THERE have been in all times those who have deemed themselves
bound to distinguish the incident here narrated from that recorded in St.
Matthew (iv. 18) and St. Mark (i. 16-20). Thus Augustine finds the divergences
in the narratives so considerable, that he can only suppose the event told
by St. Luke to have first happened; our Lord then predicting to Peter that
hereafter he should ‘catch men,’ but not at that time summoning
him to enter on the work; he therefore with his fellows continuing for
a season in their usual employments; till a little later, as by the two
other Evangelists recorded, they heard the word of command, ‘Follow Me,’
which they then at once obeyed, and attached themselves for ever to their
heavenly Lord.
Some difficulties, yet not very serious ones, in bringing the two accounts
to a perfect agreement, every one will readily admit. But surely the taking
refuge at once and whenever these occur, in the assumption that events
almost similar to one another, and with only slight and immaterial variations,
happened to the same people two or three times over, is a very questionable
way of escape from embarrassments of this kind; will hardly satisfy one
who honestly asks himself whether he would admit it in dealing with any
other records. In the extreme unlikelihood that events should thus repeat
themselves a far more real difficulty is created, than any which it is
thus hoped to evade. Let us only keep in mind the various aspects, various
yet all true, in which the same incident will present itself from different
points of view to different witnesses; the very few points in a complex
circumstance which any narrative whatever can seize, least of all a written
one, which in its very nature is limited; and we shall not wonder that
two or three relators have brought out different moments, divers but not
diverse, of one and the same event. Rather we shall be grateful to that
providence of God, which thus sets us oftentimes not merely in the position
of one bystander, but of many; which allows us to regard the acts of Christ,
every side of which is significant, from many sides; to hear of his discourses
not merely so much as one disciple took in and carried away, but also that
which sunk especially deep into the heart and memory of another.
A work professing to treat of our Lord’s miracles exclusively has only
directly to do with the narrative of St. Luke, for in that only the miracle
appears. What followed upon the miracle, the effectual calling of four
Apostles, belongs to the two parallel narratives as well—St. Luke’s excellently
completing theirs, and explaining to us why the Lord, when He bade these
future heralds of his grace to follow Him, should have clothed the promise
which went with the command in that especial shape, ‘I will make you
fishers of men.’ These words would anyhow have had their propriety,
addressed to fishers whom He found casting their nets, and, little as they
knew it, prophesying of their future work; but they win a peculiar fitness,
when He has just shown them what successful fishers of the mute creatures
of the sea He could make them, if only obedient to his word. Linking, as
was so often His custom, the higher to the lower, and setting forth that
higher in the forms of the lower, He thereupon bids them to exchange the
humility of their earthly for the dignity of a heavenly calling; which
yet He contemplates as a fishing still, though not any more of fishes,
but of men; whom at his bidding, and under his auspices, they should embrace
not less abundantly in the meshes of their spiritual net.
But when we compare John i. 40-42, does it not appear that three out
of these four, Andrew and Peter certainly, and most probably John himself
(ver. 35), had been already called? No doubt they had then on the
banks of Jordan, been brought into a transient fellowship with their future
Lord; but, after that momentary contact, had returned to their ordinary
occupations, and only at this later period attached themselves finally
and fully to Him, henceforth following Him whithersoever He went. This
miracle most likely it was, as indeed seems intimated at ver. 8, which
stirred the very depths of their hearts, giving them such new insights
into the glory of Christ’s person, as prepared them to yield themselves
without reserve to his service. Everything here bears evidence that not
now for the first time He and they have met. So far from their betraying
no previous familiarity, or even acquaintance, with the Lord, as some have
affirmed, Peter, calling ‘Master,’ and saying, ‘Nevertheless
at thy word I will let down the net,’ implies that he had already received
impressions of his power, and of the authority which went with his words.
Moreover, the two callings, a first and on this a second, are quite in
the manner of that divine Teacher, who would hasten nothing, who was content
to leave spiritual processes to advance as do natural; who could bide his
time, and did not expect the full corn in the ear on the same day that
He had cast the seed into the furrow. On that former occasion He sowed
the seed of his word in the hearts of Andrew and Peter; which having done,
He left it to germinate; till now returning He found it ready to bear the
ripe fruits of faith. Not that we need therefore presume such gradual processes
in all. But as some statues are cast in a mould and at an instant,
others only little by little hewn and shaped and polished, as their material,
metal or stone, demands the one process or the other, so are there, to
use a memorable expression of Donne’s, ‘fusile Apostles’ like St.
Paul, whom one and the same lightning flash from heaven at once melts and
moulds; and others who by a more patient process, here a little and there
a little, are shaped and polished into that perfect image, which the Lord,
the great master sculptor, will have them finally to assume.
‘And it came to pass, that, as the people pressed upon Him to hear
the word of God, He stood by the lake of Gennesaret;’ by that lake
whose shores had been long ago designated by the prophet Isaiah as a chief
scene of the beneficent activity of Messiah (Isai. ix. 1, 2); and, standing
there, He ‘saw two ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were
gone out of them, and were washing their nets. And He entered into
one of the ships, which was Simon’s, and prayed him that he would thrust
out a little from the land. And He sat down, and taught the people out
of the ship. Now when He had left speaking, He said unto Simon, Launch
out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. This
He says, designing Himself, the meanwhile, to take the fisherman in his
net. For He, who by the foolish things of the world would confound the
wise, and by the weak things of the world would confound the strong, who
meant to draw emperors to himself by fishermen, and not fishermen by emperors,
lest his Church should even seem to stand in the wisdom and power of men
rather than of God—He saw in these simple fishermen of the Galilaean lake
the fittest instruments for his work. ‘And Simon answering said unto
Him, Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;’
but, with the beginnings of no weak faith already working within him, he
adds, ‘nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net’ —for these
are not the words of one despairing of the issue; who, himself expected
nothing, would yet, to satisfy the Master, and to prove to Him the fruitlessness
of further efforts, comply with his desire. They are spoken rather in the
spirit of the Psalmist: ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in
vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh
but in vain’ (Ps. cxxvii. 1); as one who would say, ‘We have accomplished
nothing during all the night, and had quite lost hope of accomplishing
anything; but now, when Thou biddest, we are sure our labour will not any
longer be in vain.’ And his act of faith is abundantly rewarded; ‘And
when they had this done, they enclosed a great multitude of fishes,’
so many indeed, that ‘their net brake, and they beckoned to their partners
in the other ship, that they should come and help them.’
It was not merely that Christ by his omniscience knew that now there
were fishes in that spot. We may not thus extenuate the miracle. We behold
Him rather as the Lord of nature, able, by the secret, yet mighty, magic
of His will, to guide and draw the unconscious creatures, and make them
minister to the higher interests of His kingdom; as the ideal man, the
second Adam, in whom are fulfilled the words of the Psalmist: ‘Thou madest
Him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things
under his feet, * * * the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea,
and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea’ (Ps. viii. 6,
8). Of all this dominion bestowed on man at the first no part perhaps
has so entirely escaped him as that over the fishes in the sea; but He
who ‘was with the wild beasts’ in the wilderness (Mark i. 13), who gave
to his disciples power to ‘take up serpents’ (Mark xvi. 18), declared here
that the fishes of the sea no less than the beasts of the earth were obedient
to his will. Yet since the power by which He drew them then is the same
that guides evermore their periodic migrations, which, marvellous
as it is, we yet cannot call miraculous, there is plainly something
that differences this miracle, with another of like kind (John xxi. 6),
and that of the stater in the fish’s mouth (Matt. xvii. 27), from Christ’s
other miracles;—in that these three are not comings in of a new and hitherto
unwonted power into the region of nature; but coincidences, divinely
brought about, between words of Christ and facts in that world of nature.
An immense haul of fishes, a piece of money in the mouth of one, are in
themselves no miracles; but the miracle lies in the falling in of these
with a word of Christ’s which has pledged itself to this coincidence beforehand.
The natural is lifted up into the region of the miraculous by the manner
in which it is timed, and the ends which it is made to serve.
‘And they came, and filled both the ships, so that they began to
sink.” It was a moment of fear, not indeed because their ships
were thus overloaded and sinking; but rather that now through this sign
there was revealed to them something in the Lord, which before they had
not apprehended, and which filled them with astonishment and awe. Peter
is the spokesman for all. He, while drawing the multitude of fishes into
his net, has himself fallen into the net of Christ; taking a prey, he has
himself also been taken a prey’ and now the same man as ever after, yielding
as freely to the impulse of the moment, with the beginnings of the same
quick spiritual insight out of which he was the first to recognize in his
Lord the eternal Son of God, and to confess to Him as such (Matt. xvi.
16), can no longer, in the deep feeling of his own unholiness, endure a
Holy one so near. He ‘fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, Depart from
me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. For he was astonished, and all
that were with them, at the draught of the fishes which they had taken.’
At moments like these all that is merely conventional is swept away, and
the deep heart utters itself, and the deepest things that are there come
forth to the light. And the deepest thing in man’s heart under the
law is this sense of God’s holiness as something bringing death and destruction
to the unholy creature. ‘Let not God speak with us, lest we die;’
this was the voice of the people to Moses as ‘they removed and stood afar
off’ (Exod. xx. 18, 19). ‘We shall surely die, because we have seen
God’ (Judg. X111. 22; cf. vi. 22, 23; Dan. x. 17; Isai. vi. 5; I Chron.
xxi. 20). Below this is the utterly profane state, in which there
is no contradiction felt between the holy and the unholy, between God and
the sinner. Above it is the state of grace, in which all the contradiction
is felt, God is still a consuming fire, yet not any more for the sinner,
but only for the sin. It is still felt, felt more strongly than ever,
how profound a gulf separates between sinful man and a holy God; but felt
at the same time that this gulf has been bridged over, that the two can
meet, that in One who shares with both they have already met. For
his presence is the presence of God, but of God with his glory veiled;
whose nearness therefore even sinful men may endure, and in that nearness
may little by little be prepared for the glorious consummation, the open
vision of the face of God; for this which would be death to the mere sinner,
will be the highest blessedness to him who had been trained for it by beholding
for a while the mitigated splendours of the Incarnate Word.
It would indeed have fared ill with Peter had Christ taken him at his
word, and departed from him, as He had departed from others who
made the same request (Matt. viii. 34; ix. 1; cf. Job xxii. 17), but made
it, as it needs not to say in quite a different spirit from his.
If Peter be this ‘sinful man,’ there is the more need that Christ should
be near him; and this He implicitly announces to him that He will be.
And first He re-assures him with that comfortable ‘Fear not,’ that
assurance that He is not come to destroy, but to save, which He bad need
to speak of so often to the trembling and sin-convinced hearts of his servants
(John vi. 20; Matt xxviii. 5, 10; Luke xxiv. 8; Rev. i. 17) And that Peter
may have less cause to fear, He announces to him the mission and the task
which He has for him in store: ‘From henceforth thou shalt catch men.’
In these words is the inauguration of Peter, and with him of his fellows,
to the work of their apostleship. Such an inauguration, not formal,
nor always in its outward accidents the same,—on the contrary, in these
displaying an infinite richness and variety, such as reigns alike in the
kingdoms of nature and of grace,—is seldom absent when God calls any man
to a great work in his kingdom. But infinitely various in its outer
circumstances, in its essence it is always one and the same.
God manifests Himself to his future prophet, or Apostle, or other messenger,
as He had never done before; and in the light of this manifestation the
man recognizes his own weakness and insufficiency and guilt as he had never
done before. He exclaims, ‘I am slow of speech and of a slow tongue,’
or ‘I cannot speak, for I am a child, or ‘I am a man of unclean lips,’
or, as here, ‘I am a sinful man, falls on his face, sets his mouth
in the dust, takes the shoes from oft his feet; and then out of the depth
of this humiliation rises up another man, an instrument fitted for the
work of God, such as he would have never been if his earthly had not thus
paled before God’s heavenly; if the garish sun of this world had not thus
set in him, that the pure stars of the higher world might shine out upon
him. The true parallels to this passage, contemplated as such an
inauguration as this, are Exod. iv. 10-17; Isai. vi.; Jer. i. 4-10; Ezek.
i-iii; Judg. vi. 11-23; Acts ix. 3-9; Dan. x.; Rev. i. 13-20.
‘From henceforth thou shall catch men.’ The Lord clothes
his promise in the language of that art which was familiar to Peter; the
fisherman is to catch men, as David, taken from among the sheep-folds,
was to feed them” (Ps. lxxviii. 71, 72). There is here double magnifying
of Peter’s future occupation as compared with his past. It is men
and not poor fishes which henceforth he shall take; and he shall take them
for life, and not, as he had hitherto taken his meaner prey, only
for death. So much is involved in the word of the original,’ which
thus turns of itself the edge of Julian’s malignant sneer, who observed
that ‘the Galilaean' did indeed most aptly term his Apostles ‘fishers;’
for as the fisherman draws out his prey from the waters where they were
free and happy, to an element in which they cannot breathe, but must presently
expire, even so did these. But the word employed—and we must presume that
it found its equivalent in the Aramaic—does with a singular felicity anticipate
and exclude such a turn. Peter shall take men, and take them for
life, not for death; quite another catching of men from that denounced
by the prophet Jeremiah (v. 26) and by Habakkuk (i. 14, 15). Those
that were wandering, restless and at random, through the deep unquiet waters
of the world, full of whirlpools and fears, the smaller falling a prey
to the greater, and all with the weary sense as of a vast prison, he shall
embrace within the safe folds and recesses of the same Gospel net;’ which
if they break not through, nor leap over, they shall at length be drawn
up to shore, out of the dark gloomy waters into the bright clear light
of day, that so they may be gathered into vessels for eternal life (Matt.
xiii. 48).
It is not for nothing that the promise here clothes itself in language
drawn from the occupation of the fisher, rather, for instance, than in
that borrowed from the nearly allied pursuits of the hunter. The
fisher more often takes his prey alive; he draws it to him, does
not drive it from him; and not merely to himself, but draws all
which he has taken to one another; even as the Church brings together the
divided hearts, the fathers to the children, gathers into one fellowship
the scattered tribes of men. Again, the work of the fisher is one
of art and skill, not of force and violence;” so that Tertullian finds
in this miracle a commencing fulfilment of Jer. xvi. 16, ‘Behold, I will
send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them.’ It is
true that these words are there rather a threat than a promise. It
is, however, quite in the spirit of the New Covenant to fulfil a threatening
of the Old, yet so to transform in the fulfilling that it wears a wholly
different character from that which it wore when first uttered. There is
now a captivity which is blessed, blessed because it is deliverance from
a freedom which is full of woe,—a ‘being made free from sin and becoming
servants to God,’ that so we may have ‘our fruit unto holiness, and the
end everlasting life’ (Rom. vi. 22). But the promise here might be brought
with more unquestionable propriety into relation with Ezek. xlvii. 9, 10,
and the prophecy there of the fishers that should stand on Engedi, and
of the great multitude of fish with which the healed waters should abound.
But if Christ’s Evangelists are fishers, those whom they draw to Him
are as fish. This image, so great a favourite in the early Church, probably
did not find its first motive in this saying of our Lord; but rather in
the fact that through the waters of baptism men are first quickened, and
only live as they abide in that quickening element into which they were
then brought. The two images indeed cannot stand together, mutually
excluding as they do one another; for in one the blessedness is to remain
in the waters, as in the vivifying element, in the other to be drawn forth
from them into the purer and clearer air. In one Christ is the Fish,
in the other the chief Fisherman. As Himself this great Fisher of
men he is addressed in that grand Orphic hymn attributed to the Alexandrian
Clement, in words which may thus be translated:
Fisher of mortal men.
Them that the saved are,
Ever the holy fish
From the wild ocean
Of the world’s sea of sin
By thy sweet life Thou enticest away.’
‘And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed
Him,’ or, as St. Mark has it, ‘left their father Zebedee in the ship with
the hired servants, and followed Him.’ Here let us quote Crashaw’s epigram:
‘Thou hast the art on’t Peter, and canst tell
To cast thy nets on all occasions well.
When Christ calls, and thy nets would have thee stay,
To cast them well's to cast them quite away.’
But what was that ‘all’ which ‘they forsook,’ some might
ask, that they should afterwards make so much of it, saying, ‘Behold, we
have forsaken all, and followed Thee: what shall we have therefore?’
(Matt. xix. 27). Whatever it was, it was their all, and therefore,
though it may have been but a few poor boats and nets, it was much; for
love to a miserable hovel may hold one with bands as strong and hard to
be broken as bind another to a sumptuous palace; seeing it is the worldly
affection which holds, and not the world; and the essence of forsaking
lies not in the more or less which is renounced, but in he spirit in which
the renunciation is carried out. These Apostles might have left little
when they left their possessions; but they left much, and had a
right to feel that they had left much, when they left their desires.
A word or two may fitly find place here upon the symbolic acts of our
Lord, whereof, according to his own distinct assurance, we here have one.
The desire of the human mind to embody the truth which it strongly feels
and greatly yearns to communicate to others, in acts rather than by words,
or it may be by blended act and word, has a very deep root in our nature,
which always strives after the concrete; and it manifests itself not merely
in the institution of fixed symbolic acts, as the anointing of kings,
the breaking of a cake at the old Roman marriages, the giving and receiving
of a ring at our own (cf. Ruth iv. 7, 8); but more strikingly yet, in acts
that are the free products at the moment of some creative mind, which has
more to utter than it can find words to be the bearers of, or would utter
it in a more expressive and emphatic manner than these permit. This
manner of teaching, however frequent in Scripture, (1 Kin. ii. 30, 31;
xxii. 11; Isai. xx. 3, 4; Jer. li. 63, 64; John xxi. 19-22; Acts xiii.
51) pertains not to it alone, nor is it even peculiar to the East, although
there most entirely at home; but everywhere, as men have felt strongly
and deeply, and would fain make others share in their feeling, they have
had recourse to such a language as this, which so powerfully brings home
its lesson through the eyes to the mind. The noonday lantern of Diogenes
expressed his contempt for humanity far more effectually than all his scornful
words ever would have done it. As the Cynic philosopher, so too the
Hebrew prophets, though in quite another temper, would oftentimes weave
their own persons into such parabolic acts, would use themselves as a part
of their own symbol; and this, because nothing short of this would satisfy
the earnestness with which the truth of God, whereof they desired to make
others partakers, possessed their own souls (Ezek. xii. 1-12; Acts xxi.
11). And thus not this present only, but many other of our Lord’s
works, were such an embodied teaching, the incorporation of a doctrine
in an act; meaning much more than met the natural eye, and only entirely
intelligible when this significance has been recognized in them (Matt.
xxi. 18, 19; John xxi. 19). The deeds of Him, who is the Word, are
themselves also, and are intended to be, words for us.
