Mary decided to read the Bible in a new way. She had studied scripture as a biblical scholar. She had been a person of faith, and a faithful church member, for decades. She knew her Bible. And she knew she needed some different. “I’m setting out to read the Bible confessionally…” she wrote, “to read the Bible as if our lives depended on it; reading with expectancy and hope.” This desire to read the Bible confessionally arose from feeling a sense of “holy discontent.” She sensed, for herself and others, that “somewhere beneath our well-nourished exterior, our successful, busy lives, our abundance and achievements, there are some ways in which we are starving . . . hungry, almost desperately hungry for something more.”1
A confessional reading of scripture expects to meet Jesus here amongst the lines inscribed so long ago. A confessional reading of scripture anticipates Jesus meeting us here in the encounter of our hearts, minds, lives and dreams – our whole selves – with the stories that shape our faith. And such a confessional pursuit seems apt for the start of Lent. What is the journey of the next forty days if not a sojourner into the desperately hungry parts of ourselves expecting to encounter Jesus, whose body is our nourishment? And surely holy discontent is a proper mindset for this first Lenten Sunday, unnerved as we are by the week’s violent headlines, anxious for a different way yet feeling helpless amid the shootings, murders, lost-ness, and grief. We are starving for the saving power of God. What might we experience, then, in the sacred meeting between our hungry selves and the day Jesus approached a company of fishermen, inviting them to follow.
Simon Peter is the one who grabs Jesus’s attention. You know the apostle Peter: head of the church, lead disciple, eyewitness to the transfiguration and to the empty tomb, miracle-worker, and evangelist who breaks barriers between Gentile and Jew. This is Peter: leader, healer, spokesperson, missionary par excellence.
And you know the other sides to Peter: a fisherman of modest means and an unassuming background, a disciple so anxious to make a good impression that he sinks when trying to walk on water and blurts out “surely you won’t die” when Jesus speaks about the crucifixion. This man with a rural Galilean accent, who confesses “You are the Messiah” at one moment and “I do not know the man” at another. This, too, is Peter: a stumbling disciple, a healer himself needs healing, the spokesperson will be undone by fear.
Peter stands as a prototype for every disciple. His trust mingles with doubt. His courage can be compromised by self-survival instincts. His wandering life mirrors ours. To enter his story is to receive a front-row seat into the contours of discipleship, the realities of being human, and the way Jesus meets us along the way.
Early in his ministry Jesus comes to the Sea of Galilee. Peter is working there along the shoreline, cleaning out the boat and tiding up the nets after a fruitless night of fishing. Jesus asks to borrow his boat, recruiting Peter to set off once more into the sea and provide Jesus a better vantage point for his teaching. When the lecture is over, surely Peter is ready to be done for the day, to finish his clean-up, and to rest before the night fishing begins again. Jesus, who had asked for the boat borrow now makes a command. Go out further, into the deep and let down the nets. Peter, the experienced fisherman, knows the folly of such a request. It is the heat of the day. The fish clearly are not biting. The nets are heavy, cumbersome and difficult to manage. Why let them out again?
Despite his objections, Peter obeys. What compels him to do so? Is it the look in Jesus’s eyes or the authority of his voice? Is the prior meeting of Peter and the Lord, when healing happened to Peter’s mother-in-law that enables him to trust in the unusual? Was it hope lying dormant in Peter’s chest, ready to be awakened by a voice of love. Maybe life would not come up empty again. When the net goes down, the fish swim in. What had been empty is now overflowing. It is a burst of grace, a sign of God’s presence, a signal to Peter that the command to go deep – and the command Follow Me soon to come – comes from the Son of God, who, when his life meets ours, changes empty into overflowing, fruitless night into a mercy-filled morning.
Has it ever happened to you? You have been at it all night, or all year, laboring for your survival as best you can, torn between hope and desperation. Day after day you plan, prepare, and work. You have prayed, read your Bible, come to worship, asked for help and still nothing happens. You come up empty. Until the day that God appears, and the sparse spaces are filled with God’s loving presence. During one difficult season in my life, I worked and I prayed. I planned, adjusted, and worshiped. And still I cast out my dreams and what I pulled back felt empty. Late one night in mid-December, I was driving home and a carol came on the radio: “O Come All Ye Faithful” sung in German by a boys’ choir. Somehow the purity of the voices, the deep of the night, and the twinkling of the stars rushed into my empty heart, flooding the space with love. To meet Jesus is grace. It is to see the love that made the universe wrap its power above, beneath, and around us.
Peter’s reaction to the overflowing nets is not a thank you or a praise God, but a confession. “Get away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” The river of love, designed to wrap around him, magnifies his guilt and enlarges his sense of unworthiness. What prompts his reaction? Did the chasm between God’s holiness and his messiness become insurmountable? Galilean fishermen are ordinary, oft-overlooked laborers. Did he think, “I am not good enough, smart enough, courageous enough to be sought by Jesus, to be called as one who fishes for people.”
Thomas Merton says, that “our discovery of God is, in a way, God’s discovery of us. We only know God in so much as we are known by God.” Sought by Jesus, Peter sees himself more clearly. If we are emptied by God, the grace has space to rush in. What if this exchange on the seashore is less about a confession of sins than a confessional posture. Peter says to God, in essence, “Lord, I am realizing now that I am meeting you. I am seeing you. More importantly, I am being seen by you, claimed by you, called by name into life.”
Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, has written extensively about the history of Eastern Europe, focusing upon the policies enacted by Hitler and Stalin during the 1930’s and 1940’s, policies that created the brutal violence in Poland and Ukraine. His book, titled Bloodlands, offers an achingly painful, accurate name for the blood shed on those lands. After recounting the millions of lives lost, he concludes, “the key to both Nazism and Stalin’s regimes was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human. They turned people into numbers. And it is the work of scholars to seek out the numbers and put them in perspective. And it is for humanist to turn the numbers back into people.”2
In an article drawing from Snyder’s work, Walter Brueggemann suggests he church has a role to play in turning numbers back into people.3 This is Jesus’s work, to see, claim, and know each of us in our specificity and to cherish us. Jesus’s work is, by extension, our work as his body. As we face the world’s brutality this Lenten season, we do so bearing the grace of God that flows ceaselessly through and around us. May we cast out Jesus’s power to know, to name, and to claim persons as people, enabling their encounter with Christ through our lives. Amen.