It was still early morning after a tiring night. Peter and his companions had caught nothing and were cleaning their nets before catching a wink of morning sleep. So many people had gathered around the place with the new sensation of the town, Jesus, who was healing the sick and casting out demons. He was there in the synagogue last Sabbath. Peter had listened to him. But what is he doing on a working day? As he looked inquisitively, with a friendly tone but one that commands sudden obedience, Jesus asked him to take the boat to the water, a little away from the shore. So there he was in the boat, preaching.
Peter listened to the preaching of Jesus with a certain disenchanted resignation. He was tired from the night’s work. He was hungry. He might have had a gut hatred for prophets who preach to empty stomachs! He had tolerated the Sabbath day sermons in the synagogue, but the preacher is here on a weekday in the middle of his work. When Jesus asked him to throw his net to the deep, he was probably suspicious, and in a bad mood! He might have imagined, “This man will be disproved in public for this stupid move. Catching fish is a different trade, not like preaching in the synagogue. Moreover, is he not a carpenter? What does he know about fishing? Does he take me for a fool? Don’t I know this sea more than this carpenter guy can ever know? I wonder if he knows even to swim!”
Anyways, Peter, giving a weak resistance to the suggestion of Jesus, throws the net to his all too familiar sea that would give no fish at that time in that place. Then, to his surprise, shaken to the core, Peter finds the net full. Suddenly fear dawned on him, like the prophets of the Old Testament who saw God face to face.
Peter was always a little clumsy in dealing with his emotions and often spoke out his heart with no guise. He asks Jesus to leave him. All his suspicious thoughts started honking in his head like unruly drivers in a traffic jam. With his sinful suspicious thoughts, he could not stand the holiness of Jesus! By the time he finished his confession, the carpenter had grown into a figure touching heaven and earth, into the Cosmic Christ. Jesus, instead of departing, made company with Peter a long-lasting company. Yes, Peter was in company with God.
A friend wrote, if Peter were a shrewd little businessman, he would have found money in that catch and cajoled Jesus into staying with him instead of following him to make large catches every day without toil and making a lot of money!
The God-experience of Peter in the middle of his work is a new mode of knowing God. Until now, such divine encounters were made in the temples, to the priests, or the prophets on Sabbath days. A God who gives his vision to an ordinary person on a weekday is a metaphor for a new way of encountering God, a metaphor of the God who walks out of the temple to be with his people.
We have here a plebian profile of God, one that matches the narratives of the kings who disguised themselves as ordinary people to learn the living conditions of their subjects, which most cultures have. You have these stories, even of the popes! I often think this obsession with kingdoms and kingship is at the root of our palatial churches and exquisite tabernacles. But, unfortunately, these symbols have obscured the vision of the Immanuel, God-with-us, symbols.
The plebian God who lives among his people during the ordinary days is a threat to my mundane, ungodly life. Keeping God pleased in the temple on the Sabbath and leaving him there at the end of the day, and returning to one’s own mundane life is a luxury that the spiritually privileged enjoyed. A God who lives with his people on weekdays is a threat; he comes to know my real self without the guards and facades of weekend devotions. Jesus encountered Peter in his daily routine. He discovers God who gets involved in his failures. He was thereafter a night of failures and futile work. Jesus takes him back to the very site of failures—to the sea—and makes him get a big catch from where he had returned in despair on that night of failures.
Peter was courageous enough to revisit the site of failures with the help of the Lord. It requires an extraordinary simplicity and trust in the Lord to face the failed past, and to become empowered by the Lord to reap returns from the very site of failures is a miracle.
Never before had Peter experienced a sensation like this—the success when God is with him. He had counted the too common failures and futile work of the weekday life acceptable since success was hard to come by. When the Lord comes into his weekday life, it suddenly turns out to be a successful day, a Sabbath day.