Year B: January 24, 2021 | Epiphany 3
Epiphany 1, Year B: Mark 1:14-20
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
January 24, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 21:15 in).
After a year-and-a-half here at Holy Cross, you undoubtedly recognize how much I like playing with words. I enjoy unwinding the subtleties of most basic form of human communication, exploring how terminology can change not just the ways we interact with one another but how we’re able to perceive the world around us and even think.
Yet despite my love for language, I’ve never been a big fan of poetry. My tastes are too specific and my expectations unmanageably high. I look for complexity of rhythm, structure, and rhyme, but I want it under a clean, pristine veneer. The lines must bear both beauty and meaning. A good poem should also refuse to be trapped in two dimensions: it needs to escape the page. I want the words to sound as sharp as they appear, unraveling layers of connections and connotations you might miss unless you physically hear them echoing in your ear. I want to witness precision and intention tucked inside a sparkling tone. My attention span and patience are short. A poet must earn my continuing interest, and few do.
So when I saw Amanda Gorman[1] step up to the microphone at Wednesday’s presidential inauguration, my expectations were low. “Great,” I thought to myself, “time for some well-meaning, overly emotional drivel wrapped in lazy rhyme.” Assuming the next few minutes would be better spent immersed in sudoku, I pulled out my phone. But though my eyes turned away, my ears remained alert.
I was soon surprised to find myself drawn away from my game. This poetry was…not bad. The vocabulary was relatable; her tone wasn’t pompous or overbearing, and Amanda’s meter, wordplay, and internal rhyme exhibited some real skill. Pleasant sound, tight writing, and a challenge to both present events and future hope? This I did not expect. I set my phone down and began to pay real attention. Watching her read added another layer of interpretation. Her unassuming confidence and precise gestures simply added to the artful dance. Body, text, and message met time and again in a brilliant and delicate balance and flow. By the time she finished, I was pretty much breathless. Here was a person who not only knows the wonder of words but can instill that respect in others.
I suspect that Jesus was the same way. Most of us recognize he was a master storyteller. His parables have survived for 2,000 years, challenging and inspiring entire civilizations along the way. But what probably kept the crowds’ attention in the moment was his mastery of language itself, his skill playing with puns and binding meaning after meaning into a simple, memorable container. Today’s calling of the first disciples is a brilliant display of that ability.
“Fishers of men”—or “fish for people,” as the NRSV says—may be a catchphrase in the Church, but have you ever really thought about what it might mean? Growing up, it was a large part of one of my favorite Sunday School songs:
I will make you fishers of men,
fishers of men,
fishers of men;
I will make you fishers of men
if you follow me.
A bouncy tune enhanced the funny image, and the hand motions reminded me of spending summer mornings with my dad along the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal. However, even as a small child the concept bothered me inside: I wouldn’t want to be jerked into the air by a hook pierced through my cheek. I might have enjoyed playing the fisherman, but I most certainly held no interest in being the fish.
As I grew older, even after becoming accustomed to metaphors, the idea continued to trouble me. First off, everyone knows that a fish’s long-term wellbeing depends on it not being caught. The phrase also sets up and reinforces a dangerous (and sadly common) superiority mentality. If Christians are the humans in the story, that makes non-Christians slimy, stinky, and unquestionably less intelligent fish. It also promotes the concept of bait-and-switch evangelism, using manipulation and deceit to trick people into coming to Jesus, trapping them into a life of supposed “holiness.” But as I mentioned before, this turns out to be a shining example of Jesus’ skill with words. It’s just hard to see in English.
Unlike our language, the term Jesus uses for “fisherman” contains no reference to either fish or men. It’s root is based in the ancient Greek word for “salt.”[2] So people who caught fish for a living were basically known as “salties.” The label draws more attention to the environment where the people worked—the sea—rather than what the people were attempting to capture.
Something important to know about the ancient world was that their association with the sea was almost entirely unlike ours. We tend to idealize the sea, imagining quaint fishing villages and summer escapes to the beach. Sure, sometimes storms can get destructive, but even then people flock to the coast to watch the power of the wind and waves from the comfort of their hotel rooms. We think of the waterfront as a place to relax and escape everyday life. But in the ancient world, especially the area where Jesus lived, the sea stood for something else entirely.
In Ancient Near Eastern literature, the sea is the standard image of primordial chaos. Most creation accounts from the region—including the one in Genesis—begin with the gods subduing the ravenous ocean, often by chaining or slaying its dark avatar and always by confining its boundaries, preventing the water from overwhelming the land. In this way, the gods brought and maintained the order necessary for humans to survive. In the ancient mythos, a civilization-ending flood like Noah’s wasn’t just a creeping result of climate change but an active, everyday risk. The head god simply had to remove their protection, allowing the unstoppable power of discord and anarchy to once again consume the world.
But remembering Jesus’ love of puns and layered meanings, it turns out this “fisherman” term can reference more than salt and the sea. It’s also a homonym (and known alternative spelling[3]) for a different natural power: the sun. That essentially allowed Jesus to bind up two concepts here: these disciples were “salties” because of the setting where they worked, but their actions also made them “sunners.”[4] They weren’t just people who made their living atop the physical embodiment of destruction. Somehow, they could also find life and sustenance hidden within it, elevating these treasures from the cold, shadowy wastes to the light and warmth of day where they could be of use to everyone.
So, well beyond the visuals we imagine and applications we often take from the phrase “fishers of men,” Jesus proves himself a masterful poet, uniting the ideas of overcoming chaos with the work of life and resurrection in a single word.
It’s been well over a year since we last talked about it, but I hope you still remember that the Bible isn’t particularly concerned with saving people from just one cosmic-level “end of the world.” That’s a misreading and misapplication of the text. Encountered as a whole, the Bible reminds us that the world is always ending, and the world is always being born anew. As “salties,” Simon, Andrew, James, and John already lived in that reality. Their job was literally to ride the border of reason and disorder, to navigate the edges of life and death. They spent every day piloting their way along the end of the world. When Jesus showed up, he never asked them to change that. Instead, he essentially expanded their working environment, inviting them to confront and maneuver not just the dangers of nature but the chaos devouring the lives of the people around them.
On top of expanding the disciples’ awareness, Jesus was also increasing their workload. There’s a common misunderstanding that being a Christian is about improving your life’s circumstances or somehow magically making it easier. Jesus never offered any of that. What Jesus actually did was summon us to labor, and to labor faithfully. If hauling in a net full of fish was hard work, imagine dragging a bunch of human bodies aboard! Again, Jesus was expanding the “salties’” world, broadening their work as “sunners.” No longer were they riding the sea to find treasures for themselves, something to consume or sell for profit. They were on a rescue mission. People—children of God—were trapped and overwhelmed by the disorder surrounding their lives, drowning in the everyday reality of a culture losing its own sense of humanity. The disciples were not simply expected to continue riding along its edges. Now they were also to turn their efforts toward locating anyone trapped in this turmoil’s raging clutches, raising them from dark, icy depths to the light and warmth of day.
So by declaring them “fishers of men,” Jesus was actually calling his disciples to expand their reality, to embark across a broader world of anarchy, laboring not for self-gain but to raise people from the hold of death to the light of life.
Although that gives us a “what” and a “why” to Jesus’ words, it still leaves us without a “how.” Thankfully, Jesus offers us one more trick with this phrase.
While Jesus was definitely playing with “salty” and “sunner” ideas held in this “fisherman” label, it turns out you don’t just have to read this word as a noun. It can also be a verb. In fact, Jesus is already saying exactly what he wants his followers to do: “you take pity;” “you have mercy.”[5]
Jesus isn’t demanding the disciples proselytize or evangelize as we understand those things from a Modern American Christian perspective. They weren’t just to announce the “good news” of the coming Kingdom of God as a sign of judgment and terror to the masses, filling the world with even more fear. They were to ride alert along its edges, watching for people disappearing into its disorderly depths. Then they were to draw them out, guiding them to a new and better day not against their will, not by force or deceit, but by mercy, by kindness, and by compassion.
On Wednesday, Amanda Gorman concluded her poem, saying,
“There’s always light
if only we’re brave enough to see it,
if only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Her words were not unlike Jesus’ invitation to those first disciples. This work of Christ continues today. And if we’re willing not just to listen but to act, that is still what Jesus is calling us to do. Only through love and compassion can any one of us truly become a “fisher of men.”
[1] https://www.theamandagorman.com/
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%85%CE%BB%CF%82#Ancient_Greek
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%A5%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek
[4] https://christswords.com/content/mar-117-come-after-me-and-i-will-make-you
[5] Ibid.