Fish Song (Luke 5:1-11)

“I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men. I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.” A lot of us grew up singing that song, but not any more, at least not in the Presbyterian church USA and other mainline denominations. The problem is one of translation and scope. The rock-bottom, literal translation is “from now on you will be catching men.” That’s because the greek word translated as “men” is anthropous,which traditionally is translated “men.” However, many scholars have come to recognize that it should sometimes be translated as “human beings” or “people.” After all, it isthe word from whence we get “anthropology,” which is the study of all of humanity. So, because Jesus is speaking of all humans here, not just men, our translation has it as “from now on you will be catching people”And as Betty and I were discussing the other day, “I will make you fishers of people” just doesn’t have the same ring.

But there’s another problem with this particular line, and that’s what Jesus actually meantwhen he said this to Simon, whom we all know will eventually be named Peter. When I was little, I was taught that “fishing for people” meant following the great commission, stated over in Matthew as “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” In other words, “bring them to a saving relationship with Christ.” But it seems that Jesus was alluding to a much older, somewhat darkerOld Testament tradition. In Jeremiah, Amos, and Habbakuk, “fishing for people” refers not to God’s salvationbut rather to God’s judgment: the unrighteous and unjust are caught and pulled up by hooks and nets. Listen to this line from Habbakuk: “You have made people like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. The enemy brings all of them up with a hook; he drags them out with his net, he gathers them in his seine; so he rejoices and exults.” And from Amos, speaking to those who oppress the poor and crush the needy, “The time is surely coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks.” Ouch. So, far from telling him he’s going to be winning souls, he’s saying that soon he,Simon Peter, will be the one doing the judging, the one pulling the unrighteous up by hooks and nets. What is going on here?

Fishermen were considered to be unclean because they had to handle fishthat were unclean, and anybody who touched something unclean became unclean themselves. The most prominent such critter was an eel-like species of African catfish called the sfamnun,which had no scales and was thus unclean. The Sea of Galilee—which Luke calls Gennesaret—was lousy with them. Now, even if they didn’t keep the catfish—and there were Gentiles around that atesfamnun—they’d have to disentangle them from their nets, so when Peter whines that he’s a sinful man, he’s not just whistling Dixie—remember that the word we translate as “sinful” was a synonym for “unclean.” Peter wants Jesus to get aways from him because good Jewish people—especially rabbis like Jesus—didn’t associate with unclean folks lest by that associationthey become unclean as well.

So that tells you something about Jesus’ request to sit in Simon’s boat, doesn’t it? By getting into that boat, by associating with someone unclean, he is risking becoming ritually unclean himself.But he doesn’t seem too worried about it; in fact, when he’s done speaking, he prolongs his exposure by asking them to put out into deeper water and let down their nets. Which they do, but only after more griping from Peter: We didn’t catch anything all night, what makes you think we’ll catch some in the daytime, when they can see our nets? But of course they catch a lot,more than anybody’d ever seen,more than one boat can handle, so they had to call in their partners—James and John, the Zebedee boys—so they could fill theirboat as well. And when Simon Peter—at whose house Jesus has already stayed and who already knows Jesus as a wonderful teacher and healer—when Simon Peter sees all the fish, he falls to his knees and calls him Lord.

And that’s when Jesus says he’s soon to be fishing for people: far from being condemned for being sinful, for being unclean, he’s being invited to join the club, to become partof God’s ministry. He’s going to be hooking the unrighteous by the mouth, entangling them in God’s net, and hauling them up. But here’s the kicker: he may be hauling them up, but he’s not condemning them. Simon Peter himself is the proof of that: an admittedly sinful man, Jesus hooks him by the mouth, pulls him up out of sin’s dark waters, and . . . invites him to be part of everything, to be an agent of God.

We can’t divorce this story from the one we read over the past couple of weeks: Jesus announces he has come to usher in the the Year of the Lord’s Favor, the permanent Jubilee, where the lowly are lifted up and all debts are canceled. And it’s that last, that all debts are cancelled thing, that interests us here. And if the Jubilee comes first to outsiders, to the marginalized then, well, within Israel few were more marginalized than the unclean, or as Simon Peter put it, the sinful. The unclean couldn’t participate in synagogue or Temple and were shunned by others lest they become unclean as well. Given that all of Israelite society was structured around synagogue, Temple and table fellowship, that was outcast indeed. And here Jesus is, not only hooking them up out of the muck and mire, but drying them off and taking them in to supper.

And come to think of it, maybe the meaning of fishing for people as soul-winning isn’t so far off. The Old Testament image is one of judgement and doom on the unrighteous, as they are pulled up into . . . wherever . . . for assumed eternal damnation, where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Jesus usesthis image but flips the script: the unclean are caught, all right, and they’re pulled up, but not into judgement but into communion,into belonging,which must be at the core of longing for the marginalized.

And Jesus, always more interested in his disciples’ figuring things out on their own than telling them outright, tells Peter—and did he have a twinkle in his eye?—soon you’ll be doing the fishing, and will you—who have not been judged by me—will you then condemn those who are caught? And even Peter will get it in the end . . .

Friends, we live in a world that seems to be getting increasingly tribal, with this group with these interests and characteristics over and against thatgroup with thoseinterests and characteristics, and politicians all over the world are trying to capitalize on it. And tribes aren’t inherently bad, there are some things that do better, that are better taken care of at the tribal, or national, level. But for every tribe, for every fenced-in grouping, there are those on the margins, those outside looking in. And Jesus comes to say that the Jubilee Year, aka the kingdom of God, is open for business, and it’s a tribe so big and so inclusive that no oneis excluded . . . not even you or me.  Amen. 

Cliffhanger (Luke 4:21-30)

So. Last week, we read about Jesus’ inaugural address, the first sermon he gave in his hometown of Nazareth. Taking up the scroll of Isaiah, he read “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And after rolling up the scroll and handing it back to the rabbi, he sat down and began to teach: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all his homies were amazed, just amazed, at all the gracious words that came out of his mouth, even more so because he wasa home-town boy: “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

He starts up preaching again, and that’s when things start to go South . . . and by the time he’s finished, his hometown buddies, with whom he’d shot hoops in the driveway and horsed around at football games, whom he’d worked side by side in his father’s shop and at whose weddings he was best man, all these so-called “friends and family” are enraged. So much so that they’re not content just to run him out of town, but they grabhim and try to throw him off a cliff.Now that’smad!

And the question is . . . why? Why does the hometown crowd reject him so violently,especiallyafter such an apparently warm reception? To try and understand, let’s burrow down a little bit into the context and what he actually says. First up: he tells them he is the one chosen to proclaim the “Day of the Lord’s Favor.” As we mentioned last week, this was almost certainly the idea that every fiftieth year would be a Jubilee, a kind of “reboot” for society as a whole. Slaves would be freed, debts would be cancelled, and “liberty” would be proclaimed “throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” according to Leviticus. This would have especially benefited many of the most vulnerable in Israel, of course, and accordingly, the Jubilee ideal is often understood to be a time of relief for the poor, a built-in leveler, a bulwark against the development of entrenched inequality. 

Well. You can imagine what this might have sounded like to the beneficiariesof entrenched inequality, the oligarchs and princes of the Middle East . . . even the most pious among them were as adept at ignoring scripture they didn’t like as modern-day Christians can be. But in Jesus’ day, there weren’t likely to be many of those living in the agricultural town of Nazareth, the population of which was scarcely 500. Remember: in those times, there were only rich and poor, those who benefitted from inequality and those to whom the Jubilee would indeed be good news. And archeological evidence shows there were none of the former in Nazareth at the time. Jesus’ friends and neighbors, with whom he’d grown up, were almost certainlyas poor as he and hisfamily were, which could be characterized by comparing them to church mice.

So . . . if the folks packing the synagogue that day aren’t enraged by the prospect of being knocked down a peg or two, if indeed they would come out of the Jubilee smelling like a rose, why are they madder then 300 wet hens, so over-the-top angry as to be moved to murder? Can it have something to do with what he actually preachesafter he reads the Scripture? Let’s see . . . “doubtless you will quote to me this proverb,” he begins: “Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you’ll say ‘Do here—in your own hometown,for goodness sakes—the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” He’s assuming—and he always couldsee what’s in peoples’ hearts—that they want the same things out of him that he’s done in other places, that surely here in his hometown they’d get some of the good stuff as well . . . and do they assume they’d actually get more, get the best, get the creme de la creme?Did they hear his message—that he’s been anointed,already . . . Christ-ed! Messiah-ed!—to bring in the Jubilee year, when folks like them would get their due? How cool wasit that the guy slated to bring on the goodies was a home-town boy?

So when Jesus began by quoting that proverb and telling them what’s in their hearts, they all thought “durn tootin” we want to get the same treatment they got in Capernaum. But the next thing he says starts to belie this hope: “Truly I tell you”—and when he says that, we know he’s serious “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” And before they even have time to protest—not us, your messiah-ship, not your home-town buddies—he tells them the unvarnished, harsher-than-harsh truth, and in a way, this is the center-piece of the whole shebang, the truth, the Alethia,as it is in Greek. And this alethiasets the tone for all of Luke’s writing: here in his Gospel, then in Acts, the second volume. And the truth is that although there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s day, Elijah was sent to none of them except the one at Zarephath in Sidon. What’s more, there were many lepers—and that word was used for a number of diseases in the day—there were many lepers in Israel, but Elijah’s successor Elisha only came to one: Naaman, who was a Syrian.

And have you figured out what enraged Jesus’ hometown peeps yet? All those people in trouble in Israel—lepers and poor widows, no less—and God sent the prophets not to them,not to God’s supposedly-chosen people, but to foreigners, to outsiders, to those their religion had marginalized. And this, friends, is a defining theme of Luke’s gospel, a theme we’ll return to again and again as we dip into it over the coming year. The divine seems to have a preferential option not only for the poor, as Catholic doctrine would have it, but for the marginalized, for the outsider as well. But, as we’ll see over the next months, the concept of outsider-ness is a slippery, relativeterm. On the outside of what?On the margins of what?And what about when the situation is reversed, when marginalized suddenly become the insiders, what about then? Often, when that happens, when through some divine or worldly intervention the marginalized come in out of the cold, eventually theybecome the oppressors. It’s happened time and again over the ages, and become almost a cliché when one thinks of South American politics, with the revolutionaries becoming just as bad as those they overthrow.

And the amazing thing about this episode—taking last and this week’s readings to be one, as was Luke’s intention—is that this one story encapsulates all that complexity, the slippery-ness of the notion of insiders versus outsiders. First, Jesus uses that particular passage from Isaiah—one well-associated with Israel’s identity as an underdog community—and encourages them to see themselves as the “lowly,” then pulls the rug out from under them, saying “not so fast . . . are you sureyou’re the ones for whom the prophecy was written?After all, Elijah—arguably Israel’s greatest prophet—came to the foreigner, the outsider. And his successor Elisha: he did the same. And by the way . . . how doyou treat the wandering Samaritan amongst you, or the Syrian or Syrophoenician?

And today, as nationalism is on the rise around the globe, we might well ask a similar question . . . what about the Muslims amongst us, what about immigrants—undocumented or otherwise? Heck, given the precipitous rise of anti-semitism over the past few years—hello Pittsburg!—what about Jews?The fact is, God favors the marginalized, which kind of kicks nationalism right in the pants, doesn’t it?

And is it any wonder his listeners got all ticked off? He comes into their synagogue preaching good news for . . . somebody. . . they’d thought it was them—they were amazed, just amazedby his gracious words—and they reveled in being in the inner circle, the ultimate insiders, because who was more inside, more ground floorthan the anointed-one’s own friends and family? This Day of the Lord’s Favor would certainly favor them.But then came . . . the rest of the story, and as they begin to realize that it ain’t necessarily so, and that realization spread through the congregation—What’d he say? What does he meanGod sends prophets to the unclean first?Take care of your own first,that’s what Isay—as people start to figure out what it means, whispered incredulity becomes downright hostility, and the crowd in the synagogue becomes a mob—a lynchmob, to be precise—and the very one they’d cheered just minutes before becomes its scapegoat.

And it’s not the lasttime Jesus would be a scapegoat, but his time has not been fulfilled, and so he passes, ghost-like, through the midst of them and goes on his way. And of course, this foreshadows the final lynching of Jesus, up on a Jerusalem cross, but it also states anothermajor theme of Luke’s highlighted in this passage: preaching the alethiatruth, is dangerousin a lot of ways. It can be dangerous to one’s bank account, one’s social standing and even one’s bodily integrity, even one’s life.

Preaching truth to power—and in that moment, the good people of Nazareth had the power of a mob—is dangerous, but that’s what we are called to do, brothers and sisters, preach the unvarnished truthof the Day of the Lord’s favor—aka the Kingdom of God—which comes first to the marginalized and powerless, but, of course, also to us. Amen.