9 Feb, 4th Sunday Before Lent
Readings: Is. 6. 1-8 (9-13); 1 Cor. 15. 1-11; Lk. 5.1-11
Theme: ‘Gone Fishing!’
Both our Old and New Testament readings today speak about the transformations brought to a life by the call of God. The first reading is full of rich symbolism. We have a large throne with the Lord sitting on it, there is the robe of the Lord filling the temple, seraphs are all around with six wings covering different parts and being used for flying. The seraphs sing a hymn of praise, the ‘Holy Holy’, which we use as part of liturgies each Sunday in the Sanctus (the Holy Holy). The whole house is filled with smoke and in this context, our prophet, Isaiah, appears. He speaks of his unworthiness to communicate about the things of the Lord, and as a form of ceremonial purification of his lips, one of the seraphs flies towards him with a hot coal to cauterize them, which heals him of his sin and he is now able to speak on behalf of the Lord to the people. This is the story of Isaiah’s calling from the Lord to be a prophet and it turns his life around and reorients him towards the service of the Lord.
This same motif is picked up in our epistle from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Here we have Paul telling the community that though he had once been the greatest persecutor of the church, now that he has encountered the risen Lord Jesus, he like Isaiah, is empowered to speak of the death and resurrection of the Lord.
When we come to the gospel, the scene is set around that of the work of fishing. Jesus is at the shore of the lake of Gennesaret and he sees two boats there as the fishermen are occupied by cleaning their nets. We are told in the passage that he gets into the boat belonging to Simon, whom he asks to put out from the shore, so that he can teach the crowds who had assembled at the shoreline. Once he finishes teaching the crowds, he instructs Simon to put out into the deep water so that he can have another go at fishing. Peter is clearly upset at this. No wonder, really, he has spent all night trying to catch fish without success and here comes this itinerant preacher and tells him to give it another go. Nevertheless, there is clearly something about this person, Jesus, which elicits the trust of Peter, because he follows the orders and lo and behold, the fishermen catch so much fish that the quantity of them nearly breaks their nets. The effect of this on Peter is similar to the encounter of Isaiah with the Lord in the fiery and smoked filled temple: he is ashamed of who he has been. As Peter puts it in the passage, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ Nevertheless, the key line at the end of our passage clearly articulates the enormous transformation of the fishermen’s lives (Peter, James and John) that is brought about by this encounter with the Lord: ‘When they had brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed Jesus’. ‘They left everything and followed Jesus’, what a transformation this encounter must have been for them!
If we attempt to decipher the symbolism of both our Old and New Testament texts it is clear that there is similar pattern of the calling and conversion stories in them which repeat in different settings. Isaiah is called to be a prophet for Israel. He is first made aware of his unworthiness by the extravagant vision of King Uzziah, the King of Judah at the time, who dies in the year that Isaiah is called to be a prophet. The King here represents God who sits on his throne like a king and inspires awe, fear and majesty in Isaiah. The hot coals represent the searing heat of the realization that dawns once one realizes that we are sinners, but which also acts as the first step on the road to true conversion. We suddenly become aware of God, not simply as a theoretical possibility, but rather through some form of personal encounter and this encounter transforms us.
This is no more powerfully illustrated than in the life of St Paul. His road to Damascus conversion upended his whole life. It turned it around 360 degrees, so that he changed from being a persecutor of the community of the early Christians to being one of its most tireless and fearless champions.
The imagery of fishing in our gospel passage provides the scene for the conversion stories of Peter, James and John. Initially they had been fishermen, but now the invitation of Jesus is to fish for disciples. This transformation of activity is radical for them, as expressed in the text by that line, ‘they left everything and followed Jesus’. Can you imagine what a total transformation that must have been for them? It is hard to take it in, isn’t it? But the symbolism of fishing is used by Jesus in this text to communicate something about the radical nature of calling and conversion. This motif of a radical encounter with the Lord beginning with some form of rupture is a common theme in the Scriptures. The fishermen break with their previous work and start to walk a new path. The start of this rupture with the old is a deep realization of who we are because we have encountered who God is. We are sinners and God is all goodness, truth and beauty powerfully communicated to us through this encounter. Such a realization inaugurates a deep sense of humility in us, in the fishermen, as we hear in the gospel from the lips of Peter, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ Yet, this humility is but a pre-condition for following the Lord. It initiates the vocational journey in which, whilst there may be a rupture with our past, this rupture is best understood as a transformation of our past. The fishermen continue to fish, but now they will fish for people. They remain who they are even in this radical transformation of themselves, but now, who they are is put fully at the service of the Lord.
And so it should be with us. Like Isaiah, Paul and the fishermen, we too are invited and commanded by the Lord to follow him. But first, we need to encounter him personally, so that the preconditions for this deep transformation which is a vocational calling, can be set in motion. When this happens, the sign on our door will always say, ‘Gone Fishing!’.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.