catch me

I’m working my way through Luke so I am a little off from the lectionary, but this turned out to be the right story for this past week and, perhaps, for the days to come.

_________________________

In my days as a high school English teacher, one of the books I loved to read with my students was Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I won’t say that all the ninth graders in my classes enjoyed reading the book, but I loved it because it presented such a simple and vivid picture of the old man—Santiago—chasing the big fish. Still they had a point: it’s not easy to describe that kind of struggle in a way that the reader can really get it, especially when none of us had been in Santiago’s situation.

A fair part of the story takes place after the fish is hooked and is dragging Santiago’s small boat while the old man hangs on waiting for the fish to exhaust itself. One day, a boy in one of the classes was vocal in his frustration with how long the whole thing was dragging out.

“He’s just sitting in the boat.”

The next day, I came with a big coil of rope and asked him to stand up. I secured one end of the rope to a pole in one corner of the room and then tied the other end around his waist and asked him to lean back so that the rope was taut, much the same as Santiago had to keep his line taut so the fish wouldn’t break it.

“The old man did that for a couple of days,” I said. “I want you to do it for forty minutes.” He was up for the challenge, but he couldn’t last. He still didn’t like the story that much, but he understood the old man better.

I tell you that story because I think we have to remind ourselves of how different life was in first century Galilee, compared to the world we know. That seems obvious, I know, but when we read the would-be disciples were out fishing all night, we have to work hard to picture the small, hand-carved wooden boats they sailed; or the rough ropes that made their nets; or even that they were not independent business people, but peasants who did grueling work but saw little of their profits.

We should also remember that the men in the boats were not strangers to Jesus. They were with him in Nazareth and his other stops across Galilee. In the verses between where we left off last week and today, Jesus went to Simon Peter’s house and even healed his grandmother. This is not a story about Jesus calling these people to something that hadn’t thought about.

Still, something changed in this story. They had continued to go to work, it seems, until now. Jesus got into the boat, first, to get a little distance from the crowd so he could preach to them. Simon and the others were cleaning up from having fished all night, which was the usual shift for fishers in the area. They had come back to port with empty nets, which was probably not that unusual because the pressure from the Romans for product meant that the lake was overfished.

Jesus finished his sermon and told them to sail out farther and dropped their nets. Simon must have rolled his eyes and responded with the Aramaic equivalent of, “You’ve got to be kidding me, Boss,” but he did as Jesus asked and dropped the nets. When they pulled them up, they were so full they were a problem. The nets were ripping and the boats were sinking. They barely made it back to shore with their record catch. And it frightened them. They didn’t know what to say or do.

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid. From now on you’ll capture people.” It’s a word that means “to take them alive” and “to entrall,” the way we talk about being taken by a photograph or a dramatic performance. And Luke said they walked away, leaving their pile of fish with whoever was still on the docks, and went with Jesus. We could even say they were taken—captured—by what he said and did.

Luke makes it sound so simple—they just dropped everything and went with him—but they were allowing Jesus to change their whole view of the way the world worked.

They lived in a world of scarcity: there weren’t enough fish, there wasn’t enough money, they were oppressed by the Romans. They were accustomed to looking at the world and feeling trapped. Jesus said, “Try again. Throw the nets out one more time,” and with that came an image of abundance: more fish than they could reasonably harvest.

I wonder if it made any of them think of Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth when he quoted from Isaiah– The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.—and then said, “Today you are seeing these words become flesh right before your eyes. Luke wants us to make the connection in the way he describes the turn of events.

Jesus was calling for spiritual, social, and even economic upheaval when he proclaimed the Jubilee, the Year of God’s Favor. Jesus still calls us to trust the extravagance of God, to trust that there is enough to share, that we are enough to take care of each other. And that is not a pipe dream. Even now, with eight billion people on the planet, we grow enough food in the world to feed everyone. The reasons people starve has to do with our broken systems that enforce a sense of scarcity and conflict. We have the ability to catch everyone, if we will unclench our fists and open our hearts.

Which takes me back to high school English—tenth grade this time–for Catcher in the Rye. In one of my favorite passages, Holden Caulfield asks his sister Phoebe, “You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like—” and she interrupts to tell him he is remembering the line from a Robert Burns poem incorrectly: it was “if a body meet a body.” Then Holden says,

“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

Part of the reason the people in Jesus’ time were looking for the messiah was they were convinced that they were living in the last days and that things couldn’t get worse. Sound familiar? That perspective has been true for most every generation. We think we are last because we are the newest.

The eight billion people alive on our planet today represent a fraction of the 117 billion humans who have walked the earth. All of us have been in the same boat, wondering how we will make it through or who will save us from all of this. And God’s message to us remains constant: there is enough—enough food, enough room, enough love—if we will only catch each other. Amen.

Peace,
Milton