Living into our common vision
Epiphany 5C | Luke 5:1-11
Previously in the gospel according to Luke: Jesus was in the synagogue in Luke chapter 4. He was handed the scroll of Isaiah, he read it, and said that it had been fulfilled in their hearing. The people were astounded.
Then, because the Presentation of Our Lord landed on a Sunday, we took a trip back to when Jesus was 40 days old and Mary and Joseph brought him to the temple for their rites of purification.
What we missed was the second half of that other story, when the people stop listening to Jesus and focus on where he came from, belittling him because of his father and place of origin. Then Jesus challenges them, and they get so mad that they try to grab him to throw him off the cliff, but Jesus eludes them, walking right through the crowd.
It is an important juxtaposition between the physical, literal attempt to kill Jesus and a metaphorical inability to even touch him, hold him, let alone destroy him.
Jesus leaves Nazareth for he can do nothing there, heading to Capernaum where he goes to a synagogue on the Sabbath to teach and the people are astounded “because he spoke with authority.” There he finds a man possessed with a demon and Jesus rebukes the demon, sending it away. And this amazes the people there because, they say,
‘What kind of utterance is this? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and out they come!’
—Luke 4:36
Word spreads everywhere about Jesus and what he can do. They don’t dismiss Jesus, like the people of his hometown. They want to know more.
The first appearance of Simon.
When we read about Jesus getting into the boat a few moments ago, pushing out and speaking to the fishermen about fishing for people, this isn’t Simon (Peter)’s first appearance in the text. That came a few verses earlier, when Jesus left the synagogue and just waltzed into Simon’s house, where he healed Simon’s mother-in-law of a high fever. Then people started bringing people to him to heal and exorcize their demons and everybody was talking to everybody else about it.
But that first encounter with Simon and his family just throbs with anticipation. The evangelist doesn’t introduce Simon as a person, but merely names that it was Simon’s house with a casual knowing. As if the reader would already know — oh, you mean, Simon?
But it also sets us up for a second encounter, when Jesus gets in Simon’s boat to escape the crowds who are getting way too handsy. It’s a person he knows. A person who also knows him. It is a small encounter, a confidence, I need your help.
Jesus taught from the boat.
This, too, is easy to miss. That the crowds are too eager, too familiar with Jesus. Not because they want to be a part of something, to love him, but to touch and hold him. It isn’t a kind or virtuous impulse, not at this scale. The people are pressing and will crush him. He has to put some distance between himself and them. A gap. He uses water like a moat. Then he begins to teach.
As I thought about what this means — of people coming to Jesus, asking for help, wanting to know the love of Jesus — I found this image of the crowds as dangerous, of Jesus seeking separation from them, even as he taught them, to be a disturbing and conflicting image. One that I wasn’t sure how to square with our tradition of bringing our troubles to Jesus. Of adoring him and loving him above all others. Our own adoration, then, is being cast in a different light. One that now looks more complicated and threatening. What are we to make of this?
Let us consider the situation. Jesus is becoming incredibly famous with astounding speed. Famous for his healing and his teaching. They marvel at his authority, which seems to be as much about how he says things and does things as what he says and does. And people come to him for themselves or their loved ones. But Jesus seeks separation from the danger of the crowds in the trusted hands of people he would then call disciples. The ones who would help him fish for people.
In our reading, we are drawn to call this moment, the calling of the disciples. Which becomes, for us, a picture of discipleship. And that picture is founded on a story many often describe as being about evangelism. A word we associate with both proclaiming the Good News and recruiting people to the cause.
The other problem with evangelism.
Episcopalians aren’t known for our love of evangelism. We often treat it like a four-letter word. But about 94% of that response is thinking it has to do with talking to another person about Jesus and asking them to come to church with us. Which is also why we love the Francis quote about proclaiming the gospel with actions and only use words when necessary.
But this passage illustrates another problem with evangelism: the invitation to an individualistic, selfish faith. It shows what happens when we think of following Jesus as something that gets us out of our bad situation alone, that our own interaction is all that matters, or that the community itself is just a thousand people vying for the GodMan’s attention.
This is how a movement becomes a dangerous mob. Many of us are warned about groupthink, but here we are invited to see a kind of self-absorbed yearning, reaching, pawing at the figure of their obsession, every individual longing to be the next or the only. This isn’t a communal or personal moment, it is a competitive isolation of hundreds of people pushing on Jesus to help them.
What Jesus offers the disciples is a vision of common freedom and liberation. That you will be free as we help to free others of their burdens, of their fear, of their hatred and anger and selfishness.
“Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”
—Luke 5:10b
We get free when we get free.
We inherit this discipleship vision.
Even though we are too reluctant to use that language. Too eager to seek comfort in the language of our culture, of our associations. Not to think of ourselves as disciples, a word that implies that we are students, learning, training to become practitioners, but to instead call ourselves Christians, members of a church, a denomination, participants in a group project.
The difference between these words is tremendous and dangerous to our faith.
Members do have obligations. To maintain the institution and participate in its function. We get to carry ID cards or wear jewelry that display our membership. And we are often keen to recruit people like ourselves, both to strengthen the organization and because we have a type of person that we like to hang out with. But these aren’t the marks of discipleship exactly. Nor are these the patterns Jesus established with the disciples or the disciples established with those earliest Followers of the Way.
Disciples are students who learn and practice as they follow their master, their rabbi. They learn by doing and the work of the disciples is to love: to proclaim the Good News of repentance and the liberating love of Jesus Christ. Disciples are to heal the sick and feed the hungry. To offer good news to the immigrant and the exiled. This is the kind of fishing Jesus was inviting Simon, James, and John to join him in.
And I suspect this, too, is what separates the disciples from the crowds; discipleship from membership. This is definitely what separates what Jesus is looking to do from what we are taught about evangelism.
Hear him, Friends!
We are disciples and apostles far more than we are members. Our work isn’t to get in. To have the ID card in a wallet to prove to an officer we deserve to be here. And there is no king on Earth worthy of our devotion. We are here to love other people and to free us all through our generous acts and an uncompromising commitment to Jesus’s Way of Love.
This is our walk. There are no shortcuts or membership perks. This isn’t a reward program or a place to fix yourself, only to get back onto the treadmill of despair and self-loathing. We do this work together. Because our purpose is common. Our need is common. Our work is common. It is ours — to do, to receive, to make, to fund, to create, to lead, to whip up out of whole cloth. Following Jesus is something we do together.
And not everyone can keep up with our pace, so we carry them. And not everyone can be here, so we visit them. These are the things we do out of love, right? For our friends and family, compatriots and comrades. We share in Christ’s love with people because we need this. It isn’t me or you or them, but us. All of us and each of us both. Us.
We don’t have to fear this or think we are incapable of this. Jesus soothes Simon when he thinks he’s wrong for this. Because it isn’t about him, but us. He is perfect for the job because he can see the job is about us. And in the end, he’ll embody it with his whole self. Because the story was never about him. It is our story. Our love. To receive, to share, to offer the world, in every age. The true freedom of love.