Fishers of Men

Propers: The Third Sunday after Epiphany, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men.” Now there’s an odd turn of phrase, don’t you think?

One might get the impression here that Jesus is just trying to be folksy, speaking to people in terms resonant with their vocation. Do you suppose, had He called farmers, He might have said to them, “I shall make you harvesters of men,” or to craftsmen, “I shall make you shapers of men”? To be honest, I rather doubt it. It sounds cheesy. Jesus doesn’t pander to His audience.

Rather, what He’s doing here is drawing upon the long prophetic tradition of the Bible in which “fishing for people” is an established image of violence, judgment, death and resurrection. And His hearers would have been familiar with this.

Fishing is an aggressive, bloody business. We may not think so, relaxing in our boats. But on the Sea of Galilee, Peter and Andrew and James and John are flinging out their nets, dragging them through the water, and drawing up their catch. Then the fish are sorted, gutted, cleaned, and killed; cooked, dried, and eaten. The fish die, so that the fishermen and their families may live.

And it might seem a little jarring, a little hyperthyroid, to interpret “fishers of men” in this way. But note the language used in the beginning of this passage: “proclaiming the Good News,” “the time is fulfilled,” “the Kingdom of God has come near.” Believe it or not, this is all military language.

In the Hebrew Bible, the Gospel—literally Good News—refers to news of battle, of military victory. It’s the joy in hearing that your side won, that the enemy is defeated, and that your sons and daughters are even now dividing the spoils. The Good News is news of war, and of war won.

“The time is fulfilled,” Mark continues. But the Greek word he uses isn’t chronos, regular progressive time, the tick-tick-ticking of the clock. Rather it’s kairos, which means royal time, the decisive moment for action. Kairos is when you see an opportunity and you take it, when you deliver the pivotal strike that wins the day. Alexander the Great was famous for this: for watching and waiting, until his opponent left an opening, made a mistake. And then Alexander would swoop in, swift and sure, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Kairos means checkmate. And that, Mark says, is what here has been fulfilled. God has acted decisively, made His move, and now goes forth the proclamation of the Good News that the Kingdom of Heaven is victorious is battle.

Meanwhile, James and John, Andrew and Peter, are fishing upon the Sea of Galilee—which, mind you, isn’t a sea at all, at least not by modern reckoning. Rather it is a lake; of decent size by Middle Eastern standards, certainly, but a lake nonetheless. So why call it a sea? It’s to make a point. In the Hebrew Bible, the sea represents chaos. The Spirit of God hovered over primordial waters: waters of birth, yes, but also waters of drowning, home to Leviathan and the monsters of the deep.

Ancient peoples did not like the sea. It was for them a necessary evil, and a scary place. “Impious was he,” wrote the Emperor Augustus, “who first spread sail and braved the terrors of the frantic deep”—and this, mind you, from a ruler whose empire centered around the Mediterranean Sea. In the Bible, the land represents God’s chosen people Israel, while the sea represents the gentiles, the nations, the peoples of chaos—just as Galilee itself is known as “Galilee of the Nations,” home to good Jews, yes, but also to plenty of pagans.

When Jesus says, “I will make you fishers of men,” He’s talking about dragnetting the nations, pulling the peoples out from their chaos—indeed of conquering them! Jeremiah prophesied that God would send forth fishers and hunters to go out into the nations and gather His people in a new Exodus, dragging them home while judging them for their idolatry. Fishing isn’t passive: it is judgment.

Ezekiel spoke of how God would use a dragnet to punish Pharaoh and all the other enemies of His people. God then is the fisherman punishing the wicked. The Prophet Amos writes that God will punish all those who oppress the poor by taking them away with fishhooks. And in Habakkuk the Babylonians are the ones doing the punishing, taking people away with their hooks, nets, and dragnets.

In the words of Professor of Hebrew Chad Bird:

If you take all of these together, you see that by and large the image of “fishing for men” in the Old Testament is a very violent image. It involves judgment. It involves punishment. It involves catching people so that they can face the Lord … whatever that might entail … In the Old Testament … if you are the fish, and someone is fishing for you, it basically means that, when they catch you, life as you know it is now … over.

So given all of this, what exactly is Jesus calling these people to do? What does it mean to become “fishers of men”? In Jesus Christ, God has acted decisively. He has broken into our world in the Incarnation, as Emmanuel, God-With-Us. The time is fulfilled; the Kingdom is at hand. And here by the sea—emblematic of the nations, of the peoples all in chaos—Jesus calls His disciples to go out aggressively and drag from the waters both Gentile and Jew, pulling them up to death, to face the judgment of God, which is of course our Baptism.

We are pulled from the chaos through the waters onto the land, into the promise, and here we die to ourselves in the bright light of day and rise victorious with the Spirit and the breath and the life of Christ within us. We are baptized into death and resurrection. God’s judgment is His mercy; the battle is His victory. And what we think is death is nothing less than new, true, eternal life in the Kingdom of our God. Now is the Gospel; now is the Kingdom; now is the royal time of the reign of Jesus Christ.

But here’s the thing, and this is very important: when Jesus draws upon biblical imagery of judgment and violence and war, He is not calling us to be violent. That was Judas’ fatal mistake. Judas wanted Jesus to be a king like other kings: to lead out armies and conquer territories and put God’s enemies all to the sword. But that’s exactly the opposite of what Jesus Christ has come to do.

Jesus enters a world ravaged by war, obsessed with violence, and tells us that God’s Kingdom is at hand—indeed, is here in Him—and the Good News is that the victory has already been won, not through violence but against violence. The war we fight is never against human beings, but always against the powers of evil and oppression and idolatry that would dehumanize human beings, that would treat the image of God in Man as nothing more than meat.

Yes, be aggressive. Yes, go forth. Yes, pull all the world kicking and screaming up from the darkness, out from the chaos and gasping into the Light. Let us one and all die to our sins and rise as Christ for our neighbor in his need. That is our victory.

You know, the Early Church really had something. There’s no wonder Christianity was punishable by death. The Early Church laid out for all an alternative to the Roman Empire, the true and only Christ as the conqueror of every Caesar in this world. It was an alternative society, where the poor were blessed, the hungry were fed, and the peacemakers were the heroes of the day. Christian war was waged not by the sword but by unflinching proclamation of truth in the face of violence and lies.

That all changed with Constantine. The Church was made legal and came up from the tombs. The State first tolerated, then sponsored, then enforced Christian orthodoxy. And Church and State somehow, strangely, conquered one another. I’m not saying it was all bad. The legalization of Christianity gave us everything from human rights to the modern scientific method. Would any of us have even heard of Jesus Christ were it not for the conversion of Constantine and Rome?

But we lost the understanding that the Empire is our enemy; that Christ is King and will brook no rivals; that the rich and the strong and the violent are not heroes but idols to be toppled from their thrones. And we need to get that back. Christ is calling you to go forth into chaos and dragnet the seas, pulling up the lies of oppression and racism and tyranny, and sterilizing them in the Light of the Son.

Follow Jesus Christ and He will make us fishers of people. He alone is the Gospel. He alone is Good News. And anyone who would defile Jesus’ Name for power and violence and lies is nothing more before Him than ooze dragged up from the sea.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

Credit where credit is due: as the quotation above surely indicates, much of this homily is drawn from the exegesis of Chad Bird.