Luke 5:1-10
1 Once while Jesus was standing beside the Lake of Gennesaret and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, 2 he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gotten out of them and were washing their nets. 3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. 4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” 6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to burst. 7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’s knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” 9 For he and all who were with him were astounded at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” 11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
Jesus has only recently begun his ministry after surviving the attempt to kill him in his hometown of Nazareth. He’s traveled to nearby Galilee intending to preach and has gathered a crowd beside the water. There were two boats on the shore as the fishermen washed their nets, and he gets into one of the boats - apparently without asking - and then tells them to put out the boat a bit from the shore, then he teaches the people from the boat. If you’re wondering why he did this, the prevailing assumption is that this provided for better acoustics, and it may also have prevented people from crowding to closely around him. We’re not even told what he says to the crowd, but when his sermon ended, he instructs Simon to push the boat out into the deep water and let down their nets to catch fish.
Remember that this is the first time that Simon has encountered Jesus. He’s just had his boat more or less commandeered by this itinerant preacher, and presumably he listened to what Jesus has had to say, but we have no indication as to what impression it made. He does not know who Jesus is.
What Simon does know, presumably, is fishing. This is his trade, as it was probably his father’s before him. This is how he spends his days, how he supports himself and his family. He’s fished those waters 6-days a week for years. It seems that when Jesus arrived they had already been hard at work for many hours and had caught nothing. It’s a been a disappointing, unproductive workday, surely not for the first time.
Simon has good reason to doubt that casting the nets one more time like Jesus instructed is going to make any difference. His response to Jesus reveals his reluctance, his skepticism: “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing”. Simon might be wondering to himself, “Does this guy know anything about fishing?”. Simon is the expert on the scene; he’s got the experience and wisdom about fishing; he knows how these things go. It would’ve been reasonable for Simon to tell Jesus that he’s tired and ready to go home, that letting down the nets once more is a waste of time.
But Simon overcomes his reservations and says to Jesus, “Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” And then immediately they caught so many fish that their nets were about to burst, and they had to call the other boat to come help. Then both boats were so full that they began to sink. “But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’s knees, saying, ‘“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”’
Simon’s experience leads to belief, to resonation of who Jesus is. When we speak of religious experience we typically imagine some mystical vision, or the witness of some miracle, an encounter with the divine which opens one’s eyes to what had previously been hidden. And we could easily tell Simon’s story this way, that he lived through a miracle and thus had the the kind of experience that makes belief possible. We might even say that what divides belief and unbelief is that some people have had a “religious experience” while others have not, and so those who lack faith but want more learn to desire the kind of encounter with God that makes faith easier, who lament than God seems so stingy with such experience, that some people get to have it while others do not. Or we might say that what divides belief from unbelief is not the experience itself but rather how we make meaning from that experience, the interpretive lens through which we filter our reality. Another person on that boat, rather than understanding the catch of fish as miraculous, might have chosen to see it as merely an extraordinary coincidence, to seek purely naturalistic explanations. The sort of people open to miracles tend to see them more than those who categorically deny the possibility.
In light of this, Christians tend to assume that the way to bring people to faith is to create the conditions necessary for religious experience, and/or to teach people to see that their experience already has religious significance, to convince of the truth. The goal of worship in the modern age - especially, but not exclusively, in the charismatic/evangelical stream - is to bring people into God’s presence, primarily through music, to produce a subjective experience that the whole context teaches you to interpret as God. And I don’t want to entirely discount that there could be and often is something real to all this, but my suspicion is raised by the need for this experience to happen weekly and by the apparent reality that those who have it don’t necessarily lead transformed lives. Could one truly encounter God and remain the same?
While I hope that people will indeed experience God in worship - even here! - and while it’s certainly true that fundamental task is for us to adopt a new interpretive lens for our experience, to learn to see all things in light of Christ, I still want to suggest that Simon’s experience in this passage teaches quite a different lesson. And that lesson is that the entire episode hinges on Simon’s decision to do what Jesus says despite him having fairly compelling reasons to doubt that anything will come of it. He follows Jesus’ command not because he knows who Jesus is but because he seems to want to find out. Or maybe just because he’s got nothing to lose. In any case, his religious experience is downstream from obedience.
This passage presents a very different paradigm for faith formation than the one we typically presume, reversing the causal order of faith and following. The standard account is that you somehow come to faith - be it from childhood, or through some experience, or investigation - and then, once you’re convinced who Jesus is, then you possess the necessary impetus to put his teachings into practice, to obey what he says. The whole game is to convince you who Jesus is and then once you’ve don’t that, you then need to follow him. You first decide Jesus is Lord, then you start to act like Jesus is Lord. Faith precedes following.
But the experience of Simon and the first disciples is the other way round. They begin following Jesus, however tentatively, before they know who he is, and this step leads to experience that seems to confirm who Jesus is, which leads to further obedience and further confirmation.
Obviously different people people have different stories; there isn’t a single journey that everyone must take. But I think this actually is the more common story, and probably the journey we should be encouraging people - including ourselves - to take. And this presents a very simple, straightforward (though not easy) course of action: That is, we could attempt to actually do the stuff Jesus said to do, we could follow his commands, we could put his teaching into practice, and we could do this before we are convinced about who he is or if there’s any truth to what he says. Rather than assuming that we need to figure everything out before taking the first step, we could take the first step and then discover that the resulting experience points to the truth.
I do, of course, have in mind people who do not believe, who find faith difficult, who might be attracted in some ways but have questions for which they haven’t found good answers, who would like to be convinced but have not yet been. And if that’s you, then I encourage you to actually try following Jesus, even if you’re very skeptical that it’s going to be worthwhile. You could even treat it like a hypothesis to test. You just might be surprised.
But I’m also talking people who do claim to follow Jesus, people like myself, who also recognize the meagerness of their faith, who wish they had more. We say to ourselves, if I had more faith I when would like Jesus said, which then makes the most important work the psychological struggle to force yourself to believe stuff you can’t quite believe. But it’s at least as true - and I think truer - to say that if we just did the stuff Jesus said, then our faith would increase. What stops us? Like Simon was an expert on fishing who might have assumed he knew more about this than Jesus, we too tend to consider ourselves competent in the field of how life works, and we encounter Jesus’ teaching as naive or ineffective. We assume that praying for your enemies, turning the other cheek, and all the ways of dying to yourself to which he calls us is simply impractical. We have our objections ready. But also like Simon, perhaps we should force ourselves to respond, “Yet if you say so….”
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