Bible Text: St Luke 5:1–11 | Preacher: Rev. Andrew Richard
And yet, while we do labor in this world, our life is not ultimately a life of our works, but a life of God’s grace. If our works earned us our daily bread, the Holy Spirit would not have taught us to say, “The eyes of all look to You, O Lord, and You give them their food at the proper time. You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Ps. 145:15-16). If our works earned our daily bread, Jesus would not have taught us to pray to our Father in heaven, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Again, if our labor put fish in our nets or bread on our tables, the fishermen wouldn’t have toiled all night and caught nothing. We live by God’s grace. He orders His storehouses open and He sends His rains upon the earth. He commands His land to bring forth and sprout, and by His Word every living thing is fruitful according to its kind. If He open not His mouth to speak His life-giving Word, our daily bread fails, as does body and soul, as does our hope of eternal life.
Therefore the Word of God is primary. The crowds show this in the very first verse of today’s Gospel. They aren’t pressing around Jesus for a healer or a bread king, but “to hear the Word of God” (Lk. 5:1). This is admirable. We should be like that crowd and seek the Word of God above all things. Now in order to address the crowds in such a way that they can all hear, Jesus needs to back up, and so He gets into Peter’s boat and asks him to put out a little from the land. Peter is exhausted. Peter is at his wit’s end. But Peter doesn’t make excuses to Jesus. He gets back in his boat, and he puts out to sea, and he sits and listens to Jesus preach. This likewise is admirable. There are many exhausted and frustrated Peters who use their exhaustion and frustration as an excuse to distance themselves from hearing the Word. “God will understand how tired I am. God will understand that I need rest. God will overlook it if I skip out on hearing His Word and take time for what I need.” No! God will walk up to you when you’re dead tired and tell you to get in the boat and listen to His Word, because that’s what you need, and the Peter in today’s reading did it.
Nor was he disappointed. We don’t have Jesus’ sermon on this occasion recorded, but it was full of grace and goodness, so that Peter’s faith was strengthened to exalt the Word over his own exhaustion and frustration: After the sermon Jesus says, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch” (Lk. 5:4), and Peter responds, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at Your word I will let down the nets” (Lk. 5:5). Peter knows that God’s Word is supreme, and so he doesn’t listen to his aching muscles or his experience of the previous night, but listens to his Lord. “And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking” (Lk. 5:6).
Jesus at last provided them with their daily bread, and let’s pause here for a moment and reflect more deeply on what we’ve seen so far before moving on to Peter’s reaction. First, we see that Jesus cares about our bodily needs. He isn’t just the Lord of souls, but the Lord of men who are body and soul. He is the Word through whom all things were made. He is the mouthpiece who spoke everything into existence, everything except man. He didn’t speak us into existence, but stooped down to the earth and formed the man of dust from the ground and put Himself face to face with man and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. He took special care in forming the bodies of men from the very first body He formed, and to this day we say, “You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:13-14). Jesus cares for your body. And if this weren’t enough to persuade us of His bodily care, He became a man, took a body, “the Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14). He knows what it is to hunger and thirst, to be tired, to bear sickness. When He looks on you in your bodily distress He has compassion, not just as someone who can imagine what you’re going through, but as someone who has been there. So bring your bodily needs to Him and pray to Him. Again, Jesus cares for your body.
We also see in today’s reading a set of twin teachings that may seem at first glance to be contradictory, but are in fact in perfect harmony. One point is that we don’t have our daily bread because of our labor but because of God’s grace, as Peter says, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing!” (Lk. 5:5), but at Jesus’ Word they catch fish. The second point is that God doesn’t want us to neglect our work, as Jesus says, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets” (Lk. 5:4). Jesus doesn’t make the fish jump into the boat, but tells Peter to do the duties of his station in life.
How do we take these twin teachings together? Let me paint you two Christian scenes, two Christian dinner tables. At the first, a man has worked hard and done his duty and received his paycheck. He sits at his table with his wife, and it’s full of food that she bought with the money he earned, and that she cooked with the labor of her hands. And he leads his family in prayer, saying, “The eyes of all look to You, O Lord, and You give them their food at the proper time…” There’s the family with hands folded and heads bowed, not thinking of their food as something earned, but as something given. Their eyes are not on their works, but on God’s grace, and they are content. That’s the first table. At the second table there sits a man who has worked hard and done his duty and has been laid off. He sits at table with his wife, and there’s food enough on it, though the pantry is looking rather empty. But the pantry isn’t in the picture. The pantry has to do with tomorrow’s food, and we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” There he sits with his wife and children, and he likewise leads his family in prayer, “The eyes of all look to You, O Lord…” This family also thinks of their food not as earned, but given, their eyes not on their works, but on God’s grace, and they too are content, even if they don’t know where tomorrow’s food is going to come from. Compare those two pictures and you’ll quickly realize: they’re the same picture. That’s the peace of the Christian life. No matter the circumstances, we occupy ourselves with our God-given duties, and trust that God will worry about the daily bread. That’s how the two teachings go together.
The world gets this exactly backwards. The world thinks little of duty and neglects it in favor of worry and greed and being a busybody. Worry says, “Daily bread is ultimately my concern,” which is false. Daily bread is God’s concern, and no amount of worry will change that. Worry is like an obsolete currency: many people are rich in it, and yet it doesn’t buy anything. Greed says, “I should be the one to determine who gets what, and I should have that.” But all things belong to God, not to man, and He can do what He pleases with what belongs to Him. Greed likewise ends with beating its head against the wall in its futility. The busybody says, “It’s more important that I see to his duty than that I see to mine.” The word for busybody in the New Testament literally means “work-around” (1 Tim. 5:13). To be a busybody is to depart from the way appointed by God and choose one’s own way, instead of being occupied with what God has given. Interestingly, the Greek word for busybody sometimes also gets translated “magic arts” (Acts 19:19), because magic is likewise an attempt to work around what God has instituted and have life on one’s own terms. But being a busybody is about as productive as black magic: this is God’s world, not Satan’s, not ours.
Worry and greed and meddling are enemies of faith and of contentment. Faith delights in the fact that my Father in heaven will concern Himself with my daily bread, and He will determine what I have and what I don’t, and I need only do what has been given me to do, and He’ll see to the rest. That might mean I toil all night and get nothing. That might mean I let down the nets and they’re filled to the point of breaking. But whatever the case, I have my Lord, I have His Word, and I will have my daily bread when I need it. This illustrates Jesus’ saying from Matthew 6, “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Mt. 6:33).
Now let’s continue with Peter’s reaction to the catch of fish, because it is very instructive. “When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord’” (Lk. 5:8). Peter sees the Lord’s divine power and gracious provision and falls down before Him, afraid of the power, unworthy of the catch. Peter despairs of himself and his works before Jesus, and Jesus lovingly gave Peter practice in this, making him despair of himself and his works before fish. Note that well. Fishing all night with no success taught Peter to say, “My works merit nothing,” and that is a very salutary thing to know how to say. When Jesus frustrates your labors and makes you toil all night and catch nothing, He is not toying with you, but teaching you how you should think of yourself and your works in His presence. If you think you earn your daily bread from God, there’s danger that you’ll think you can earn salvation from God, and that cannot be. So at times in life Jesus will show plainly through your sweat and tears that you live by His grace and not by your works.
Peter said, “Depart from me,” because he didn’t know how he could stand before God. But Jesus doesn’t depart, and He shows how Peter will stand before Him: He has mercy and pardons, saying, “Do not be afraid” (Lk. 5:10). He is gracious to Peter not only in the matter of daily bread, but in the forgiveness of sins. Jesus can command fish into a net because He’s God, and they’re His fish; He made them. Jesus can likewise command sins away and pronounce Absolution, because He’s God, and they’re His sins; though we committed them, He bore them and made them His own. That’s the main reason the Son of God took a body, that He might take the sins of men as a man and atone for those sins by His blood.
After forgiving Peter his sins, Jesus gives him a duty to do. Peter is to be a minister of the Word, a servant of the Gospel, a fisher of men. You likewise have your duty and station in life from Jesus, whatever that work might be. And you go about that work in faith, knowing that just as the Word of Jesus put fish in the net, just as the Word of Jesus formed the Christian Church, so the Word of Jesus will give success to your labors. His Word is supreme. Through it you have your daily bread, and through it you have the forgiveness of sins. Praise be to Christ. Amen.