LK tells us the crowd 'presses upon Jesus' to hear the
word of God.
Would that it were still so! The only people I see pressing upon anyone
these days
are those demanding a very black & white, cut & dried, in or
out,
selective word barely recognizable as God's!
Maybe I'm just jealous of
preachers who peddle that kind of religion & as a result have a
crowd
'pressing upon them'. But the God I've come to recognize
during life's journey doesn't fit the description of the One I hear
these others
peddling ( Richard, from North Carolina, in kindly responding to a
question I posed recently, included a quotation from Bp.Desmond Tutu:
'God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low'. That
hits the mark with me. If God didn't
have such low standards I
wouldn't be acceptable to him for a start.
That I am acceptable, in Jesus Christ, is evidence that what Jesus
teaches
when we 'press upon him' may be hard going, but it's always lovingly
& acceptingly inclusive.
The scene by the lake is idyllic, & always
portrayed that way. Yet when Jesus teaches, someone's nose is always
going to be put out of joint, their apple cart - or fishing boat -
going to be upturned. Rather than being nice, comfortable (except in
Isaiah's sense) & sustaining of the status quo, the genuine
Gospel is always challenging, re-shaping, re-directing...........What
we see happening here is the way it begins to bite into lives. It's
easy enough for Simon to humour Jesus by 'putting out a little from the
land' (I'll come back to that in a moment *) not at all a demanding
exercise. Many of us settle for that kind of 'discipleship'. Now what
Jesus tells them all when he teaches the crowd, we can only guess, but
did he ever teach without challenging? And once he starts telling
people who know all about fishing where the fish are shoaling, he's
moving the goal posts quite a bit.Yet it's Simon & his fellow
fishers who are out of their depth, not Jesus! If we press upon Jesus
seriously, we too find ourselves out of our depth till we take up
Jesus' call to serious discipleship. Simon's falling down at Jesus'
knees is itself both a first step & a sign of what lies ahead
for those who will follow Him.
Simon's admission that he has 'missed the mark' (Gk.) is in
itself a good first step for any of us to take. The question is, what
do we do next? It seems to me that for a moment at least, Simon feels
actually threatened by Jesus. A lot of us can / do feel threatened by
God. Seriously threatened. The easy way out is to tell him to 'Go away from me!' as Simon
tells Jesus here. But that doesn't change anything. I'm left missing
the mark in yet another way, & God still has the problem of what to
do about me. The only path to solving both these issues is to leave our
'boats' - whatever they happen to be in our case - leave everything
behind, & follow Him into deeper waters.
* Many years ago now I had a salutary lesson in how
easy it is to assume that people understand even seemingly obvious bits
of Scripture. I happened to wander unannounced into a Sunday School
class about this passage soon after being appointed to a parish. I
still haven't recovered from hearing the teacher telling the children
that when Jesus tells Simon to 'put out a little from the land', what
he meant was that the fish needed more room to swim about in!!! A
warning not just to me, but to all of us?
