Don't Be Afraid: From Now You Will Fish For People

Luke is the careful one. He tells us at the start of his Gospel that he set out to write an orderly account after looking into everything closely (Luke 1:3), and you feel that care here. He is the one who slows this whole morning right down and lets us watch: the failed night, the washed nets, the sinking boats, Peter on his knees. The other Gospels mention Jesus calling fishermen by the lake, but Luke gives us the full scene.

The setting is the lake of Gennesaret, which is simply another name for the Sea of Galilee, a working freshwater lake ringed with fishing villages. Peter was not a visitor passing through. This was his trade, his living, the water he knew best. What I notice is how ordinary the pressure is at the start. A crowd has pushed in so tightly that Jesus needs a little space, and a moored boat with a tired owner becomes his pulpit. The kingdom of God arrives on a perfectly unremarkable morning, into a half-cleaned net and a man who would rather be in bed.

Read Peter’s reply slowly and you can hear two men in it. First the realist: “Master, we worked all night and caught nothing.” On that lake the night was the usual time to fish, so by daylight Peter had every practical reason to think the boat would come back empty again. Then the hinge: “but at your word I will let down the net.”

That small “but” carries everything. Peter does not suddenly believe the fishing will work. He simply decides the person sitting in his boat is worth one more haul. Luke also lets us watch a name shift. Through the early lines he is plainly “Simon”. Then, at the moment he falls down undone, Luke writes “Simon Peter” for the first time, the name Jesus will go on to build a church upon. And notice the odd shape of the miracle. It does not begin with Peter at his best. It begins with him admitting he has nothing. I find that quietly freeing. The catch came after the honest confession of an empty night, not before it.

This scene does not float free of the rest of the Bible. Long before, the prophet Jeremiah had pictured God sending for fishers to gather his people (Jeremiah 16:16), so the image of fishing for human lives was not dreamt up out of nowhere. Matthew records the same call in shorter form (Matthew 4:19), the line many of us first met as children.

What moves me is where Peter’s road actually goes. The man who said “Depart from me” because he felt too sinful to stand near Jesus is the same man who will deny him three times and then, by a different lakeside, be asked three times whether he loves him and told to feed the sheep (John 21). The call here is not a one-day high that fades by the weekend. It is the start of something God means to finish. Paul puts the principle plainly: the One who began a good work will carry it on to completion (Philippians 1:6). Jesus is not recruiting Peter for his strength on a good day. He is committing to him for the long haul, failures and all.

The detail I keep returning to is the order of events. Jesus climbs into the boat and uses it to teach while the morning is still a write-off, before a single fish has been caught. He asks for Peter’s tiredness and his ordinary kit before the miracle, not after it. Nothing impressive had happened yet, and the boat was already being used.

That steadies me more than I expected. I have had stretches where nothing seemed to take, a piece of work I prayed over for years that went nowhere I could see, and the quiet temptation is to assume I am useless until results arrive. This passage cuts across that. My unspectacular week is not disqualified from being useful to him. Peter’s other instinct steadies me too, the way he tries to back off precisely when he feels his own unworthiness most sharply. I know that reflex well. When I am most aware of my failures I want distance, not nearness. The reply, though, is gentle and the call comes anyway. He does not wait for me to clean myself up first.

• Where in my life have I “worked all night and caught nothing”, and what would it mean to try once more “at his word” rather than on my own reading of the odds?
• Peter’s first reaction to grace was to feel his unworthiness and pull back. When I sense that in myself, do I let “Don’t be afraid” reach me, or do I keep my distance?
• They left everything after the best catch of their lives, not the worst. What good thing might I be holding that he is gently asking me to leave in order to follow him?
• Whose name is in my boat, the person I have half given up praying for, that this story invites me to keep fishing for?

If you are reading this at the end of a season that caught nothing, you might sit a while with other passages for how you feel, or read on in Luke.