would have wanted it otherwise.” Oh, it’s true: there is nothing static!
There is just no point of bliss that you can stay at and never move on from. The Bible understands this. The biblical message is one of the dynamic nature of human life, the recognition that human life changes, and that there is an ebb and a flow. What I think is the central message is not finding your destination, finding your point of bliss where you can stay, but it is about who goes with you on your journey and through the change. Nowhere does this seem clearer than in our passage today, from the Gospel of Luke. This passage is all about who goes with us and who we go with throughout a time of change.
The passage is a fascinating one. Luke is unlike Matthew and Mark. Where Matthew and Mark have the very famous words, “Follow me” at the end of it, Luke doesn’t do that. He has another further invitation for people to follow along. Nor is this a passage, as some have suggested, drawn from the post- Resurrection period and Luke has now written it forward. I don’t think so. The reason I don’t think so is because it is the context of what happens here that sets the tone for everything.
We read that Jesus had been in Capernaum and, as we looked at last week, in Capernaum he had healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, he had spoken in the synagogue, he was really doing very well in his Galilean ministry, but then he went to Nazareth and when he unfurled the scroll in the Temple in Nazareth all eyes turned on Jesus and they saw that he was a man with authority and yet the people turned on him. They were deeply troubled that he wanted to take this Word of God to the Gentiles, to others. They did not like his illustrations from Elijah and Elisha that we looked at last week. They wanted to run him out of town.
Now, Jesus is still in Galilee. But he is in a different place. He is down by the water of the Sea of Galilee. When he is there, he sees fishermen in their boats. They are coming in after a day’s fishing. As great fisher people do, they washed their nets to make sure that they were clean for the next day. Then, as he sees them, and recognizing their boats are still in the water and now being followed by a crowd of people who wanted him to speak the Word of God, Jesus walks over and simply says, “I want to get into one of the boats.” Peter’s is the one that he chose and he goes over and he gets into Peter’s boat and he addresses the crowd.
You might not appreciate this if you haven’t seen it, but in many ways the coast of the Sea of Galilee is like an amphitheatre in places. There are rolling hills that go up from the water’s edge and they climb up in some cases steeply from the water. The Sea of Galilee can be like a fish bowl and it can toss and turn, as we know from stories of the waves coming and moving the waters along. But in this particular case, Jesus is simply getting on the boat and he is using all the people and the crowd that are on the bank as his audience. A great amphitheatre is there.
When you go to Galilee and you see the hills, you can just picture Jesus doing this. It is a magnificent setting! It is near the end of the day and the sun is probably a little lower in the sky, Jesus begins to teach. The crowd are in awe. But then, Jesus speaks to Peter. He says to Peter, “Let’s take this boat out now. Let’s go and catch some fish.” Peter is argumentative. He is always argumentative to Jesus! But this is his first major encounter after his mother-in-law has been healed. He says, “We’ve already been out. We’ve done a day’s work. We’ve washed the nets. There is absolutely no hope. There are no fish in this area.” Of course, Jesus instructs them to go out and Peter finally says, “Well, if you say so.” In other words, “If your word is authoritative, I will go and do that.”
To his surprise, and to everybody else’s surprise, there are fish. There are so many, we are told by Luke, that in fact all the other boats had come to pick them up. It may be a little extravagant in its language, but you get the gist. Peter had listened to Jesus. But then, what is Peter’s response? Peter’s response is, “You don’t want to be talking to someone like me. I am a fisherperson. I am a sinner. I doubted you. Why would you in any way want to engage me more than this?”
Jesus simply says, “Someday, you are going to be catching men.” In other words, “You are going to join me.”
What is it about this encounter that is so fantastic? Why should we read it with any passion or any vigour or any sense of faith and hope? Well, first of all, it is obvious that had this not occurred at some point in Jesus’ ministry, we wouldn’t be here. It was the witness of those that were called on the Sea of Galilee that bore witness to the Gospel that we have received. In many ways, if Pentecost was the birth of the Church, a moment like this was the conception of it. In a sense, this is like our beginning, going back to our roots. We would not be here if it was not for the apostolic witness. There, in that very moment, there are some key words. These key words and phrases speak to us now, two thousand years later, with the same passion that they addressed Peter and James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were in the other boat and they come at us powerfully. The first phrase is, “He got into the boat.” Jesus got into the boat. That is important.
This is because the initiative of the call of the disciples rested with Christ himself. It wasn’t as if they were in some sort of existential dilemma, they weren’t fixing some crisis, and they didn’t have a particular need, except that they hadn’t caught any fish that day. When Jesus came, he initiated a contact. He got into the boat. He started things rolling.
The great writer C. S. Lewis, in an account of his own call – he doesn’t call it a conversion; he calls it “a call.” He had the following things to say:
I want you to picture me in my room in Magdelene College, Cambridge, night after night, feeling whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my book, the steady unrelenting approach of Him, who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come to me in the Trinity term of 1929. I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed. Perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England, I did not see then what is now the most shining and obvious thing: that divine humility which will accept a person on such terms, a prodigal son, at least walked home on his own feet. But, who can duly adore that love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? It was me. The words compel him to come in have been so abused by wicked people that we shudder at them, but properly understood, they plumb the depth of the divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion of love is our food.
C. S. Lewis had been caught up in the great intellectual quest for God. He was at one of the world’s finest universities, studying to understand God, but really deep down wanted to run as far away from that God as was humanly possible, and God just tracked him down!
God just reached out and grasped him when he least expected it. As he said, he was “reluctant” “resentful” and “struggling” but his God reached him. That is exactly what God does in Christ. From the very moment when Peter was called on the Sea of Galilee to our very existence today, it is Christ who initiates this, who moves us, and steers us, and calls us. Has he called you? Is this voice something you have heard? Or, is it something you resist?
The second great moment is when Peter, in an artless way, argues with Jesus. Nevertheless he says “if you say so” and then does as Jesus requests. There is a very famous Latin phrase deus dixit or “God spoke” and when God speaks, people have a chance to either listen or not. Peter heard. God spoke and he responded. Is that not what the trail of the whole of The Old Testament has been about? Is that not exactly the case with Elijah that we looked at last week: Elijah’s desire to reach out to the widow of Zarephath? Is that not the case with Elisha and Namaan? Is that not the case with Esther respondeding to having heard the Word even though it could be costly? In all these cases, doing bold things because they heard, they heard God address them directly.
I am not suggesting that you are going to be sitting in your chair someday and you are going to get a blast in your ears saying “This is God. I want you to go to the living room from the dining room.” No, let’s not trivialize it. God speaks through the Spirit. God speaks through the Word. God speaks through our encounter with his Son. God speaks to us in mysterious ways. But, God speaks! The question is, do we hear?
The third thing is, using the words of Peter, “Go away.” Can you imagine saying that to the Son of God? Peter says, “Go away! We are not going to be able to catch anything. Go away. This is a waste of time. We’ve cleaned the nets. Go away. We’ve done all this before. We don’t need you. You are a carpenter, not a fisherman. Go away. Leave me alone. Let me be.” Peter was actually in his own way quite content with the fact that no fish had been caught. The nets were washed, the day’s work had been done and everything seems fine. He found this place and he was settled in it. He was satisfied. He really didn’t think he needed anything.
Yet when I look at the Scriptures, it seems that in those moments when we are at our most content, when things are actually moving in all the right directions and we are sitting back and we have found that moment of bliss, isn’t it usually ironic that it is in moments like this that God speaks to us and comes to us? Was that not the case with Abraham, when God called Abraham to leave his house and his country and move on? Was that not the case with Peter on the Sea of Galilee? Was that not the case with Paul or with Lydia? Is that not the case that in the moments that we say, “Go away” when we are settled and we have everything all nicely sorted out that the Lord comes and speaks to us and causes us to move on? There is no static place of bliss; there is only the journey. But Jesus, as the awesome presence of God now causes Peter to be in awe. He knows he is in the presence of the Living God and his life will never be the same.
The last words that I love the most are the words “Do not be afraid!” You see, change causes us to be afraid: fear of the uncertainty, fear of what is there before us. In a magnificent sermon on this very text Desmond Tutu, in addressing the people of South Africa, used this as an example. He said, “You know, there comes a time when we have those great nets that those nets actually become our chains. Rather than being the means to attract others or to bring others into the kingdom, those nets, they are the things that we own, they are the things that we dry out overnight, they are the things to which we are chained”
Had Peter had been bound by those nets there would have been no propagation of the Gospel. Had the disciples just ignored Jesus on the side of the Sea of Galilee and had not responded, and just simply wanted to maintain their nets, then the mission of Jesus would have been stalled. But he said, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of moving forward. Don’t be afraid of change and things that are lying ahead of you, for there is no static place, there is no place of bliss to stand, there is only a journey.” Jesus is saying to them, “I will go with you on that journey.”
I have been reading again recently a biography of someone who I had encountered in my university years. He is one of the most famous thinkers, I think, of the twentieth century, the philosopher Jacques Ellul. He was a mysterious man in many ways. He was born in Bordeaux in France to parents who had little or no Christian faith. At the age of ten something amazing happened to Jacques. He described it as something like a seizure where, he said: “The living God frees individuals from their conformity to a world which blinds and binds even if it renders them to be useful to God and the world on behalf of the kingdom, which cannot be shaken.”
Ellul was ten years old! He went into a room. He found a place to pray. He said, “From that moment on, looking back to my childhood, God’s love, God’s grace for humankind, God’s future became my future, and all other futures seemed futile.”
Jacques Ellul went on to become a great academic, a philosopher, a teacher of law. He was even one of the lawyers who willingly represented those who had worked with the Nazis in France and people did not want anything to do with them. He said, “If we cannot represent even those who have been disloyal and have been responsible for the death of others, no one will speak for them and there will be tyranny, so I will speak for them even though I abhor them and what they have done.” That was the kind of man he was.
He was the kind of man who had a great love of Karl Marx at times in his life and loved his social teachings in many places but he said, in the end, that compared to the revelation in Jesus Christ they are paltry words really. In his life, in his teaching, in his writing, in his concern about people’s obsession with technology and progress, Ellul says that there is really only One, who when he calls you, you are committed to Him. When the old man Ellul was at his end, he said the following, and this is in a book by Victor Shepherd: “Perhaps through my words or my writing someone met the Saviour, this One, this unique One. Someone met Him, and besides all human projects, which are childless, what has happened in Him is rich. I will be fulfilled, and for that Glory to God alone, I will rest.”
For Ellul, as a child, Christ comes to him. In his own small way, in his writings he hoped that in his life others might know the Christ that came to him as a child. For Ellul though, the greatest line is this: that it is in an encounter with Christ that we have the freedom with which to live. And it is that freedom to live, no matter what transpires in our lives, that goes with us: to know that Christ goes with us that makes the words “Do not be afraid” seem real.
So this day, as Christ encountered the people on the boat in Galilee, so may He encounter you! Amen.