The Shepherd’s Voice

Becoming Fishers of Men

Readings for Sunday, February 7^th
Isa 6:1-13
Ps 138
1 Cor 15:1-11
Lk 5:1-11

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Good morning saints of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. As some of you know, I’m your pastor’s son. I’m also a first year seminary student and this happens to be my very first sermon. First sermons tend to be either too short or too long. But the good news is that the super bowl doesn’t start till late this afternoon, so no matter how long I talk you’ll almost certainly make it home. So in the spirit of new ventures, let’s say a word of prayer together, asking God to open our eyes and ears to the message within His Gospel lesson for today.

{Prayer}

Turn with me, if you would, to our Gospel lesson for the day, Luke 5:1-11.

Now I’ve heard it said that every good Lutheran sermon contains a little bit of law and a little bit of Gospel. And while there are various ways of understanding law and Gospel, I think it’s helpful to understand law and Gospel as events. And so in the case of “law” we might say that “law” is the event of standing under condemnation, of recognizing one’s brokenness, of seeing not just, or not even necessarily, one’s moral fallenness, but experiencing the radical and sobering truth that one is broken and cannot fix oneself or one’s world. The event of law is not the sentence of a judge, but the epiphany that the sentence of the judge is true and that one is utterly undone.

The Gospel, by contrast, is the event of reconciliation to God. Where the event of the law produces despair, because we can do nothing to fix our brokenness, the event of the Gospel declares to us that God will, and has, fixed our brokenness. He has forgiven our trespasses and created us anew, and the event of Gospel not only announces this work by God, but we experience this newness of life as we live out our lives in the event of the Gospel.

This Gospel event is so big that it doesn’t just limit itself to the crucifixion event in 33 AD. It not only declares our justification by grace through faith in Christ as a present reality guaranteed by God, but it gives us an anticipation of our resurrection in this life. As Paul might say, we already live with Christ, even though we are not yet with him.

But the Gospel event is even bigger than that. It’s not just objective, nor subjective, it permeates creation. Ever since the fall God has been working to renew the order and beauty of His creation. And as we Christians know, He had been planning this for a long time. As Romans 8 reads:

… the creation was subjected to futility … in hope 21 that athe creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. (Rom 8:20-22 ESV)

So in accordance with this way of understanding law and Gospel, we can say this: all of creation, us humans, the animals, the rocks and stones and trees and stars, all of creation stands under law. It is and remains “subjected to futility”. The event of law is the event of recognizing the brokenness in all of creation. It is in our families, in our nations, and in our world. But as Romans reminds us, there’s hope. Because Christ has accomplished the event of the Gospel. And where Christ is, there the Kingdom of God is. There the renewal of all creation is. And saints, wherever two or more of you are gathered, there is Christ. The renewal of all creation began around 33 A.D. and it continues even now, with us in Buena Park, as we live out our lives in the event of Gospel.

Ok, so at this point perhaps you are wondering where we see this in our passage from Luke? Where is the law and Gospel here?

We note that throughout Luke, the author of Luke quotes the prophet Isaiah frequently. And not only does he quote Isaiah, he has the people in his narrative speak parts from Isaiah. These are woven seamlessly into the narrative. This is a common technique in ancient writing. The purpose of this kind of allusion is to enable the reader of the Gospel to appreciate the events happening in the Gospel in a way the “characters” in the Gospel couldn’t when the events actually occurred. To invert a phrase from Isaiah, the purpose of allusion in the Gospel is to make those who have ears to hear, hear. In our case, the readers of the Gospel are you. You are the ones with ears to hear. And so when, in the beginning of chapter 3, Luke quotes from Isaiah and Zechariah, saying:

5 Every valley shall be filled, band every mountain and hill shall be made low,cand the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, 6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” (Luk 3:5-6 ESV)

the purpose of the quote is to build up expectation in us for the fulfillment of this prophecy. What would such fulfillment look like?

These prophecies all have to do with God coming to his people and making a new exodus possible. When the mountains and hills are made low, they are made low so as to enable the people of God to travel out of their present slavery and darkness and back to God. The rough places becoming level is the equivalent of a heavenly Caltrans project: God is going to make it easy to come back to Him, and there will be no potholes. There is an image here of returning to Eden where God will once again dwell with all peoples. And the mark of Eden is the reestablishment of divine order within the cosmos. So if we are attentive readers, Luke 3 has prepared us to expect God to somehow, someway renew creation and reestablish the divine order. Does this happen in Luke 5? Let’s look for this in our Gospel story.

Chapter 5 begins with a crowd of people striving to hear “the word of God” from Jesus. Nowadays, the phrase “the word of God” is part of our Christian lingo. To a first century reader, however, the phrase is a novelty. It nowhere appears in the Greek Old Testament, save in the very beginning of Jeremiah, and while it’s common in Luke, it isn’t especially common in the rest of the New Testament. So when 1st century readers familiar with the Torah and the Prophets heard this Gospel, this phrase would have caused their ears to perk up.

In verses 2-3 Jesus gets in Simon Peter’s boat and asks to go out a little bit from the shore. He’s going to teach the people from the boat. And since his teaching has been referred to as the “word of God”, we could re-describe this scene as the word of God going out over the water to the people. Our 1st century reader would now be really quite shocked! This is a subtle allusion to creation in Genesis, where God’s spirit hovered over the waters and God spoke his royal edicts bringing all of creation into being. This allusion is further strengthened by Christ’s command to Simon to “Put out into the deep,” which conjures up the “deep” in reference to Genesis 1:2. So far these are only allusions. They are there to color the text and form our expectations. But they are not the events of either law or Gospel.

By verse 4, Simon challenges Christ’s command to take out the boat. Christ’s request goes against everything an expert 1st century fisherman would have done, and the very fact that Peter owns this boat (a relative luxury for a fisherman at the time) indicates that Peter is the head fisherman here.

To better understand how wild Christ’s request was, consider that 1st century fishing techniques involved the use of nets which were, much to the chagrin of the fisherman, visible to fish during the day. As such, fisherman using nets would ordinarily work at night and in the darkness. So when Jesus suggests to Simon Peter that they casually take the boat out to grab some fish in broad daylight, this suggestion flies in the face of what everybody knows about fishing.

To Simon’s astonishment, they make a great catch. Verse 8 says that “Simon Peter saw it.” This verse, verse 8, contains the first reference in Luke to Simon as Peter, a name that Jesus Himself chooses for Simon. The implication is that Simon has become Peter at this point. He has been converted. So what was so shocking to Peter about the catch?

It is in this catch that Jesus demonstrates his command over creation. The great catch isn’t just a magic trick. Luke has been using allusions from Genesis to get us to anticipate that some kind of restoration of creation’s original order is about to take place. And in the original order depicted in Genesis 1, everything was in a relation of governance towards something. For example, light governed the darkness, land was over water, and heaven over both land and water. The birds tended to the air, the fish to the sea, and the animals to the land. Even the sun “ruled”, as Genesis says, the day and the moon the night. But the highest governor in all of creation was man. Man was to tend to all things, take care of all things, and had power over all things. After the fall, all these relationships became inverted. Instead of man tending to the ground and eliciting produce, the ground resisted man and yielded only thorns. It was as if man had to serve the earth now.

The miracle Jesus accomplished demonstrated Christ’s concern to restore creation to its original order. He demonstrated that He ruled over the fish, just as in Eden. He was the New Adam. He was setting things aright, back to how they should be. When Simon sees this, when he recognizes that the one whom Isaiah had prophesied would come and restore all things has arrived and is restoring them, he at the same time recognizes his own fallen-ness. He says:

Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” (Luk 5:8 ESV)

This is a partial quotation from Isaiah 6:5, which reads:

“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Isa 6:5 ESV)

It is not that Simon is guilty of some secret sin which the text dare not mention. Rather, Simon sees Jesus doing the very things Isaiah promised God would do. And in seeing this he recognizes the failure and brokenness of the world that he and all humans have brought about. Perhaps he remembers first generation out of Egypt. They were supposed to be mediators of God’s renewal to all of creation, but instead they rebelled against God and spent 40 years wandering the wilderness. Or maybe he remembers the failures of the two Kingdoms, and the exiles to Assyria and Babylonia. Maybe he remembers that Israel has not always been a light unto the nations, that it has not cared for the widow, the orphan and the alien, that it has not lived up to the Torah and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think it will change. This is the event of law. It is the hopelessness of encountering God at work and realizing you are undone and helpless to fix things. But the event of the Gospel is quick at hand.

As soon as Simon alludes to Isaiah, Jesus makes a counter reference to Isaiah. Jesus says:

“Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” (Luk 5:10 ESV)

“Do not be afraid” is a watchword in Isaiah. It’s a command from God meant to comfort those who are broken and crushed. And so although Jesus simply says, “Do not be afraid,” it is short-hand for a verse from Isaiah 41 near the verses already explicitly quoted in Luke chapter 3 – the very verses that promised that God would clear the way for man’s exodus back to God. That verse, Isaiah 41, reads as follows:

10 fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with amy righteous right hand. (Isa 41:10 ESV)

That is the event of Gospel. Simon recognizes the brokenness of his world, and God is with Peter in that brokenness to heal that brokenness. God is with Peter to work to restore the order that was lost so long ago. Simon has become Peter and now confesses Jesus as “Lord.” He leaves everything behind to follow after Jesus. He is living in the event of the Gospel.

Like Peter, God sees us in our broken state and says to us, “Do not be afraid.” Like Peter, we are forgiven in Jesus. Like Peter we can live in newness of life.

Amen

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