Catching Fish - Luke 4:1-11

I have been out of the blog for a while, about 3 weeks and it’s been absolutely insane in my life right now. Really, out of the blue I was offered a job out of state which I hemmed and hawed over but accepted, then bought a house, well trying to buy a house, I haven’t closed on it, am in the middle of planning a renovation of said house, getting the kids and things ready for the big move and enrolling them in school, and in the middle of all that am still working a full time job and went on vacation for 10 days. So it’s been a pretty wild ride and that’s one thing about Heavenly Father’s plans, he knows exactly how to let me know that there is a change coming, he tells me what to do in the perfect way, and he is so merciful.

Luke isn’t super specific about what happens in the time between when the Savior healed Peter’s mother in law and the miraculous catch of fish, just that he taught and healed people. Apparently His disciples went back to their lives and families and responsibilities because when Jesus “stood by the lake of Gennesaret, and saw two ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them, and were washing their nets. And he entered into one of the ships, which was Simon’s.” Now as glamorous as a life as a fishermen in ancient Israel appears, it was not the life of luxury that we imagine. From the exchange that happens we learn that fishermen “toiled all the night,” and that it was grueling physical labor as Jesus found them “washing their nets.”

There were many people following Jesus so He got into Simon’s ship and “prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land. And he sat down, and taught the people out of the ship.” I was told once that Jesus went out into the sea so that he could speak to all the people instead of just the little group that surrounded Him. I also hadn’t put it together before, but it appears that Simon stops washing his nets and take the Lord out on the boat. Let’s just recap that Simon had been up all night fishing, not the relaxing pole fishing, but the casting and retrieving nets fish, he was probably exhausted and wanted nothing more than to finish up his work and go home to rest. I know exactly what it’s like to be this exhausted, but I don’t think that I would have stopped everything to do something like push my boat out a little bit for someone to speak from. And his night had been disappointing as they “have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” It would have probably been stressful knowing that an empty night would have meant less food on the table for their families. Simon might have even been thinking, as I probably would have, that he was financially behind because of the empty catch the night before that he could have been doing something besides sitting in the boat listening to Jesus to make up for that economic loss.

When Jesus finishes teaching, Simon is probably ready to go home, but Jesus tells him, “Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.” Simon probably groaned a little bit inside knowing that going into the deep would have taken a lot of time, it wasn’t like “hey throw your nets over the side right here,” it was “go deeper into the water and throw in your nets.” We also know that Simon had just spent a ton of time and energy cleaning his nets so he would have to clean his nets all over again and then I’m sure that he would have been back out fishing again that night, so basically what the Savior would have been asking Simon is to give up his rest for that day and any other opportunity that he would have had to make money. It’s a big question to ask and it would have taken a lot of faith to do what he was asking, and as an expert fisherman, Simon was probably very wary of accepting the advice of a carpenter.