Master Crafter
If you have a broken pipe, you will get help from a plumber. If you have an important tax question you consult your CPA. You would not ask your physician to install a breaker panel on your house. Nor would you ask your electrician for a knee replacement. We want our specialists to stay in their own lanes. Experience allows them to assess what we require.
Do you remember the story of when Jesus gave Simon Peter fishing advice? The rabbi told the fisherman when and where to put his net after a bad day out on the lake at Gennesaret. I am sure Simon gave it no second thought because as you know, men are so open to getting redirected in their area of expertise. If he was forty at the time Peter might have been casting nets for thirty or more years. This time, somehow. He was compliant:
Jesus got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." (Luke 5:3-5)
Jesus was teaching the crowds from the boat. Teaching is his craft. Perhaps his respect for him as his master gave Peter the patience to comply with his order to again launch and let down nets in deep water. That is when some wild things erupted.
This man from Nazareth, a carpenter by training in his youth, now a teacher in the things of God, knew just how to get the catch of the day, the catch of the ages:
When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon.
(Luke 5:6-10)
We could consider it a continuation of the calling Jesus had been issuing to the Disciples. He tells this team of fisherfolk that from now on they will be catching people. It is a sign of the radical shift in their lives. In their trade, the key tools are their boats and their nets. With this extreme haul, ordered by Jesus, the nets are breaking and the boats begin to sink. This signals the new vocation now captivating them: messengers for Jesus’s enveloping net, the kingdom of God.
In this scene, I am drawn to the spiritual, mystical feeling that overtakes Peter. Dethroned from that ego-seat from which we all reign in our lives, Peter can fix attention only on the one with power to call forth this impossible harvest of fish. It unnerves him. He feels small in his mortality, sinful before such holiness, humbled as a creature facing the Agent of Creation.
Notice, Peter is caught in a paradoxical pinch between attraction and trepidation, fascination and fear. Encountering the power of this ominous sign of divinity, Peter is struck with the awful majesty revealed and captivated at the same time with something attractive and compelling. The 20th-century German theologian, Rudolf Otto, from his Idea of the Holy would explain to us that the “two qualities, the daunting and the fascinating, now combine in a strange harmony of contrast.” He would note that Peter is in a holy crisis rocking the life he knows. He would say that the scene, for Simon Peter, “may appear to the mind as an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has at the same time the impulse to turn to it.”
Consider your calling. Have you been surprised with the presence, reality, and power of God in ways that have been both daunting and attractive? In these experiences we find ourselves stepping back to secure a safe distance and at the same time moving close, that we might dive into this beckoning power. Brave the invitation: trust the master, Jesus. Carpenter? Wandering teacher? He is infinitely more. Jesus is the jack of no trades, the master of all. He sawed and joined, planed, and smoothed all of creation into being. You know that God has a ministry and fulfilling life drawn up for you. Trust his invitation and step further into it today, now.