“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.
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