I have to begin with something that I don’t tell very many people because even now at my age it’s too embarrassing. I can’t swim. Never been able to and still can’t. It was a source of traumatic embarrassment in middle school and high school and even college, and it’s a little embarrassing even now. I had lessons at a variety of ages and still had the unmistakable feeling of sinking like a rock. It’s amazing how vividly you can remember being humiliated in 7th grade gym almost 60 years after the fact, although of course most of the time I successfully push all that down under the surface, and get engaged with all the other things that have gone so well in my life. But you know sometimes even now I wonder what’s really going on. I wonder if maybe I just decided I am the kind of person who can’t swim and doesn’t want to, instead of it really being impossible. I wonder how much of my still not swimming is my thinking no, that’s not meant for me.
This might not seem like a related question, but I think it is: What does it mean in this reading when Jesus tells these fishermen he wants to call as disciples to go out into the deep water? In one sense, maybe it means he just thought there might be fish there. Apparently the Lake of Gennesaret is the kind of place where until fairly recently it was actually possible to see schools of fish from the shore, if you were standing in just the right place. But I wonder if that deep water is also a wonderful image that means that he is trying to get them to go somewhere they don’t think it makes any sense for them to be. They’re fishermen, they just spent the whole night working, they know what they’re doing, they know where they have success and where they don’t, and this makes no sense for them. And the words “deep water” sound like somewhere new you don’t go unless you have to.
We can identify with this. We’re all resistant to the idea of being sent out somewhere we are not comfortable, the place we are pretty sure is not right for us. And this happens because of two very human characteristics that affect all of us.
First, we have all drawn lines around our lives that define the way we are and the way we live and what we are willing to do and what we believe about the world. Like these fishermen, who think they know how this fishing business works, we know what works for us, and even if it’s not working great, we are comfortable in the zone we know. We build our security around the things we think we know for sure, and after a while it’s hard to change us, even when we get invited to something new that maybe is where we are being called next. It seems that God is never really finished trying to do this kind of invitation with any of us.
And there is a second reason we don’t follow these invitations, and sometimes we don’t realize this is what we’re thinking but it is: We don’t think we’re worthy of whatever it is we’re being offered by God. With Peter, this overwhelming catch of fish is physical evidence of what Jesus is offering him, just more and more abundance, a new life that is richer and deeper than the one that he had, and yet Peter’s reaction is: Go away, take all this abundance away, I am a sinful man. Jesus doesn’t say he isn’t sinful. He says he shouldn’t be afraid. That sinfulness doesn’t change what Jesus wants to give him. It turns out Peter is worthy enough for all of this.
What does it mean for us to go into deep water? If you believe that God is constantly desiring to reveal something to us, then we are always being called to something that might bring us closer to God, even though it seems like something that we are not quite ready for. Just to take a few examples, which may or may not be your example. We don’t think we are the kind of people who have the patience to be with the chronically ill, and yet we might be that person if we let God convince us, and we might even find God there. We don’t think that we could seek a deeper and more joyful experience of prayer, that’s not us, but maybe it is us now. We are afraid of situations where we would leave aside a comfortable role where we know what we’re doing for one where we would feel like a newcomer, we’re afraid of taking on a problem of injustice, because they are messy and don’t always work out and we have to trust other people. All that might put us somewhere where we would feel like we could sink and fail, we’d feel unqualified and insecure.
These fishermen, though, saw in this huge catch of fish the sign that God always has more available to us, more love, more places where we experience him and know him more deeply. We are never at the limit of what God can offer us. If we decide that we already have everything God has to give us, we are ignoring this huge boatload of fish in the gospel.
Jesus wants these new disciples to bring other people to this experience of overwhelming grace that Jesus has given them. That’s going to be what they do for a living, if you can call it a living. They are now headed off into deep water permanently, but they seem to understand that what they are leaving behind is over, they even left behind all the fish. They probably are not 100% sure where they are going, but they know that they will be closer to the abundance of God by doing it.
We may have somewhere like that to go too, some place where we will open ourselves up to what God wants for us next. We may not feel ready for it, but ultimately, the boatload of fish is a sign that what God wants us to have is a lot more than we imagine.