The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost 2024
The miraculous haul of fish
In today’s Gospel, once again, we find our Lord beside the Sea of Galilee. What is going on this time?
‘Jesus got into one of the boats,’ the Gospel says. ‘It was Simon’s.’ That is, St Peter’s—though he had not yet been given that name, he was still called Simon.
In fact, he’d only just met Jesus, perhaps a week before. Rumours were already flying about the miracles this Nazarene was performing, and when Jesus passed through Simon’s hometown, Capernaum, he visited his house—for what reason, St Luke doesn’t say. While he was there, he healed Simon’s mother-in-law. So Simon knew something wasn’t altogether normal about this wandering carpenter.
Imagine it. There Jesus stands, in Simon’s boat, preaching the Word. Simon sits at his feet listening—while also, one assumes, keeping a firm hand on the oars, or on the tiller, doing whatever he can to hold the boat steady.
Then: ‘When Jesus finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”’
Now, we know the end of the story; we know that Christ is going to perform a miracle, and that he is going to reveal the meaning of that miracle, that from now on Simon will be catching, not fish, but human beings. Knowing this, we can see what those words which the Lord just spoke to Simon signify: ‘Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.’
Notice, he says this after he finishes addressing the crowd. This symbolises the end of Christ’s ministry on earth. When he ascends, Christ goes silent. He has delivered the Gospel, and from then on, the responsibility for spreading the Gospel falls to the Church—and so it is to the Church that we must humbly and obediently turn if we want to follow the Gospel correctly.
That is what Christ is saying when he tells Simon to ‘put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch’. He tells it to Simon, in Simon’s boat, because Simon’s boat is the Church.
St Peter often represents the Church in the Gospel. ‘You are Peter,’ the Lord will tell him, ‘and upon this rock’—the rock of Peter’s faith— ‘I will build my Church.’ And Christ sends the Church into ‘the deep’, which St Gregory the Theologian says symbolises ‘the unsettled and bitter waves of life’, the dark world of ignorance and sin which we all too often inhabit, but into which the Church casts the nets of the Gospel, ready to save the ones who answer the call.
Let us now pay close attention to everything that Simon does next. We can always learn a lot from Simon, from St Peter. Of all Christ’s disciples in the Gospels, he is the one most like us.
First of all, Simon is not ashamed to confess that he doesn’t think the Lord’s command will work. He’s not pretending. There’s no fake piety in Simon. ‘Put out into the deep and let down your nets,’ the Lord told him, but Simon is an experienced fisherman. He spent the whole night fishing in precisely that spot. He knows there are no fish there—he knows it, I should say, with his worldly expertise.
This is how the Lord’s commandments often strike us as well. Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. The first will be last and the last first. Whoever desires to become great, let him be a servant. We hear these gospel commands and we think, ‘That’s just not how the world works.’
And you know what? We’re right. The world does not work like that. Christ’s commands are not in sync with how the world works. Quite the contrary. ‘I have overcome the world,’ Christ says. So, like St Peter, like Simon, it’s okay to be honest when the Church’s teachings strike you as unrealistic, or confusing, or nonsensical. In the eyes of the world, they are.
And yet, Simon does not stop there. ‘Master, we toiled all night and caught nothing,’ he says, but then straight away he adds, ‘but at your word I will lay down the net.’ At your word, I will obey. Our Lady the All-Holy Theotokos uttered the same when the Archangel Gabriel told her something incredible, that despite her virginity she would bear a son. Like St Peter, she also found the word to be unbelievable. ‘How will this happen to me since I am not intimate with a man?’ she asked. And yet, also like St Peter, she set her own thinking aside and trusted in God, answering ‘Let it be to me according to your word.’
The Theotokos and Simon Peter both bent the knee. I will ignore my own worldly reservations and I will put my trust in your word. This is the only way the Spirit of God can enter our hearts, if when we hear the word proclaimed by the Church, instead of relying on our own worldly judgement—no matter how reasonable that judgement seems to us—we say, ‘I don’t see how this can be true, Lord, but at your word I will obey.’
If you don’t, and if you postpone putting Christ’s commandments into action until they seem reasonable to you, then you will never put them into action—and in the end, you will find yourself outside the Kingdom.
So, having ignored his well-informed doubts based on his worldly expertise, Simon obeys. He puts out into the deep and lowers his nets. Right away they are filled by a huge shoal of fish. See how quickly we receive the spiritual benefit from obeying our Lord’s commands! The net became so full that it began to break! And so Simon called out to James and John, who got into the other boat and rowed over to help him.
Now, James and John are described as Simon’s ‘partners’ two times in this gospel passage, once by the Greek word μέτοχος and once by the word κοινωνός. On the surface, yes, both words can mean ‘partner’ in the sense of business partner. But in Church tradition, both words are also used to describe our union in Christ.
St Peter himself, in his second epistle, would describe each one of us as a κοινωνός, ‘a partaker’, of the divine nature; and St Paul, in his epistle to the Hebrews, would write that we are μέτοχοι, ‘sharers’, in the Holy Spirit. So more than just business partners, James and John were destined to become Simon’s partners in this deeper sense, sharers with him in the divinity of Christ, through faith in the risen Lord, and partakers of the Holy Spirit, which would descend upon them on the day of Pentecost, inaugurating the Church’s saving mission to the world.
And so, if Simon’s boat is a metaphor for the Church, as the holy Fathers say it is, and casting the net into the deep of the sea a metaphor for the Church’s Gospel preaching, fishing for souls, then the story is making it crystal clear that the traditional Orthodox understanding of the Church is the correct one. Because without the help of his two partners James and John, Simon would have lost the catch of fish; and unless all the successors of the Apostles, the bishops, work together as equals, equal sharers in episcopal grace, then the Church’s mission cannot succeed.
We reject the idea that one single bishop—for example, the bishop of Rome—exercises sole supremacy over the whole Church. No, this gospel teaches that all the bishops are equal partners, μέτοχοι and κοινωνόι—and isn’t it interesting that, over the past thousand years, as the Catholic Church’s assertion of papal supremacy has grown ever more absolute, to the same degree has that Church failed to keep the fish in her nets and struggled to haul them up from the depths into the sunshine.
What did Simon do next? Seeing the miraculous haul of fish—and remember, he knew there were no fish there; he knew the catch was miraculous; just as we know Christ’s commandments make no worldly sense, and therefore we know, when carrying out those commandments results in peace, the forgiveness of sins, the healing of passions, and the conversion of souls, we know that these results are miraculous—seeing the haul of fish, he and James and John, it says, they all fell on their knees in astonishment and fear. Simon cries out: ‘Leave me, Lord, because I am a sinful man!’
See his humility. See the effect that Christ’s divine presence has on the soul. When you—in prayer, in contemplation, in meditation upon Scripture, in the sacraments—when you cast your net into the deep of your own soul, and Christ works his miracle in you, see what happens: his divine presence reveals your sin.
Confronted by the overwhelming reality of Christ’s holiness, if that encounter is genuine it will set you shaking! ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,’ and Christ is the wisdom of God—and so at the beginning of any encounter with Christ, we must feel that holy fear.
We know in our bones what the natural consequences are of bringing our sinfulness before his holiness: fire, wrath, terror, earthquake. Every time we stand at prayer, or approach the chalice for Holy Communion, or kneel before the icon of Christ at Holy Confession—every time we turn toward Christ, we must re-summon that holy fear, we must recall our sinfulness, we must stand, inside our hearts, in awe at the almighty power, purity, and unimaginable holiness of the Lord of Hosts—all the while knowing that he will respond as he always does: ‘Fear not!’
‘Fear not!’ he will say in our hearts. ‘Do not be afraid!’ Just as he said to Simon, just as the angel said to the Theotokos, and just as countless others heard. ‘Fear not!’ is the most frequent command in the whole Bible. If we want to hear that command in our hearts, ‘Fear not!’ then let us first feel that holy fear.
It is not for us to calm ourselves—we approach the Lord, we are overwhelmed by his holiness, and in his mercy he tells us ‘Do not be afraid’. As St Ambrose once said: ‘You must also cry out, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” so that God may answer, “Fear not”. Confess your sin and the Lord will pardon you.’
We do not pardon ourselves, and yet we can trust that God’s love is such that he will pardon every sinner who approaches him in fear and humility. As St Bede once said: ‘The Lord soothes the fears of carnal men, so that no one trembling at the consciousness of his guilt will be afraid to undertake the journey of holiness.’
So, let us take our beloved St Peter as a model of humility and the fear of God. Let us, like St Peter, temper fear with readiness to obey. And, having confessed our sinfulness and heard the voice of Christ alleviating the fear in our hearts, let us commit ourselves once again to that journey of holiness, walking faithfully in Christ’s footsteps.
In the words of St Paul in today’s Epistle, let us ‘be vigilant’. Let us ‘stand firm in the faith’. Let us ‘show courage’. Let us ‘be strong’.