Progressive reflections on the lectionary #52

Luke 5:1-11 The miraculous catch (this is where the trouble really starts)

Photo by Ryan Loughlin on Unsplash

Why on earth is there so much fish and fishing in the gospels? For a day labourer, a jobbing builder from the hill town of Nazareth Jesus spends a strange amount of time (the bulk of his ‘ministry’) mucking about with fishermen when he might otherwise have been on building sites. Why?

In our reading this week, the story of the ‘miraculous catch’ (a story that only Luke includes in the synoptic Gospels, but John has as a ‘post resurrection’ tale) Luke finally recruits some disciples for Jesus. He’s left it a little later in the narrative than his primary source, Mark, would have preferred, but Luke likes a detailed yarn.

To begin with, though, the story is not about the disciples - it’s about a boat. Jesus’ teaching is so popular that a crowd has built up and he needs a boat from which he can teach. Luke doesn’t say what he was teaching, just that it was ‘the word of God’. Our only clue, then, is the location. It was something that people by the sea of Galilee wanted to hear.

Who is the great villain of the gospels? It’s Herod Antipas of course. “That fox” as Jesus called him, the guy who had John the Baptist executed for calling out the political scheming that lay behind his outrageous marriage to the Hasmonean princess Herodias. The great villain of the gospels is not a disembodied spirit, it is not a fallen angel as some would prefer. It is, in fact, a malign power, but it’s a malign power with a name and a face. And a beard. Herod Antipas - the man who wanted more than anything else to be: “King of the Jews”.

It was around 18CE that Antipas made the first of his two major political moves and began the construction of Tiberias, his new capital, on the shore of the sea of Galilee. It’s kind of a weird thing to do, to build a new capital city when you’ve already got a perfectly good one, Sepphoris, known for its impressive Roman architecture and rich cultural life: “The ornament of all Galilee”. But strategy sometimes demands weird moves, and Herod made his by setting up a new home by the lake.

What spurred on the move from the hillside to the lake? Bill Clinton knew, back in the 1990s. “It’s the economy stupid,” a phrase coined by strategist James Carville that would lead Clinton to victory over the incumbent George Bush. The economy is everything, get that right, and you will win.

Back in the early years of the first century Herod Antipas, the man who wanted to be King of the Jews, had an economy problem. He needed to raise more money, and he had already squeezed the hillside peasants pretty hard. But just twenty or so miles away from Sepphoris lay a fruit ripe for the picking: a lake full of fish, being fished, inefficiently, by small boats full of hand-to-mouth fishermen. Imagine what could happen if that resource could be tapped, imagine what could happen if the lake was commercialised. Imagine the fish factories, the salting plants, the export trade… Cha-ching! This would impress Rome.

Antipas’ dad, Herod the Great (The previous King of the Jews) had focussed his attention on the south, Romanisation had taken hold around Jerusalem, but not so much in Galilee - until now. Now Antipas was digging deep in order to make his mark. If he was going to get a Caesar to declare him ‘King of the Jews’ instead of the embarrassing title ‘Tetrach’ as Augustus had given him (oh the shame), then surely it would be Tiberius, the man he had been cultivating. Naming the new capital after him wouldn’t hurt his cause - in fact, why not the whole lake? Lake Tiberias - it has a certain ring to it.

As Galilee moved toward the third decade of the the first century the place was changing rapidly, it was becoming Romanised. As the city of Tiberias took shape, so Antipas’ tax coffers began to bulge. The whole lake, newly named after the emperor, came to symbolise the exploitation system of the time. As such it was the obvious place for Jesus to take his radical message. Unlike conservative Nazareth where, Luke says, his old friends just weren’t up for this radical return to prophetic Judaism, the heavily taxed, exploited, lakeside people were ready to hear. So many of them were ready to hear him, in fact, that he had to get on a boat and get off shore a bit.

In his story of the recruitment of the first disciples Luke indulges in one of his own parables, that of the miraculous catch. Under the Antipas system these oppressed fishermen were suffering, they had nothing. They were destined to starve. In the ‘kingdom of God’, on the other hand, the radical message that called people back to the old Israelite ways, they would have abundance. Stay part of the exploitation system, aka the ‘sinful’ life (“I am a sinful man” confesses Simon), and the results are obvious. “Do not be afraid;” proposes Jesus by way of an alternative, “ from now on you will be catching people.”

Jesus and John the Baptist were not people out of context. Herod Antipas isn’t a bit part player in the gospels. The story was never about one catch of fish.

“When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him,” concludes Luke. There’s no rejoicing at the amazing catch, no great disbursement of the fish, no messages to family or friends. The story was never about that.

Here and now, Luke sets out, the popular revolt against the injustice of Antipas’ reign really took hold. Here, on the shores of the lake, the Jesus movement - the ‘kingdom of God’ movement as he might have preferred, got rolling. It got rolling among the over taxed and exploited fishermen, among those who needed to hear some good news. It got rolling among those who could now see that ‘King of the Jews’ was indeed a meaningful title.

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Progressive Reflections On the Lectionary are intended to be useful to people who preach, or are interested in why on earth anyone still reads the Bible.