Christ Church

“Thou shalt catch men”

Today’s Gospel illustrates rather wonderfully the Epistle reading from 1 Peter. We meet within Petertide, in the Octave of St. Peter and St. Paul, the twin pillars of the Apostolic Church. In a way, today’s readings provide a kind of commentary on the Church and our life of Faith. “Be ye all of one mind,” the Epistle begins and ends with the command to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” And in between? A way of facing suffering and hardship.

The Gospel begins with the people pressing upon Jesus to hear the word of God. It ends with Jesus saying to Simon Peter “from henceforth thou shalt catch men,” and he and James and John, his fellow fishermen, “for[saking] all, and followed him.” And in between? Nothing but an image of the futility of our lives, it might seem. “Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing,” Simon Peter says to Jesus. Nothing. The point is clear, I think. The ultimate end and good of our humanity is not found in the riches and abundance of the world and in our human endeavours and labours. In and of themselves they are nothing. Something more is wanted and looked for.

The Epistle shows us what that something more is. It is our communion with one another through our communion with God, “having compassion one of another,” blessing one another because we are called to blessedness, to an end that is beyond the world. But does that mean forsaking the world? It might seem so from the conclusion of the Gospel. But that would be to overlook what lies in between the opening lines of the Epistle and the Gospel, each of them a commentary on our lives as lived in the world but not of the world. In the Epistle, it is loving as brethren, forsaking evil and doing good, seeking peace and following after it, being followers of that which is good even in the face of evil and suffering. And why? Because of Christ.

In the Gospel, it is in what follows Simon Peter’s statement of futility: “nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” The point is not that there is suddenly wealth and abundance materially speaking, “a great multitude of fishes” so much so that “their net brake,” an image of what is more than we can handle or need. God does provide, to be sure, but in different ways. No. The deeper point is that “apart from me ye can do nothing” (Jn. 15.5), as Jesus says. The deeper point is about our abiding in him and he is us in his body the Church. Apart from him we are nothing and our lives are empty and nothing.

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“He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light”

What light? The light which is Christ. Christ is “essential light” without whose light we are blind, and, like the parable in today’s Gospel, “hypocrites,” who lead one another astray, the proverbial “blind leading the blind.” It is an ancient commonplace about a critique of leadership, on the one hand, and about a self-critique of our own self-certainties and judgmentalism, on the other hand. But who is the “witness of that light?” John the Baptist. We stand on the cusp and eve of the midsummer’s festival of the Nativity of John the Baptist. In a way his witness marks the beginning and end of our summer reflections (at least here in the Maritimes!) with his Nativity tomorrow and his martyrdom, the Beheading of John the Baptist, in late August, itself another kind of nativity. Birth and death go together. As dying, we live.

There are only two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Church: the Nativity of Christ and the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. The latter coincides with the summer solstice, the longest day, and points us to Christ’s winter birth, the fons et origo of Christian life and faith, the longest night in which the greatest light is made manifest. John’s Nativity celebrates the purpose of his very being and so, too, of our lives. It is captured in our text: “He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light.” Along with the witness of Christ to himself and the witness of the Father to his only-begotten Son, there is the witness of human testimony as inspired by the Spirit. The whole life of John the Baptist is a witness to the one who comes who is greater than himself, the one for whom he is sent to prepare his way.

He points not to himself but to Christ but even more to Christ in us. Such is the necessity of the preaching of John the Baptist. He comes for the purpose of “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Yet John is not himself the forgiveness of sins; only the instrument of God preparing us for the coming and indwelling of Christ in us. This is what Paul in the Epistle reading from Romans, too, is reminding us: “the whole creation is waiting for the revelation of the sons of God” in whom we “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” That mercy is what Luke highlights at the same time as showing what stands in its way: our being blind to ourselves and to one another is about our being blind to God and his will and purpose for our humanity.

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