I’m intrigued by the way Jesus enlists Simon Peter at each stage of this miracle, and how, by doing so, Jesus leads Peter to conversion.
The story begins with Jesus teaching a large group of people. As more and more gather and push in on him in order to hear his unique take on the word of God, you can imagine Jesus running out of real estate, inching closer and closer to the water’s edge and bumping up onto one of the two boats sitting ashore as the fishermen wash their nets after a night out on the lake.
I wonder what Simon Peter, James, and John were thinking as they watched this situation come towards them. According to Luke, Simon’s encountered Jesus before, when Jesus healed his mother-in-law (Luke 4.38-40). So Simon Peter’s willingness to acquiesce to Jesus’s request to go out a little ways in his boat is based on experience. Note that Jesus did not command Simon, but “asked him to put out a little way…” in order to be able to better teach the whole crowd.
Based on what Simon Peter has already seen and experienced from Jesus, Simon respects him and is grateful enough to do this thing for him. When Jesus is done teaching the crowd on the shore, he turns to Simon Peter in the boat with him, his proverbial teaching assistant who has helped him deliver the word to the crowd. Was it because Peter showed his willingness to Jesus’s earlier request that Jesus now gives Peter a command? Having seen Simon Peter display trust, Jesus tells him make an act of faith: Jesus commands the fisherman to do the very thing they failed at the night before.
At this point, Peter calls Jesus “Master,” using a word that connotes respect for one in authority but has no hint or connection to a sense of divinity. Being the expert on fishing, Simon Peter says that he thinks it’s a fool’s errand, but because of their relational trust, he will do what Jesus tells him to.
Simon’s obedience does not return to him empty. Boy oh boy, does it come back full. Overwhelmingly full, in fact. So full that he has to call out to his partners to bring their boats out to help him reap the fish now weighing down his boat and nets. It’s a small act of obedience that has a huge impact. That’s the way of God, isn’t it? The smallest of things become the seeds of the biggest blessings.
If the order in which Luke tells his story is the timeline of events, Simon Peter knows that Jesus is powerful and different because he knows that Jesus healed his sick mother-in-law. But now, Simon experiences a miracle for himself. Interestingly, it’s one that he could only have experienced because he took part in it: by being obedient to Jesus’s command to go out into the deeper water and put out his nets.
The way Luke tells it, it seems like Simon Peter is dumbfounded. The other working fisherman called to the other boats because Peter was overwhelmed by the realization this miracle has thrust upon him. “But when Simon Peter saw it…” implies that the events of verses 6-7 are happening at the same time as verse 8. Here the fishermen and boats are, hauling in overflowing nets; it’s surely a bit chaotic and exuberant. And at the same time, here’s this intimate moment happening between Jesus and Simon Peter as Simon falls on his knees and makes a proclamation of faith, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” The way of God is again on display in this vignette: others reap the benefit of one person’s obedience, and epiphanies happen in the midst of life and happenings going on all around us.
This time, Simon Peter uses the word for Lord, which is connected to how the Septuagint refers to Yahweh. By contrasting his own sense of unholiness with Jesus and calling Jesus “Lord,” Simon Peter has come to a place of belief that Jesus is somehow connected to the divine. Simon does not need to understand it in whole to sense his own smallness and inadequacy in relation to the one who he let into his boat.
And what does Jesus do? He tells Simon Peter to not be afraid. He tells Peter to not be afraid of what? Of Jesus and his power? Of Simon Peter’s own awareness of his sin—and therefore perhaps his shame? What is clear is that Jesus means to not let anything Simon Peter is thinking stop the man from following after Jesus. As Luke Timothy Johnson points out, Peter tells Jesus to leave him, but in the end, Peter ends up following Jesus. The great and powerful One has enfolded Peter into his own conversion from the moment Jesus asked to use Peter’s boat to teach the crowd.
And if Jesus was not concerned about the sinful state of Simon Peter when he got in the boat, he’s not going to let it stop his plans as he steps back on shore. Will we trust and believe that it’s the same—just as true—for us?
Textual Point
Luke’s version of this story goes a little differently than Mark’s or Matthew’s. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus says those famous lines so many of us sang in childhood in the Fishers of Men son: “Follow me.” Plus, there was no teaching event that put Jesus in Simon Peter’s boat in the first place—Jesus was walking along the Sea of Galilee—not being pressed in on by eager listeners—when he called the fishermen to join him.
Illustration Idea
Jan Richardson writes, “Fish weren’t the only catch of the day; Simon and his companions were hooked. Captivated. Called. And that’s what miracles are meant to do: they meet us at our point of need, but they do not leave us there. They call us to move from being recipients to being participants, to share in the ways that God pours out Godself for the life of the community and the healing of the world.” As Richardson helps remind me, God’s “catch” isn’t the end of life, but the beginning for those who have been caught up in the work of God. When we’re caught by God, we become “fish out of water” but discover that, impossibly, we breath even better, live even freer, become even more whole than we were before. (You may be interested in Richardson’s visual piece also linked above, entitled, “The Willing Catch.”)
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Sermon Commentary for Sunday, February 9, 2025
Luke 5:1-11 Commentary