NewCreation

Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today's Gospel is Luke's account of Peter's vocation. But in order to get to it, we've had to jump most of a chapter. So I'm just going to do my usual job of filling in the background. You remember we left Jesus as he moved through the crowd and went away in Nazareth. That was the end of last week's Gospel — 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. And people are astounded at 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. Here they're astounded because he speaks with authority. But 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?" In other words, summoning up the Nazareth element: "Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are — the Holy One of God." In other words, 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." Then it says when the demon had thrown him down in the midst of them, he came out of him without having done him any harm. In other words, 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, if you like, of Nazareth reenacted in Capernaum, but now with the recognition — the clear recognition — in the demon. They were all amazed and kept saying to one another: "What kind of utterance is this?" And a 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 sun sets, 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," and he rebukes them. In other words, he doesn't want too much knowledge of who he is. They would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah. In other words, he needed to make that information more slowly available. Then it says at daybreak he departed and went to a deserted place, and the crowds were looking for him. They wanted to prevent him from leaving them. 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. And please 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. So that brings us to the beginning of today's Gospel. He's now come back to the region of Galilee, and it says straightforwardly: "Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats." Luke always packs a lot in in his little words. "The crowd was pressing in on him" — a verb which only appears twice in Luke's Gospel. We're 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 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 Apostles, 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, this is his first reference to that. "He saw two boats at the shore of the lake. The fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets." So, an ordinary end-of-day — or probably actually morning — activity, since they probably would fish at night. "He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon." So 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. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. Again, the sitting down — that's the position of the teacher. So there's the sense that here he is, he's 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. When he'd finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Please remember, in the other Gospels we get Simon, Peter, and Andrew. Simon and Andrew are brothers, and James and John are brothers. There'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 over — Simon's not brought out here. And we'll get James and John referred to later as his partners, the people in the other boat. When he'd finished speaking to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." So he's finished speaking, and now he's going to do a sign — 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. And Simon answered, "Master, we've worked all night long but have caught nothing." The word he uses is epistata (ἐπιστάτης), which is boss, overseer. In the Septuagint it's overseer, someone who oversees hard labour of other people. But maybe there's something about it. But perhaps more normally it would be boss, a popular form of rabbi. "We've worked all night long but have caught nothing. 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. When they'd done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So the "they" is presumably Andrew — that we don't get him mentioned, unless Andrew was Luke's source for this, which is why he doesn't mention him. When they had done this, they caught so many fish their nets began to break. So they signalled to their partners in the other boat — so that's James and John — to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I'm a sinful man." Okay, so what's going on here? Well, a first mission to the Jewish people, not hugely fruitful — quite a lot, 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. There are 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 sail, which would have been significant for him as a fisherman. So here, if you like, what's being foreseen, foreshown maybe, but the fact that where this is going to go and where Peter's vocation is going to take him is 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. So they signal their partners in the other boat to come and help them. Remember, the James and John party later on are the Jerusalem party, whereas the Peter and Andrew would have been part of the Gentile party, and of course there were tensions between them, and there were so many fish that their nets began to break. So all of this is beautifully prophetic of what's going to happen. 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, but here he says — when they began to sink, but when Simon Peter saw it he fell down at Jesus — and he's saying, "Get away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." 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 he is told, "Go and preach, go and preach." So this is where Peter comes into being. This is the beginning of the formation of the apostle, and it's the first sign we get of that Isaiah text in Luke-Acts. That Isaiah text — 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 be coming, that's going to come up again. It comes 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 as it were the fullness of this vision is enacted amongst the apostolic group. That's what Pentecost is all about. And then when Jesus makes his first preaching — when Peter makes his first preaching of Jesus's atonement in the Acts of the Apostles — the first reaction reported to it is to be cut. It's the same word in Greek that is used in the Hebrew for Isaiah's reaction, and of course it's the same reaction that Aaron had when, in the face of the first sacrifice of the atonement, in the book of Numbers — I think 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." Then we have his amazement — the thambos — which is the same as the amazement of the people in the synagogue in Capernaum when he casts out the demon. It's this awe, this fearful awe. And James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were the partners, are also caught up in this. And then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." So he doesn't want the someone — doesn't want this amazed awe. This is a sideways instruction. He's saying, listen, there's much, much more where that came from. I'm giving you something attractive so you can see you're going to be able both to 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. So the first hint that Peter's vocation is going to point to something oracular, far greater than he could imagine. And amazingly, through the sign of fish, he and his partners starting to move into it. Just one final point here, which is: I know that many of the people who listen to my homilies — for which I'm immensely grateful — are priests and preachers like myself who are doing their sermon prep. I just want to say how important obviously this passage is for us: the "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 taught by 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. And yeah, "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 respectful love of your word, your teaching, and the life you offer. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.