Bible reading: Luke 5:1-11.

We enjoyed belting out the songs in our Sunday afternoon boys’ Bible class: “On the victory side”, “Marching beneath the banner”, “When the road is rough and steep”, “In my heart there rings a melody” and “The Lord hath need of me” among many others, all accompanied by the piano. Many of them were militaristic in a way we’d frown on today; they were also quite old-fashioned, even by the standards of the mid-1960s. Little did we know it, but “Youth Praise”, guitars and a Christian musical revolution were lurking just around the corner.

One of the songs we sang takes us straight to today’s Gospel reading: “I will make you fishers of men” (even if we did prefer to sing “vicious old men”) “if you follow me” – Jesus’ words set to a catchy tune which, for those of you who know it, will now be an earworm for the rest of the day. I have to say that, despite our lusty singing, we didn’t think too much about what the words actually meant. One modern writer who had a vivid imagination as a child says that, for him, the phrase “fishers of men”, conjured up gruesome pictures of Peter and Andrew dragging ashore nets full of squirming bodies of fully-grown men. I don’t think any of us ever thought of that!

But thinking about this phrase is exactly what we’ll be doing this morning. And, as I did a bit of preparatory reading, I was surprised to find that the phrase “fishers of men” is actually more complicated and ambiguous than I’d realised; in fact one writer goes so far as to call it “the most misunderstood of all Jesus’ expressions”. I’ll come back to that later; but let’s first think about the context in which Jesus spoke these words which come, in one form or another, in three of the four Gospels (as so often, John’s is the odd one out).

As you’ll realise, we’re at the very start of Jesus’ ministry. Word about his teaching and miracles is beginning to spread around Galilee but he isn’t yet as well-known as he will be later. So far he hasn’t specifically called anyone to be his disciple; but that’s about to change. Matthew and Mark give us a brief description of how Jesus went about this: “As Jesus walked along the shore of Lake Galilee, he saw two brothers who were fishermen, Simon (called Peter) and his brother Andrew, catching fish in the lake with a net. Jesus said to them, ‘Come with me, and I will teach you to catch people’. At once they left their nets and went with him”. Jesus then walks a bit further and calls James and John, who also follow him, leaving their father Zebedee behind in their boat. It all seems rather casual and sudden, a spur-of-the-moment decision to drop everything and follow Jesus. I actually suspect that it was more considered than that, but still radical and life-changing for everyone involved.

Luke gives us more detail; in fact it’s been suggested that, for editorial reasons, he has spliced together two stories which, in the other Gospels, occur separately – for instance, the story of disciples fishing all night but catching nothing comes after Jesus’ Resurrection in John’s Gospel (but is it actually the same story?). I can’t comment on that; what we do have here is Jesus commandeering a boat and teaching from it; a promise to the four fisherman that, if they go out to the deep water, they will net a large catch even though their night-time efforts have been fruitless; a confession of fear from Simon Peter; and the men’s decision to abandon their boats and follow Jesus – even though, in this telling of the story, he hasn’t explicitly asked them to do so. All he has said is that they’ll now be fishing for people.

We mustn’t underestimate the enormity of the fishermen’s decision to leave their boats and nets. They weren’t wealthy men but nor were they labourers who’d go each day to the harbour or market-place, hoping to be hired. We must also remember that they were the primary bread-winners for their families, who must have been horrified by their crazy decision to follow this carpenter-turned-rabbi. What had got into them? Why had they fallen under his spell? Had they forgotten the folk who depended on them? It was very worrying – but the men didn’t look back.

But we must get to that phrase “fishing for people”! You’ll know that it is often taken to mean evangelism, missionary work, saving souls or (to use a phrase which we’d never dare to say today) “converting the heathen”. Christians, it says, are the fishermen (and women) who are called to throw out the Gospel message and pull folk from the sea of death into the safety of Christ’s boat, the Church – the precise imagery will vary according to your particular Christian tradition. This is an easy and attractive way of understanding this phrase; it’s also an ancient one. For instance the scholarly fourth-century Italian bishop Chromatius wrote: “So the Lord chose men who … were converted from earthly to heavenly fishing, that they might catch the human race for salvation like fish from the deep waters of error, according to what the Lord himself said to them: ‘Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men’.”

However this interpretation tends to unravel when we start looking at it more closely. For instance, and with the benefit of hindsight, we can notice how well-meaning Christian missionary efforts were sometimes co-opted by European and later American colonial powers, leading to conquest, land seizure, abuse and even the genocide of Indigenous people – although, to be fair, missionaries were often hated by colonial governments because they stood up for local people; there has also been the more subtle (and possibly unintentional) spreading of Western capitalist culture. I suspect that this was particularly prevalent in South America but it happened elsewhere as well. This perspective says that people who had the good intention of reaching the world for Jesus (and who endured many hardships in so doing) have in fact done concrete harm. As a former missionary I refuse to accept this criticism in its entirety, but I have to say that it does hold some truth. Fishing can have unintended consequences!

I have another problem with using this picture to describe evangelism: it’s simply that fishing, while a job for some people and recreation for others, isn’t very nice for the fish! I mean: would you like to be enticed by what looks like a nice juicy insect, only to find a hook in your mouth; or to be scooped up in a net with hundreds of other fish and dumped, gasping for breath and dying, on the deck of a boat? If we think of “fishing” in those terms, it begins to seem an inappropriate analogy for evangelism. We want to win people for Jesus, to persuade them that his is a good way of life – but we don’t want to hook, harm or coerce them. “Fishing” sounds violent and cruel, rather than loving.

But the biggest question-mark over the meaning of “fishing for people” comes from the Bible itself. For the phrase comes in Jeremiah 16:16, which begins, “I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them” and continues on land with, “and afterwards I will send for many hunters who shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks”. Amos 4 speaks of God “taking people away with fish-hooks” while Ezekiel 29 is a terrifying passage in which God says, “I am going to put a hook through your jaw and make the fish in your river stick fast to you. Then I will pull you up out of the Nile, with all the fish sticking to you. I will throw you and all those fish into the desert”. Clearly these verses have nothing to do with good news or evangelism – rather, they speak of judgement, first upon the Jewish nation and then upon Pharaoh, king of Egypt.

Obviously we don’t know if those fishermen and the folk in the crowd who heard Jesus were familiar with what are some rather obscure Old Testament verses; although they weren’t rabbis or particularly well-educated, that doesn’t mean they didn’t know the Scriptures. So, if they recognised the historic use of Jesus’ phrase “fishing for people”, they would have interpreted it as an invitation to join him in the struggle to overturn the existing order of power, privilege and corruption. This of course fits in well with Mary’s words in the Magnificat, allegedly sung before Jesus was even born: “God has … scattered the proud with all their plans, brought mighty kings from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed”. Perhaps Jesus was being more political than we usually give him credit him for, perhaps he was asking for volunteers who would hook the ruling elite, pull them to the floor, and                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              overturn the accepted social order and establish justice.

That’s an attractive – if challenging – interpretation of Jesus’ words. Is it the correct one? It may be, although I can’t be 100% sure. Perhaps Christians can hold both ways of hearing Jesus at one and the same time, seeking to spread the Gospel and draw people to faith and also doing all we can to promote righteousness and the wellbeing of society As “little people”, this two-fold task may appear impractical and impossible. We must remember though that Jesus gave these fishermen a miraculous bumper catch even their earlier efforts had been fruitless, so with Jesus, the impossible can actually happen – if we’re prepared to do what he asks, however ridiculous it may appear.

Last Sunday we were with Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, narrowly avoiding being lynched by a furious crowd. Today we’ve travelled to a fishing port on the Sea of Galilee, about 30 miles to the north-east. The two occasions could hardly be more different, but (in my mind at least) there are links between them – and not just Jesus’ presence in both. That’s because, in each case, he asks his listeners to make a radical change. For the people in the synagogue, it’s a change in the way they think about God, a call to open up their closed minds. For the fishermen, it’s a change in their whole way of life, a call to trust him enough to leave their trade and go with him. Both calls involved risk and the danger that those heeding it would be proved mistaken; neither call was easy to put into practice. Surely, though, that’s what discipleship is all about.