“Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men”
This homily is not a translation. This is the address I gave for the Fifth Sunday After Trinity at the parish church of St Margaret of Antioch, Iver Heath, at their patronal mass. I am currently on annual leave, and had the privilege of giving an address there.
The readings are as follows (using the one year lectionary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, BCP): 1 Peter 3:8-15 and Luke 5:1-11. Though the readings were from the BCP, in the language of the authorised King James version, when I quote Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (RSV-2CE), corrected to British spelling (unless otherwise noted).
Collect of the day:
Let us Pray:
GRANT, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
In today’s Gospel we meet Simon Peter as he was working, fishing with James, and John, the sons of Zebedee. But they did not catch anything, initially. Washing their nets, they were paid a visit by Jesus, who used Simon Peter’s boat to teach the people. And having done that, he told Simon Peter and his companions to set out again and try to catch fish. Simon tells Jesus that they have toiled all night, but he agrees to set out on Jesus’ word. They then caught a huge catch, so their nets broke. They needed help to get everything in. Peter understood, then, that there was something special about this man. He fell down at Jesus’ feet and said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” But Christ did not leave him, but said, “Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men.” From that day on, St. Peter followed Jesus, and he was to win people for the kingdom of God.
He received a calling, an office, as an apostle, as an envoy or an emissary. An emissary does not go out on behalf of himself, but on behalf of someone else, in this case Christ. I like to compare it to a postman. A postman is supposed to deliver the mail as he got it. And as a priest, I shall pass on the gospel as I received it, clearly and purely, and I shall administer the sacraments rightly, from the institution of Christ.1 I am called to preach the word of God, in love and humility, not to assert myself and exercise power.
Like my colleagues all over the world, I am called to administer these gifts, as I preach the same exact message, the same exact gospel, that Christ called Sts. Peter, James, and John to preach roughly 2000 years ago. But in living out this calling, I should not treat it as a way to wield my own feigned authority. As St. Paul says in Romans 1:1-2, he is “a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures.” And this service extends also to all those who are part of Christ’s body. I am a servant, a minister, not a master. With Christ as my example, I am called to self-sacrifice, to preach the good news. Christ came and served, yet He is God Himself. He is the serving master, and for all of us, ordained or not, He is the example. And a central point there is the concept of self-emptying, which I think is implied in Christ’s metaphor of fishing. And today, I want to reflect on this imagery, to really see what it entails.
Of course all metaphors break down at some point. We do not think that the word of God or the sacraments are merely bait, so that we can lure people to their demise. No, we think that the opposite is happening. Rather than meeting your demise in Christ, you find your end, your goal, your fulfilment. But this image is fitting, still, in a paradoxical way, for the one true God is a God of paradoxes. For what is more paradoxical than Christ? We seek God above, yet we find Him below, not just walking, preaching, and healing, but also beaten, whipped, crucified, even abandoned by God. There, where we would never ever think to find God, there He is, in all His glory, hidden under its opposite. As Jesus says in John 18:36: “My kingship is not of this world.” The gospel is that it is Christ who is Lord and King, yet His power is not like that of other lords. It cannot be defined into our categories.
At the top of the cosmos stands the symbol of power above all symbols of power – not the throne, the scepter, the crown, the sword, or the fasces that were used by the fascists, and which can be found in the coat of arms of the Norwegian police, but the Cross, that place where God showed His power by being humiliated and by dying as a human being, for our sake. God’s power is primarily manifested in what to us seems completely opposite. But that is actually how God reveals Himself to us. God, the One, who is completely beyond being, completely beyond our categories, lies hidden “under his opposite” or “under his contrary,” as Martin Luther put it (in Latin, sub contrario).2
He reveals Himself, paradoxically, in that which is hidden. He conceals Himself in a man, Jesus, in the waters of baptism, under the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in suffering and death. And therefore, as salvation is to be in Christ, we should expect our own justification, sanctification, and deification to follow the same pattern.
Our end, our goal, our fulfilment, is to receive all blessing from God and to become one with Him. As St. Peter says in 2 Peter 1:4, we are to “become partakers of the divine nature,” but not through self-development or our own glory, but as we “escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion.” And this hurts. We become like fishes in nets or on hooks. We die. And that is, paradoxically, how we live. In Romans 6:3, St. Paul says that “all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death.” But where the fish remains dead, we, paradoxically, find life, precisely in baptism. St. Paul continues in v.4: “We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Through baptism, we are made partakers of Christ’s death, so that our evil is killed once and for all and given to Christ, and we are made partakers of Christ’s resurrection and receive a new life, an abundant life.
Being fishers of men, then, is to lead to death but not death of the person but death of sin, of what St. Paul calls “our former man,” who “was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin” (Romans 6:6). By dying to sin and being raised in righteousness, sinners become saints.
But again, all metaphors break down at some point. As I have already said, we do not think that what we have been given by God to hand on is merely bait to lure people to their demise. No, we think that when a man is caught in Christ’s net, he finds his purpose, his fulfilment, his everlasting life. But yes, it happens, paradoxically, through death. And what is killed is sin itself, in us. And from this act flows real life, new life.
But some do indeed participate in this to an even fuller and more concrete extent. Today the western Church honours and celebrates the great St. Margaret of Antioch, who has given her name to this church, and who was martyred for Christ’s sake. In the East, she is known as St. Marina the Great Martyr, and in the Western Catholic tradition she is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers.
St. Margaret suffered during the Diocletianic or Great Persecution, less than a decade before Constantine made Christianity legal, and later favoured, in the Roman Empire. Born the daughter of a pagan priest, she embraced Christianity and was shunned. When asked to renounce her faith, when a Roman official called Olibrius wanted to marry her, she refused, and was tortured.3 Her hagiography says that miracles happened during this ordeal, including her being swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon and escaping by bursting through the beast with the cross she was carrying. Eventually, she was decapitated. She embraced death and did not renounce the Lord. Her life, then, becomes a reminder for us that we are all called to be witnesses for Christ. That is, after all, what the Greek word mártys means.
And she reminds us of the pattern of true justification, sanctification, and deification: to die with Christ and rise with Him to new life. And as we have died with Him and resurrected with Him, we can be of one mind, we can have compassion for each other, we can have love, and above all, we can live a life of blessing, where we sanctify the Lord God in our hearts. And this is exactly the opposite of sin.
Both St. Augustine and Martin Luther saw sinful man, “our former man,” as curved inwards on himself (in Latin, incurvatus in se). But in Christ, we are called to love God and to love our neighbours as ourselves. In Him, our calling is to live paradoxically for others, and from that, we find ourselves. The logic of deification is that instead of being curved inward on yourself, which is the definition of sin, you are turned outwards, first to the One, to God, then to the Other, to creation and other people, in humility. To use Biblical terminology, you should love God above all and your neighbour as yourself. We must learn this every day, as we struggle with sin. We must again and again learn that we are made to become one with Christ, who sacrificed Himself for us.
And that is the exact message, the exact gospel, that Christ called Sts. Peter, James, and John to preach. He came to them to call them to call others to life, not through self-development or self-improvement but through suffering, through baptism into death. But through that, they, and we, gain life. And that is the most precious gift of all. And when we have been given this gift, we have a calling to use it, “to joyfully serve God in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord,” as the collect says.
But this itself is also a gift, because this is all the work of God, who works all in us. And when He works in us, He not only builds but He also tears down, not for the sake of destruction, but for the sake of shaping and healing, like a surgeon or a vinedresser. And this reminds us of something essential: without God, we do not only have nothing, we are nothing.
In fact, as Scripture consistently teaches, we do not exist in ourselves but only because we participate in God, who creates us and sustains us. As a Scribe says to Christ in Mark 12:32, God “is one, and there is no other but he.” This does not just mean that He is the only God, although that is true, but that there is no other. But when we understand that, that our relation to God, as creatures and as saved sinners, is not something we possess, but something we have been given, we find true freedom and true rest. We understand that all is grace, that becoming “partakers of the divine nature” is not our achievement but a gift, which opens up to a new life, in Christ. As St. Paul puts it, in Galatians 2:19-20: “For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
This is what we are called to preach, not abundant riches here, which is only emptiness, but abundant life there, which, nevertheless, can be manifested here, to a certain extent, and which is our fulfilment. But you can only achieve life by not clinging to it. As Christ says in Matthew 16:24-26: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”
So do like St. Margaret, and countless Christians throughout history: be caught in Christ’s net. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Christ, wherever He leads you.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.
This is, indeed, what the bishop ordered me to do at my ordination. See Gudstenestebok for Den norske kyrkja, 2 vols. (Oslo: Verbum, 1996), II, 168-169 (cf. II, 162-173).
See Marius Timmann Mjaaland, The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology (Bloomington/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), 41-45.