“Master we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing”
Nada, nothing, nihil, ouden. Simon Peter’s word captures the empty nothingness of our culture and our church. Nihilism is the default position of both. We have toiled or worked, everyone thinks and says. But to what end? Nothing. What does that mean? It means the discovery that our labours, our work, if measured in worldly, practical and economic terms, and in social and political terms, have really all come to nothing. There is only disappointment and uncertainty, fear and anxiety and a whole lot of anger and despair. Just consider the remarkable state of affairs politically, socially, and, economically, in England and the United States. Ask yourself what that is all about. Recognize that while there are many, many factors, much of the phenomenon in England about the European Union and in America about the presidential election is the profound disconnect between a great number of people and their ruling elites. I think that is a fairly obvious and rather banal observation, hardly controversial.
Take it one step further and ask why. The answer, equally obvious, is that there is an obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and no hope whatsoever especially for a younger generation or for anyone else for that matter. And no, they are not simply spoiled millennials. The folly of the entitlement culture is deeply entrenched and runs across generational lines whether it is about education or health care, to name but two concerns. The problem is a world caught between the largely unregulated market economy of neoliberal capitalism, on the one hand, and the leviathan of the modern market state, on the other hand. Either in collusion or in competition, they contribute to a world of vast inequalities of wealth and a denigration of human labour; in short, to a profound unease. We have begun, it seems, the summer of our discontent.
We face a world where humans increasingly do not matter and the more that people invest themselves in technology as the solution the more alienated and empty and inhuman our world becomes. There is literally nothing to live for in the dystopia that we have created and in which we are all implicated.
The problem is not simply capitalism or communism in whatever form or combination one might imagine. The problem is the levelling effect that the global market economies and states have which are not unlike the same despairing and desperate results of Stalin’s five-year plans and policies in Russia in the 20th century. They destroy what Edmund Burke called “the little platoons”, the various mediating institutions in our communities that contribute meaning and purpose to our lives, such as our churches, our schools, the volunteer associations and organizations. But only if we will them. That requires commitment and it means reclaiming a way of thinking that we have sadly and willfully lost. That is our challenge here. In other words there is something we can do. It is what the Gospel shows us. You want to have a life? Have it wherever you are. Let down your net but “at thy word”.
To speak of the nihilism of contemporary culture is to address a fundamental problem, a spiritual and intellectual problem that bedevils each and every aspect of our world including the church. The institutional church, after all, follows the same corporate blue-print as the multi-national corporations and the same social and political agendas as the secular culture. Everywhere in our fantasy world the vision of the good is material. It is about what you can get, partly through the illusion of your activity, your labour, and, partly through the expectation that life somehow owes you. The point is that the ethical and the spiritual are missing from the picture without which we are left empty and bereft. This is why this Gospel story along with the Epistle reading from 1st Peter is so important. It is a challenge and a counter to our ways of thinking which contribute to our increasingly impossible and unlivable world.
The Gospel names the human predicament rather precisely. “We have toiled all the night and have taken nothing”. You can sense the frustration, the utter sense of futility, the same sense of despair that belongs to so much of our world and day. There is in this confession, however, an assumption about human activity. The assumption is about our own activity. “We have toiled”. As if we should be able to work, even work hard, and be rewarded. But that is the assumption that the Gospel challenges. The Gospel challenges the very idea of material prosperity as the ultimate and highest good, which is not to say that it isn’t a good, and it challenges the idea that the good can be achieved simply and essentially on the strength of our activity. It can’t. The good news lies in Simon Peter’s first word, “Master”. That acknowledges another power, something more and greater than ourselves. And it leads to the moment of saving grace, namely, the openness to God. “Nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”. We are recalled to God’s Providence but only if we see the world as God’s world and not simply ours. This is, perhaps, the strongest message of Christianity in our confused and turbulent times.
The Gospel passage begins with the people pressing upon Jesus “to hear the word of God”, itself a telling image that acknowledges the empty nothingness of human life and the desire for something more, for the divine, for something which truly satisfies the longings of the human heart. It can only happen when we are caught up in the net of God’s love revealed in its fullness in God’s Word and Spirit. That ultimately means the church, not simply as a human construct that merely imitates and competes with the world and its power structures but the confessing church which looks always to God and seeks to draw us into the fellowship that God has created for us. For the church to be the church means to be defined by the Word, by the scriptures creedally understood, and not by its power structures. How can the church presume to speak to the injustices of the world if it refuses to address its own injustices?
The Word opens us out to the vision of our humanity as caught up in the net of divine love. It can only happen when we face our nothingness and look to God’s word and will. That is the challenge. Without it, nothing, nada, nihil, ouden.
“Master we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity V, 2016