READINGS

1. Luke 5:1-11 - The First Disciples
2. Isaiah 6:1-8 - Isaiah’s Call and Mission
3. Leviticus 10:3 - Nadab and Abihu
4. Acts 2:37 - Call to Repentance

HOMILY

CONTEXT

We left Jesus as he moved through the crowd and went away in Nazareth. The crowd that had just tried to lynch him.

Then he goes down to Capernaum (not far away, also in Galilee), and teaches there on the Sabbath.

People are astounded by his authority and they speak well of him without the ambiguities of Nazareth, where they had that problem of reconciling the word from the mouth of God and the local boy.

In a wonderful mirror of what has just happened in Nazareth, in this synagogue there is a man with the spirit of an unclean demon who cries out:

'Let us alone, what have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth!' (summoning up the Nazareth element). 'Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.'

The demon is able to put together the Jesus of Nazareth and the Holy One of God.

That's the announced messianic priestly figure whose fulfillment Jesus had announced in Galilee.

But Jesus rebukes him saying: Be silent and come out of him!

When the demon had thrown him down in the midst of them, he [the demon] came out of him without having done any harm.

The demon reenacts the lynching, but the one who is being exorcised is able to walk through the midst of them freely.

So you get the shadow side of Nazareth reenacted in Capernaum, but now with the clear recognition in the demon.

The crowd was all amazed and kept saying to one another: what kind of utterance is this?

And the report about him began to reach every place in the region.

After this, he leaves the Synagogue and enters Simon's house. Now this is the first time Simon gets a mention in Luke's Gospel. He's going to be incredibly important throughout Luke and Acts. And we get Simon's mother-in-law being cured. And then when the sunsets lots of other people come and bring people to be healed to him, and he heals lots of them.

The demons say: you are the Son of God, but Jesus rebukes them. Jesus doesn't want too much knowledge of who he is.

They would not and would not allow them to speak because they knew that he was the messiah. Jesus needed to make that information more slowly available.

And says: daybreak he departed and went to a deserted place, and the crowds were looking for him. They wanted to prevent him from leaving him.

So here he has a different sort of reaction: not the crowd that was trying to lynch him, get rid of him, but here He has the crowds wanting him. But he says: I've got to go and proclaim the good news in other cities.

So he then goes and proclaims in Judea. That means going south to the area around Jerusalem. So probably his first visit to Jerusalem is during this period.

NOTICE: He's not accompanied by any disciples at this point, whereas in Mark he starts off the moment he gets his disciples. In Luke, He does a fair amount of wandering around and preaching by himself before He picks his disciples.

The First Disciples

1 As the crowd was pressing in on Jesus to hear God’s word, he was standing by Lake Gennesaret.

Luke always packs a lot in his little words.

The crowd was PRESSING in on him: a verb which only appears twice in Luke's Gospel, of pressing.

In this first time, when they're pressing in to hear the word of God, and just before the Passion when they press around Pilate to saying: You must crucify him, you must crucify him.

So the pressing can be the pressing to listen or the pressing to lynch.

Again remember that every element here in Luke feeds back to a growing picture of what is the word of God.

And here the phrase: the crowd was pressing in on him to hear THE WORD OF GOD.

That's the first time Luke uses this phrase, the word of God.

And it's going to be a constant, quite a lot in Luke, but much more in the Acts of the Apostle where it refers to something like the audible form that the Holy Spirit takes.

It's a presence which is communicating. It's to do with Jesus, it's somehow also independent of Jesus.

It's the dynamic form that is actually going to speak itself through into us.

So here is his first reference to that: come to hear the word of God.

2 He saw two boats at the edge of the lake; the fishermen had left them and were washing their nets.

The fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.

An ordinary end of day or probably actually morning activities since they probably would fish at night.

3 He got into one of the boats, which belonged to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from the land. Then he sat down and was teaching the crowds from the boat.

He probably recognized someone whom he'd known before from his time in Capernaum and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. So not far.

The first preaching is going to be, basically, he wants a place to make it easier for him to talk to other people from, a little higher, a little distant to enable a voice to carry.

Again, the sitting down - that's the position of the teacher.

So there's the sense that here he is speaking to willing Jewish people, diaspora people, a mix of people in the Galilee area from a slightly marginal position.

Before he'd been speaking in the synagogues, now he's chosen to speak just slightly offshore as it were, from a boat.

So he's teaching and this is making available the word of God.

4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

In the other Gospels, we get Simon, Peter and Andrew. Simon and Andrew are the brothers, and James and John are brothers. It's two lots of brothers.

But here we get no mention of Andrew. The only mention of Andrew in Luke is when he's chosen as one of the disciples. But his relationship with Peter is not brought out here. And we'll get James and John referred to later as his partners, the people in the other boat.

So he's finished speaking and now he's going to do a sign.

It tells him to put out into the deep and put down the nets for the catch.

Something quite inappropriate for the time of day and so on.

5 “Master,” Simon replied, “we’ve worked hard all night long and caught nothing. But if you say so, I’ll let down the nets.”

The word he uses is 'epistata', which is 'boss', 'overseer'.

In the Septuagint it's overseer - someone who oversees hard labour of other people.

Maybe there's something about here, but perhaps more normally it would be 'boss', a popular form of a rabbi.

We've worked all night long but have caught nothing, yet if you say so I, will let down the nets.

So he agrees to do it, he'd seen his mother-in-law cured, he knew that there was something special here.

6 When they did this, they caught a great number of fish, and their nets began to tear.

Well, the first mission to the Jewish people was not hugely fruitful, especially amongst the marginalized, the sorts who didn't go to the synagogue and therefore were interested around the shore.

But then the sign of the Gentiles, which is the sign of the fish.

Jesus says: okay now put out on the much deeper water, on the other side of the boat, because there's the Jewish side and then there's the Gentile side.

And there're far more people in the Gentile world than there are in Israel.

And let's remember that when Peter in Acts 10 is going to have his instruction not to call people unclean or impure, but to go to the house of Cornelius, he has a vision of food let down in a sale which would have been significant for him as a fisherman.

What's being foreseen here? The fact that Peter's vocation is going to take him to the Gentiles.

Matthew does this with the numbers in the catch.

Luke doesn't bother with the numbers. He just uses the same symbolism throughout his story.

7 So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them; they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

That's James and John - to come and help them.

The James and John, later on, are the Jerusalem party, whereas Peter and Andrew would have been part of the Gentile party.

And, of course, there were tensions between them, and there are so many fish that their systems began to break.

So all of this is beautifully prophetic of what's going to happen.

8 When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’s knees and said, “Go away from me, because I’m a sinful man, Lord!”

And here Luke throws what some commentators say is a mistake, because he refers to Peter as Simon Peter. And Jesus hasn't yet called him Peter. That happens a few chapters later in Luke's Gospel. In the other places, Luke has quite correctly referred to him as Simon.

Now I don't think it's a mistake at all.

I think that Luke is showing the vocation of Simon, and the process of him becoming Peter at its starting place.

And its starting place is a vision, very much like the Isaiah vision, which is the text we have in our first reading, and it's the important text for this passage, in which Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up. And he says: I am undone, I am cut, I am a man with unclean lips. So he explains his unworthiness, and then he is told: go and preach, go and preach.

This is where Peter comes into being. This is the beginning of the formation of the oracle, and it's the first sign we get of that Isaiah text in Luke's Acts. This is the vision of the Holy One with the fire in the Holy place and the shock of the sinful prophet as it were.

That is going to come up again very much in the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, where the Lord is high and lifted up and the smoke later fills the house.

It's where the fullness of this vision is enacted amongst the apostolic group. That's what Pentecost is all about.

And then, when Peter makes his first preaching of Jesus's atonement in the Acts of the Apostles, the first reaction as reported to it is to be cut.

It's the same word in Greek that is used in the Hebrew for Isaiah's reaction.

It's also the same reaction that Aaron had when, in the face of the first sacrifice of the atonement in the book of Numbers, Leviticus, something goes wrong and the fire comes out and kills two of his sons, and he's cut.

So this 'being cut' in the presence of the Holy One and how that is being transferred into our ordinary lives is being brought out by Luke here saying: Get away from me, Lord. ]

9 For he and all those with him were amazed at the catch of fish they had taken.

Then we have his amazement (thambos), which is the same as the amazement of the people in the synagogue in Capernaum when he casts out the demon.

10 And so were James and John, Zebedee’s sons, who were Simon’s partners.

It's this ore, fearful ore, and James and John, sons of Zebedee, with the partners are also caught up in this.

10 “Don’t be afraid,” Jesus told Simon. “From now on you will be catching people.”

So he doesn't want this 'thambos', this amazed ore, this is a sideways instruction.

He's saying: Listen, there's much much more where I come from.

I'm giving you something attractive so that you can see; you're going to be able to both do what is your work, but do it more fully.

It's not 'I'm saying you do something completely different', I'm sending you to do something that is more of what you do best.

That's the work of the fisher of people.

And strangely this must have had a huge impact on them - the realization that they had seen a sign of the Lord who was showing them something that was going to happen, which both fit into what they were doing best, but was offering them so much more than they could imagine that they left everything and followed him.

11 Then they brought the boats to land, left everything, and followed him.

So the first hint that Peter's vocation is going to point to something oracular, far greater than he.

And amazingly through the sign of fish he and his partners starting to move into it.

NOTE: AWAY FROM ME, LORD, FOR I AM A SINFUL MAN.

This is not anything to do with wallowing in sin.

I hope that one of the things we are being taughtby the Holy Spirit as we are nourished by the word is the distance between who we are and the holiness of what we're being given.

Not so as to make us ashamed or distraught or crushed or annihilated, but I think that there's something completely authentic in the realization that we really aren't up to talking about these things.

They are so much more alive, exciting, dynamic than what we can say.

Away from me, I am a sinful man, but on the other hand; no, please, not away from me as a sinful man enable me to show the respect for love of your word, your teaching and the life you offer.