“We have taken nothing”
Today’s Gospel illustrates at once the emptiness and the futility of our lives, on the one hand, and the fullness and the purpose of our lives, on the other hand. It suggests something about what it actually might mean to be “all of one mind,”as the Epistle begins, and, then, concludes after showing us exactly that it would mean to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” It has altogether to do with our attitude and relation to Jesus and to his Word. “At thy word I will let down the net,” Simon Peter says, even in the face of the empty toil and fruitless labour of the night and in the awareness of our nothingness. It is about blessings even in the face of suffering, “if ye be followers of that which is good.”
Our lives are empty and futile in themselves. This is a hard, but necessary and humbling lesson, but it is the counter to our folly and our pretension. Only “at thy word” can we “let down the net” and begin to discover what ‘fulfillment and purpose’ might mean for us in our lives. It is altogether about our being with Christ. And what is our attitude to finding ourselves in the presence of God revealed in Jesus Christ? It is what Simon Peter says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”
This must trouble us. Why does he say this? Why doesn’t he rejoice in the sudden abundance of a rich catch of fish, the nets breaking with the fullness of the unexpected harvest? Because of a deep and profound spiritual insight, an insight which belongs to biblical wisdom. Simon Peter is aware of a power that is more than natural and more than human. He recognizes the reality of God in Jesus Christ. He gives expression to the deep biblical insight of the distance between God and man, the distance between God’s righteousness and truth and the unrighteousness and folly of human lives. The language is that of knowing oneself to be a sinner and therefore not presuming to stand on equal ground with God. It is the attitude of a humble yet philosophic piety. It is to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” You are in the presence of the Holy. It is not an entitlement. It is grace.
The Gospel story suggests that the real purpose of our lives and our lives as being fulfilled, to use the psychological language of our day, is about our being with Christ and acting in obedience to his word. “At thy word” is a phrase which echoes Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel, “be it unto me according to thy word,” which is the condition for the richness and the wonder of the Word made flesh, the Incarnation of Christ, for us. We can have no fullness apart from Jesus. “Without me, ye can do nothing,” he says (Jn. 15.5). We can only enter into the will and purpose of God in the order of creation, redemption, and sanctification. Our lives, in other words, find their purpose and meaning in his Word. This is, of course, the reason for the Church. It is not by accident that the call of Simon Peter follows from this encounter. “Fear not,” says Jesus to him, “from henceforth thou shalt catch men,” anticipating his statement in Matthew “that thou art Peter [Petros means rock], and upon this rock I will build my church” (Mt. 16.18).
It is the hardest thing for our age to accept. The secular culture, itself a product of Christianity, has forgotten its spiritual origins in its hostility to God and in its own emptiness, the culture of nihilism and atheism, because it has yet to rediscover the truth of God out of its own vanity and emptiness. “We have toiled all the night” but to what end? Is there anything substantial and eternal and absolute that can be said about our lives? What does it mean to put images, for instance, of eighteen–wheelers or fishing–rods or knitting-needles on modern day tombstones where there were once texts from Scripture and the Cross of Christ? There is the tragic irony of giving attention to the particular elements of our own lives at the expense of the particularity and the uniqueness of Christ, the God made man, who alone gives meaning to such things in our lives, who alone redeems them and us, who alone sanctifies our lives when we hold ourselves accountable to his sacred truth. We find the real meaning of our lives in the story of God written out for us in the life and death of Christ.
Our work and our play have their truth, to be sure, but only when they are brought into the company of Christ, only when our lives are seen as having an end with God. Then they are meaningful and fulfilling. We are all called, in one way or another, to “catch men” for God by being witnesses to the truth of Christ, by forsaking all the idols of our lives and by following him; in short, by the quality of our life in Christ.
These readings have an even greater poignancy and power when they are seen in conjunction with the great Apostolic Feast of SS. Peter and Paul. We meet in Petertide. Peter and Paul are the twin Apostles of the Christian Church who symbolise each in their own way the being of the Church and its missionary character. Both, in relation to the Gospel, experience the utter emptiness and nothingness of human endeavour understood on its own terms. Out of the experience of the betrayal and denial of Christ by Peter and the active persecution of the followers of Jesus by Paul, God makes something more and greater. To put it in another way, the more we assume our self-sufficiency and claims to completeness, the more we discover its opposite. This is not unlike Oedipus in Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex, discovering that what he thought he knew was false and only so coming to know who he is, and, in a kind of wonder that escapes us, taking full responsibility for his actions even in his unknowing.
This is at once tragic and heroic but it seems to me that we do well to embrace the logic and see in the conjunction of Peter and Paul a common spirit of recognising their own shortcomings. Peter thrice denies Christ, and Saul who became Paul persecutes Christ – and, yet, they become the princely foundations of the Church? How is that? What a wonderful dialectic which demonstrates the true sense of spiritual conversion. For both, the encounter with the Word and Son of God is utterly crucial. It is really their encounter with Truth, the truth of God without whom all our lives are nothing and nothing worth. What they encounter and discover, we encounter and discover. Such is the wonder.
Even the tension between Paul and Peter about circumcision alluded to in Acts (15) and explicitly mentioned in Galatians (2.19,20) is illuminating and shows the dynamic of the struggle to understand the radical meaning of Christ and his church. It cannot be restricted and limited to some at the expense of others; it is for all because as Paul says to Peter, “for I through the Law died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” It is a critical insight which belongs to the emergence of what will become the Christian church.
Only in our commitment to thinking the Word, can we begin to discover the purpose and end of our lives, our true fulfillment in Christ and in obedience to his living word. For, in spite of the empty terror of our lives and even the troubles of our experiences, “at thy word I will let down the net” means holding ourselves accountable to Christ and his Word, “sanctifying Christ as Lord in our hearts.” And that is everything especially when we know that …
“We have taken nothing”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity V in Petertide, 2021
Christ Church, Windsor (the reworking of an unpreached 2007 homily)