“Put out in the deep water, Simon,” Jesus says. “Try the
deep water.”
I don’t
know how big Simon’s nets were, but I imagine fishing in deep water with hand
nets is a lot more challenging than shallow water. There’s just more water to
cover, it’s more work, and, frankly, the fish tend to congregate more in the
shallows. “Try the deep water,” says Jesus. “Fish the deep water.”
It’s easy
to spend all our time focusing on the shallows with one another, barely
scratching the surface of who other people are. Most of our conversations take
place in the shallows. “How are you doing?” “Terrible weather out there, isn’t
it?” Keep casting your nets in the shallows and you know what you’ll get: the
same answers, the same general greetings. It will definitely be the same, but will it be enough?
Jesus
has a different idea. It requires more work and it calls us to venture further
into a place we fear. Jesus calls us to deeper water; water that is more
mysterious, water that is untested, water that can drown us as surely as it can
save us. Jesus calls us to throw our nets that way, into the unknown. This
calls to mind that famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”:
Two roads
diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I
could not travel both
And be one
traveler, long I stood
And looked down
one as far as I could
To where it
bent in the undergrowth;
But
of course the most familiar part of the poem is the ending:
I shall be
telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages
and ages hence:
Two roads
diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one
less traveled by,
And that has
made all the difference.
What
Frost discovered is what Jesus knew—that to take the road less traveled and to
fish in the deeper water are two ways of saying the same thing: We must venture
deeper into the unknown. We must risk losing our old self to find our new one.
Then, when we find ourselves most disconcerted we will understand that no
effort in the deep water will ever be in vain. To fish in the deeper waters is
to be authentic in faith, in friendship, in relationship. Jesus suggests it is,
simply, the only way to be.
There is something unquestionably
romantic about that Frost poem. Who among us doesn’t love the idea of taking a
road less travelled, of finding that place without hindrance, of discovering
who and what I really am by heading off into the unknown? We love the idea of it. But when it comes to
actually walking that path in our lives? Perhaps not. Especially as we age we
become more bound to things and places—that’s not bad; it can be quite good!—but
it also means we can fail to take risks we need to take. It becomes harder and
harder to step out in faith; it becomes harder to fish the deep water. The
shallow waters are always beckoning and they look like Cancun in January.
Jesus calls us all the same: Fish
the deep water. We’re all in need of somebody to fish us out of the deep from
time to time. The deep water is where we sometimes sit in pain. It’s where we
are vulnerable—most vulnerable—and it’s where we understand our need for
somebody to come fish us out. Vulnerability: that’s the defining characteristic
of the deep. It’s no surprise that we find ourselves in the deepest, most
meaningful relationships with people who we have struggled alongside and with
people who have been with us in the depths. When you’ve swam in the deep
together you are changed.
This is what it means to fish for
people; not to say some prayers, not to knock on doors; it is to swim in the
deep with them. Telling people about Jesus won’t stick unless you’re swimming
with them. It’s not enough to leave a bobber out in the deep water; you have to
work the nets yourself. But it’s hard to know what to do with that, because
most of us don’t have a simple choice of fishing shallow or deep. Most of us,
unlike Simon Peter, aren’t given so stark a choice. We have a harder job. We
have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. It’s the path of discipleship. And,
in that way, our choice is a lot like Simon Peter’s: Fish shallow or fish deep.
No comments:
Post a Comment