Magnetic fishing

John 21.1-15
Our story tells how Peter and his friends went fishing with something called a drag net, or a seine net as it’s properly called. This is a very ancient way of fishing. There are pictures of people doing it in tomb paintings in Egypt that were created 5,000 years ago. And it’s the way that people used to fish until very recently in the Sea of Tiberias, or the Sea of Galilee as it’s better known today.

The net has floats tied all the way round the top to keep it on the surface of the water, and weights tied all the way round the bottom to make it sink. The crew start lowering the net into the water and the boat sails in a big circle until it’s created a purse made of net. Then the crew use winches to gradually make the space inside the net smaller and smaller until they can haul it on board.

But in the time of Peter and the other disciples who went fishing on Lake Galilee the boats didn’t have winches. So if they caught the fish the modern way it must have been very hard work. Apparently it takes about an hour to lower the net, haul it back in by hand and sort the catch. So if you go fishing all night you can do this about eight times. John says the crew had cast their net six or seven times but each time they didn’t catch any fish at all, until they saw a stranger standing on the beach who called out to them to try casting their net one last time.

He told them to cast the net on the other side of the boat because it’s no good trying again in the same stretch of water where you already know there aren’t any fish. This time they caught so many fish that they couldn’t haul the net in and they had to pull it to shore behind the boat. 

When the boat got close enough to the beach half the crew would normally have jumped out holding one end of the net and waded ashore. Then the boat would have have sailed alongside the beach for a short distance, with the rest of the crew holding on to the other end of the net until the boat could turn back to shore again and trap the fish between the net and the beach. When they reached the shore, the rest of the crew would have jumped out holding their end of the net and the two teams would have hauled the net onto the beach just like the stick people are doing in the picture. But John says they didn’t need to do this because Peter got back into the boat and hauled the whole net onto the beach all by himself. He must have been a tough kind of guy!

The fish won’t jump over the net while it’s being hauled in. Instead they always try to swim under or around it, so the catch has to be landed very quickly or too many of them will escape. On this occasion Peter did pretty well because 153 large fish were caught.

It must have been very annoying when Peter jumped off the boat. His friends must have thought he was leaving them to do all the heavy lifting even though going fishing had been his idea! But another of the disciples had realised that the stranger standing on the beach was Jesus, because in one of his stories Jesus had described exactly what was happening now. 

Jesus had said, ’The kingdom of heaven is like what happens when a net is thrown into a lake and catches all kinds of fish. When the net is full, it is dragged to the shore, and the fishing crew sit down to separate the fish. They keep the good ones, but throw the bad ones away.’

In other words, Jesus wants all his followers to go fishing, but for people rather than fish. The performance on the sea shore was just enacting the story that the disciples had heard him tell 

So here are the fish. [1] They come in all shapes and sizes, and different colours too. When John says that there were 153 large ones he doesn’t mean that smaller fish weren’t included in the catch or that they were discarded. Notice, though, how one fish is swimming the other way from the rest of the shoal. There’s always one, isn’t there!

When Jesus talks about going fishing for people, he doesn’t mean in an aggressive or uncaring way. He doesn’t mean that we should only go after the big fish, the important people, the movers and shakers, and discard the minnows. Nor does he mean that we should haul in our catch so quickly that we prevent anyonet from getting away. If people want to slip through the net, or swim past it, that’s fine by him.

His message is a bit like a magnetic. It won’t attract everyone, only those who are drawn to things like, love, compassion, fairness, kindness, openness and generosity. If those values appeal to you then you’re ready to be caught by Jesus and his friends.

And if we are caught by the message, he won’t have us for breakfast - like the unfortunate fish in the story - but he will come and share life with us, like the Risen Jesus shared that fishing trip and made it worthwhile soon after the first Easter Day.

[1] Image © rootsontheweb.com