At Thy Word

There is a phrase in this morning's Gospel that carries the whole weight of the Christian life in eleven words. Simon Peter, a fisherman of Galilee, a man who knows his lake the way a sailor knows his ship, has been out all night and has taken nothing. He is not a novice. He is not a man who failed for lack of trying. He has given the dark water his full professional competence, and the lake has given him back nothing at all. And now a carpenter from Nazareth, whose business is not fish, tells him to put out into the deep and let down his nets again. And Simon answers: Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net.

Nevertheless. That small word opens onto the whole mystery of faith in the face of apparent fruitlessness. It does not deny the exhaustion. It does not pretend the night was anything other than what it was. It holds the failure and the obedience in the same sentence, separated only by that hinge of grace, and it acts on the word of Christ rather than the evidence of the night.

The Collect for this Sunday prays that the Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness. That phrase — godly quietness — is not the quietness of a man with nothing to do. It is the quietness of a man who has stopped arguing with God about the terms of his vocation. Simon had terms. He had experience, expertise, a reasonable expectation of what a night's fishing should yield. The word of Christ cut across every one of those terms. And the obedience that followed was not the resignation of a broken man but the beginning of an apostle.

I. Vanity of vanities

Before we can fully hear that nevertheless, we need to let Qoheleth have his say; for he has been preparing our ears for it all morning. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes begins his great audit not with philosophy but with autobiography. I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity. He is not a cynic who never tried. He built houses and planted vineyards and made gardens and orchards and pools of water. He gathered servants and silver and gold. He withheld not his heart from any joy. And then he turned and looked on all the works that his hands had wrought, and all the labour that he had laboured to do, and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

The second movement of his audit is perhaps even more devastating than the first. He hated all his labour because he must leave it to the man that comes after him — and who knows whether that man will be wise or a fool? He laboured with wisdom and knowledge and equity, and to a man who did not labour he must leave it all. This also is vanity and a great evil. For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief, and his heart taketh not rest in the night. This also is vanity.

We are meant to feel that. Qoheleth does not offer us a way out of the recognition; he insists on it. The labour of the self-sufficient man, the man who takes his identity from his productivity, who measures the worth of his life by what he has built and accumulated and achieved — that man's labour is a form of vanity not because effort is evil but because the effort is oriented wrongly, aimed at an independence from God that human beings were simply not made to sustain. The Preacher's word is not pessimism; it is diagnosis. The man who has not yet confronted the vanity of self-directed achievement is the man who has not yet been ready for the question Christ will ask him.

The rich young man who appears at the beginning of Saint Matthew nineteen — that single verse appointed as the Morning's second lesson — comes running to Christ and kneels before him. He is not a wicked man. He has kept the commandments from his youth. But when Christ tells him to sell all that he has and give to the poor and follow him, he goes away grieved, because he had great possessions. He had not yet heard Qoheleth's verdict. He had not yet spent a fruitless night on a lake that owed him nothing. His nets were full — full of the wrong things, full of what the world counts as security — and the fullness was a kind of deafness to the word that might have made him an apostle.

Simon's nets were empty. That is the first thing Luke tells us about him. He has washed them and folded them and is done for the morning. He is not a man in the middle of his competence; he is a man at the end of it. And that is precisely when Jesus gets into his boat.

II. Be ready to give an answer

It would be easy to read the story of the Miraculous Draught as simply a display of supernatural power — a proof of divinity that overrides the natural order and leaves the disciples amazed. It is that. But the amazement that Luke records is not what we might expect. When the nets break and the boats begin to sink with the weight of fishes, Simon Peter does not say, What a miracle. He falls down at Jesus's knees and says, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.

That is the response of a man who has been undone. Not undone by the quantity of fish, but by the presence of holiness in such proximity to his own unworthiness. The abundance has not made him comfortable; it has made him aware. The man who could manage an empty lake could maintain the ordinary distance from God that allows a person to remain in control of the terms of the encounter. But this abundance has broken through every defense. Simon knows, in that moment, that he is not dealing with a teacher who can be categorized and kept at a safe intellectual distance. He is dealing with the Lord, and that knowledge unmakes him.

And here is the movement at the heart of the Gospel: Christ does not depart. He says, Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men. The man who confessed his unworthiness is the man who receives the commission. Not despite his confession but because of it. The willingness to say Depart from me — the willingness to acknowledge that the presence of holiness is genuinely overwhelming, that one has no standing before it on one's own merits — is the spiritual poverty that the Kingdom requires. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Simon was poor in spirit at that moment, poor in the most real and unaffected sense, and Christ made him a fisher of men.

The Epistle of Saint Peter, which is this Sunday's appointed reading, was written by the man who had that experience and had been living in its light for thirty years. He writes to scattered and suffering Christians who are being pressed on every side by a world that does not understand them. And what does he say? Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous: not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.

Notice the structure of that counsel. It begins with one mind and it ends with inherit a blessing. Between those two poles, the apostle describes a community that has been reorganized by the same experience Simon had on the lake — people who no longer stand on their own dignity, who no longer render to others what they deserve, who no longer insist on their own terms, but who have learned, from the abundance that overflowed into their empty nets, to overflow themselves in compassion and gentleness and courtesy. Not rendering evil for evil is not a counsel of weak-willed accommodation. It is the description of people who, having received more than they deserved, are freed from the tyranny of keeping accounts.

And then Peter arrives at the verse that has sustained the Church's witness in every generation of hostility: But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. The word answer here is the Greek apologia — a legal defence, a reasoned account, a testimony. The people of God are to be prepared to testify. But the shape of that testimony is meekness and fear, not belligerence and confidence in their own standing. It is the testimony of people who have seen holiness up close and said, Depart from me. It is the testimony of people who were not departed from.

The Collect captures the whole movement in a single petition: 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. The governance is God's; the service is the Church's. The quietness is godly because it is the quietness of people who are no longer fighting for their own sovereignty but have placed themselves, nets and all, at the disposal of the one who knows where the fish are. It is not the quietness of a life with nothing at stake. Simon's life was very much at stake that morning. It is the quietness of a life whose stakes have been handed over to Another.

III. They forsook all, and followed him

The story ends with a sentence that Saint Luke records with great compression, as though he does not quite want to obscure it with comment: And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him. Everything. The boats, the nets, the partnership with Zebedee's sons, the career, the known shape of a life. Forsook. And followed.

Qoheleth had spent his life accumulating and then was undone by the vanity of what he had accumulated. The rich young man had accumulated and could not let go. Simon had been emptied out by a night that yielded nothing, and in that emptiness received an abundance he could not have imagined, and the abundance itself became the ground of a radical leaving. The fullness that Christ gave was not like the fullness of great possessions. It did not bind him; it freed him. It did not say, Stay and tend what you have been given. It said, Come and give away everything that keeps you here.

This is the shape of Christian vocation in every generation, and it is not confined to the Apostles. We are not all called to leave our literal boats and follow Christ to Jerusalem and Rome. But we are all called to the same interior movement: to work with all that we have, to come honestly to the end of our own resources, to hear the word that asks us to go deeper than experience recommends, to say nevertheless, and then, when the nets fill beyond what we can hold, to let the abundance teach us that the life we were guarding was never ours to keep. The quietness the Collect prays for is not comfort. It is the freedom of people who have stopped treating their own sufficiency as the final word.

Simon Peter confessed himself a sinful man at Christ's knees, and was commissioned to catch men. He wrote to suffering Christians telling them to bless where others cursed, and to be ready with a meek account of hope. The man who ended his night with empty nets became the man whose sermon at Pentecost filled three thousand souls. The pattern is one pattern, and it begins always at the same place: at the edge of exhaustion, at the end of the night, with a word we did not expect and a choice about whether to let it down the net.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen ✟