The Fourth Sunday before Lent, 6 February 2022
According to the Roman statesman-philosopher Cicero, "the most shameful occupations are those which cater to our sensual pleasures: ‘fish-sellers, butchers, cooks, poultry-raisers, and fishermen’.” To me, this makes Cicero sound a bit of a snob; the sort of man with a weekend home in Padstow where at Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant he will enjoy a voguish platter of oysters, langoustines and sashimi, and then repair to the Harbour Inn where he’ll turn up his nose at a group of trawlermen jostling alongside him at the bar, their oilskins dripping fresh from their day’s catch. [1]
Fishermen are the working class men of the seas: forgotten, exploited, unsupported, reviled; fishermen are the peasant farmers of the oceans: eking out their precarious living at the mercy of the elements and the unpredictable ways of the creatures they harvest. Set adrift at the whims of governments; tossed and blown by unremitting market forces.
Many who work in UK waters today are share fishermen: crew-members of fishing boats with no contract of employment whose pay is a share of the profits or gross earnings of the boat. [2] Similar, then, to the families of Simon and Zebedee who typically worked the waters of Galilee together as small-scale collectives or cooperatives (‘partners’, as today’s reading translates it). [3]
Just as today’s fishermen operate in a world of fishing quotas, set by regulators on behalf of governments, which can be bought, sold and leased, so also the clannish cooperatives of Simon and Zebedee were indebted to tax brokers who disbursed fishing leases in their local harbours, whose revenues were in turn handed over to the chief tax collectors for the king. Then, as now, the fishermen’s subsistence living was shared with those who supported and supplied them: woodsmen with boat lumber, weavers with sail linen, farmers with net flax, stonemasons with anchors; and with the government-approved wholesalers and fish processors who they supplied.
Whilst it was shepherds who took a starring role in the story of his birth, and other aspects of Galilean village life worked their way into his ministry, there’s no doubt that ‘the aphorisms, parables and metaphors, anecdotes, and social network of Jesus are all heavily influenced by the Sea of Galilee and its fish, fishing, fishermen, and fishing-villages.’ [4]
Jesus spent much of his time in fishing towns and villages like Bethsaida, Capernaum, Gennesaret, Magdala and Gerasa. And Capernaum fishing folk formed his closest social network: Peter, Andrew, James, and John, Peter’s mother-in-law and the mother of James and John; and Levi, described as a tax-collector, who may have been a broker. Then there was Mary, from Magdala, and the people of Capernaum and the crowds from Tyre and Sidon who followed him in numbers.
Think of some of Jesus’ finest moments: the calming of the storm, the walking on the water, that wonderful breakfast of broiled fish he cooked post-resurrection; not to mention the feeding of the 4000 and the 5000 with loaves and fishes. Consider how we often find him preaching from a boat, sleeping in a boat, casting off to the other side of the lake. Recall those miraculously wondrous catches of fish he orchestrated, and the day he paid his temple tax with a coin he conjured up from the mouth of the first fish Peter caught.
Jesus was a carpenter’s son but it was on and by the water, alongside fishermen and their womenfolk that he worked out his life’s mission, formed and expressed his vision of the kingdom of God. Jesus was a landlubber but it was the fishermen Peter, Andrew, James, and John who he chose to be his first and foremost co-workers in the gospel. It’s clear from the scriptures that when they left their nets to follow him, they only temporarily left them, for it was Jesus’ everyday involvement with their ongoing fishing life which shaped the gospel as we know it. He trusted these ordinary working men to receive his message in their own way and to take it out into the towns and villages of Galilee, retelling it in their own voice. In so doing he modelled a way of Christian mission which has a precious past and must also have a bright future in the Church.
You can imagine these disciples telling the people of Galilee Jesus’ parable about the kingdom of heaven being like ‘a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.’ [5]
A modern-day fishermens’ story let’s call The Parable of the Tiny Trawler and the Fly-Shooter. To what shall we compare the Kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is like a Newhaven trawler crew who set out to fish. They found their fishing grounds emptied by a massive Fly-Shooter, a factory ship fishing on an industrial scale. ‘One of those ships will catch more fish in an hour than we can catch all year’, one trawler man said, and another agreed, saying, ‘The trawl he tows could probably swallow St Paul’s Cathedral without a problem. There shouldn’t be vessels like this in the Channel because it doesn’t leave anything for the rest of us.’ The trawlermen radioed the Fly-Shooter crew and asked them to move on; but the Fly-Shooter refused to move on. So the trawlermen went to the government and asked them to impose legislation to stop overfishing in Marine Protected Areas; but the government did not do a thing. A sympathetic MP likened these colossal vessels to ‘a bulldozer going into a nature reserve and churning it all up’ and the fishermen, agreeing that industrial fishing had ‘killed’ their livelihoods, gave up their boat and sold it for a leisure craft.
This true story is told in a recent documentary, which reveals an unusual alliance between the UK’s small fishermen and Greenpeace, coming together to campaign for the proper enforcement of Marine Protected Areas. This alliance of working men and environmental activists brought insights and energy to all involved, and inspired one of the fishermen Martin Yorwarth to say, ‘The new world is going to look a little bit more like the old world and we need to learn from the old ways and older civilisations how they lived on this earth, if we are to protect the seas and this earth.’ [6]
This is a moment in history for re-shaping, re-learning. And perhaps for forging some unusual but fruitful alliances. The Anglican Church has too often stayed more comfortably within the social world of the Ciceros than of the fishermen, but the gospels are rooted in the the daily struggles of ordinary working people; I’m saying today that I think Jesus’ very ministry was shaped by them.
As the numbers of paid clergy in the Church declines, the opportunity grows for us to foreground the calling of each Christian to share the mission of God in everyday life. After all, each baptised person is ‘gifted by the Holy Spirit with spiritual gifts for the work of ministry, in every area of their lives, both within and outside the organised church’. The devitalising model of one person being paid to do the church's ministry on behalf of the whole community may in time be replaced by the far more vigorous gospel approach modelled by Jesus and his Capernaum fishing friends in which ‘teams of gifted people, ordained and lay, together carry out God's work.’ [7]
Notes
[1] Cicero, On Duties 1.42, quoted in K. C. Hanson, The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition; Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant, Padstow, Cornwall; The Harbour Inn, Padstow.
[2] Share fisherman: Income Tax and National Insurance contributions. HM Revenue & Customs, 25 September 2014.
[3] K. C. Hanson, The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition provides all the contextual details of Jesus and Galilean fishing life in this sermon.
[4] K. C. Hanson, The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition.
[5] Matthew 13.47-48.
[6] High & Dry: How UK Fishermen Were Sold Out by Brexit. Greenpeace UK, YouTube, 28 Jan 2022.
[7] The Center for Evangelical Mission, What is Total Ministry?
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