Fishing for People

Read Matthew 4:12-23

Have you ever found yourself sitting in a room with a loud clock ticking? When you have something interesting and engaging to do, you forget that the clock is ticking and after a while don’t notice it at all. If, on the other hand, you are bored, the ticking clock can be very irritating. This illustrates the difference between two kinds of time for which the ancient Greeks had two different words: Chronos and Kairos.

Chronos gives us “Chronology” in English. It is boring time. Each second is identical and meaningless. Time drags on endlessly. Time can feel like a prison. When one is awake at night worrying about the next day, the bedside clock seems to stay motionless.

Kairos time is interesting time. In 1985 during some of the worst years of South Africa’s Apartheid past a group of church leaders wrote the “Kairos Document” which criticized the Apartheid State and attacked the theological underpinnings of the Apartheid heresy. It was a decisive moment in history. Within a year thousands of signatories had made this document one of the most important church documents ever published in South Africa. It was called Kairos because it recognized the moment in history that was pregnant with possibility and hope but that needed decisive action.

That’s what Kairos is all about: powerful meaning and critical decision. When last did you have a Kairos moment in your life?

Another kind of Kairos time is our devotional time, refreshing time; for me that’s walking on the mountain or riding my motorbike.

How many of you reading this enjoying fishing? For those of you who do, fishing can be Kairos time because it is time to pause and refresh oneself, to reflect on life and even make decisions that are not always possible in the humdrum of life. Chronos time is not good for making decisions about life the universe and everything.

For me fishing has always been more like Chronos time: sitting on my bum, waiting for something to happen (usually not catching a fish).

For the fishermen in our story today, fishing was Chronos time, but not for the same reason as it is for me. Fishing in those days was hard work. Not only that, Peter and his colleagues lived at the bottom of the feeding chain that was the Galilean fishing industry. This is not so different from industries today where those who do most of the work receive the least benefits from the industry. Read Sarah’s description of what these fishermen faced everyday.

When Jesus called Peter and the others it was a Kairos moment: an opportunity to leave the Chronos time of drudgery and worry behind them.

It is interesting the metaphor that Jesus chooses to use in calling them. They will now become fishers of people. If someone was offering you a new life, why use the old life as a metaphor for the new? Rather a poor selling strategy. But it worked. Clearly these fishermen had had enough and were looking forward to change. Jesus offered the hope of the change and the freedom to realize it. But perhaps hidden in his metaphor is the reality that the Freedom Jesus offers is not like the freedom offered so often in various worldly frameworks…

There is something really important about this freedom that Jesus offers that is not always fully appreciated by Christians. It seems to me to be hidden in the metaphorical use of fishing when Jesus calls the first disciples.

Firstly, all fishing is hard work. Fishing for people would be no less difficult and confounding as fishing for fish. The only difference would be the result. The one kind of fishing supported the grinding machine of the fishing industry and hence an oppressive society that crushed the spirits of ordinary people. The other kind of fishing promised real systemic change, dignity and freedom.

Secondly, Christian freedom is not individualistic freedom. Most of the political philosophies of human history have sought human freedom as an ideal, though sometimes human freedom has been restricted by the freedom of others, particular those who end up with more freedom than the hoi polloi. For most westerners human freedom is chronically individualistic and sadly reduced to the freedom to consume.

Christian Freedom is by no means individualistic and can sometimes appear to be anything but freedom. Christian Freedom is intimately connected to relationship. One cannot be truly free without others. And so while Christians have often been at the forefront of freedom movements, they are also the first to sacrifice their own freedoms. Take for example those who take vows of obedience and chastity yet work tirelessly for human rights. (The same example is found in many faith traditions incidentally – think of the Buddhist monks who were recently killed in Burma).

So too we find a strange contradiction in Paul’s writings to the churches of the ancient Mediterranean. Take for instance the place of women. On one hand “there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, man or woman” (Galatians 3.28) but women should not speak in church and must wear head coverings. What we are reading is the result of a long process that is not recorded in writing in the Bible but attested to by other sources as well as the logic of the end result. Paul feels the need to curtail the agitation of the women in his congregations because they are aggressively claiming the freedom he has proclaimed in the Gospel!

Some have argued that Paul was unaware of the consequences of the freedom he proclaimed. On the other hand, if Christian freedom is intimately connected to relationship it seems more likely that Paul is concerned with social transformation and sees revolution as counterproductive to that aim. Revolution makes enemies of former masters. Transformation makes equal friends of former enemies. There is an inherent danger in the freedom that the Gospel proclaims, in that people once oppressed may take what is legitimately theirs but at the expense of reconciliation.

Christian freedom is more about “freedom for” than about “freedom from”. We are certainly free from all forms of oppression and indignity but we are freed primarily so that we can bring freedom for others – especially those who are our enemies.

Jesus, our supreme example, had a legitimate claim to the Kingship of Israel – one he could have taken had he allowed the fermenting revolution to explode on the night of his arrest. But he chose not to take what was rightly his own. He did this because revolution simply replaces one evil with the next. Transformation calls on oppressed and oppressor to make the difficult journey of reconciliation together. For this he was prepared to die and did.

Fishing for people is indeed profoundly difficult work; much harder than any other life pursuit. Like the disciples though, it seems to me so much more rewarding than remaining part of the system. Give me Kairos over Chronos any day!