Simon has spent a whole night failing at the one thing he knows how to do. Fishing was his trade, his father's before him, the work his hands understood best, and the night ended with empty nets. Into that exhaustion an itinerant preacher who has never hauled a net tells him to try again, in daylight, in deep water, the least likely conditions for a catch. Simon answers, 5"Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." He obeys on the strength of who is asking.
Jesus had already used Simon's boat as a pulpit, teaching the crowd from it while the fishermen washed their nets (5:1-3), so Simon had already lent his boat before he was asked for his obedience. What happens next overwhelms every boat. 6"They enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking." When his partners bring their boat to help, both boats begin to sink under the catch. It is abundance on a scale no one on that lake could have engineered.
Simon's response to the abundance is the turn of the passage. He falls at Jesus' knees, and Luke calls him Simon Peter for the first time: 8"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." A boatload of fish has just made him richer than he was that morning, and his first instinct is terror, the recognition that he stands too close to something holy for a man like him to survive. Isaiah felt it in the temple: "Woe is me! For I am lost" (Isaiah 6:5). Nearness to holiness exposes a person.
Jesus' answer refuses what Simon asked. Simon says depart, and Jesus draws nearer with the words that have echoed through this Gospel at each encounter with the divine, to Zechariah, to Mary, to the shepherds: 10"Do not be afraid." Simon's sin is not the barrier he assumes. What Jesus wants from a sinful man is partnership: "from now on you will be catching men."
The verb Jesus uses is rare. It means taking alive, capturing in order to rescue. Against the Old Testament's fishing imagery it matters more, since being caught in a net there is usually a picture of judgment, as when Habakkuk describes nations dragged up like fish (Habakkuk 1:14-17). Jesus turns the picture inside out. Simon has spent his life pulling creatures out of the water to their death, and Jesus calls him now to pull people toward life. The very skills that failed him all night, patience, teamwork, reading the water, casting wide, are about to be put to a use Simon never imagined asking for.
The response is total. 11"They left everything and followed him." The biggest catch of their lives sits on the shore, and Simon, James, and John walk away from it toward a call that promises no countable return.
Ask what abundance you would find hardest to leave sitting on the shore.
Prayer
Father, thank you for drawing nearer to us when we feel least worthy of your nearness, as your Son drew nearer to Simon instead of granting his request to depart. Teach us to obey at your word even when it makes no professional sense, and give us courage to leave behind whatever abundance we would rather keep than follow you. Make us, whatever our old trade, people who catch others for life. In Jesus' name, amen.