This blog provides a meditation on the daily reading of the Reformed Churches, along with an item from world news.

Margaret Thatcher is given full military honours

Steve Bell’s cartoon in the Guardian last week

Luke 5:1-11

J.B. Phillips New Testament (PHILLIPS)

Simon, James and John become Jesus’ followers

5 ^1-3 One day the people were crowding closely round Jesus to hear God’s message, as he stood on the shore of Lake Gennesaret. Jesus noticed two boats drawn up on the beach, for the fishermen had left them there while they were cleaning their nets. He went aboard one of the boats, which belonged to Simon, and asked him to push out a little from the shore. Then he sat down and continued his teaching of the crowds from the boat.

⁴ When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Push out now into deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

⁵ Simon replied, “Master! We’ve worked all night and never caught a thing, but if you say so, I’ll let the nets down.”

^6-8 And when they had done this, they caught an enormous shoal of fish—so big that the nets began to tear. So they signalled to their friends in the other boats to come and help them. They came and filled both the boats to sinking point. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell on his knees before Jesus and said, “Keep away from me, Lord, for I’m only a sinful man!”

^9-10 For he and his companions (including Zebedee’s sons, James and John, Simon’s partners) were staggered at the haul of fish that they had made. Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid, Simon. From now on your catch will be men.”

¹¹ So they brought the boats ashore, left everything and followed him.

I am a fan of the cartoonist Steve Bell in the UK newspaper The Guardian. Over many years his astonishing invention and radical insight have given a savage perspective on current affairs. His cartoon about Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in today’s Guardian,  (See online)  featuring half-buried human buttocks and an invitation to park your bicycle in them, substitutes brutality for humour. It’s an insult, to a dead woman, to her loved ones and to the readers of the newspaper, for which he should apologise. How has a great cartoonist made such a mistake? My answer is that his greatness has been his ability to see below the surface of political events into the chaotic mixture of struggle, enmity, ambition, belief, good and evil which is the real nature of politics, and to draw from there his (usually) liberating fantasies. He is ever ready to enter a layer of reality that lesser artists avoid. Today’s effort is the result of remembering all too clearly the damage done by Mrs. Thatcher’s policies to the working people of the UK; but in this case his invention only expresses hatred. 

dark water

What’s all that to do with the bible passage above? At first sight, not much; but let’s look more closely. Jesus is depicted preaching God’s word to the people on the shore of the lake, from which however he soon departs, to continue his teaching from a fishing boat. That seems appropriate enough as all the gospels use fishing as a metaphor for gathering people into God’s kingdom. But there’s another dimension: water, especially in the form of a lake or a sea, was for Jewish culture an image of chaos. Before God’s Word brings light “darkness was on the face of the deep.” The “waters under the earth” would from time to time surge up and menace the earth. In God’s new world in the book of The Revelation, there is “no more sea.” So Luke’s story of Jesus preaching from the water carries overtones of danger and chaos. Jesus takes his stand in the dimension where evil meets good and death meets life. His ability to live in the place that makes others afraid gives power to his healing and teaching. Finally as the gospel will tell us, he enters that dimension completely in his crucifixion and demonstrates that he can live even in death. 

The disciples’ unsuccessful night fishing is an image of human weakness. In the darkness (the darkness which swallows Jesus also in rejection and death) nothing can succeed. But in the light of day, the resurrected one will show them how to venture into the deep water unafraid, as he did, and from there speak words that catch people in the net of truth.  

Eva Schloss

That’s what this story tells us; it’s not merely a seaside miracle. It’s about how to live and speak in unity with the crucified and risen Jesus; it’s about how human words can be words of life because they come from a place of death. I’ve just listened on the radio to Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor, whose sober matter-of-factness about that place is more powerful than any spurious eloquence. People listen to such a voice because it is not self-aggrandizing, it is not trying to sell something, it is not promoting an opinion; it is bearing witness to reality.

At his best, Steve Bell does that in his cartoons.

When religion uses the voice of advertising most people can see that the speaker is another snake oil merchant. When religion uses the voice of authority most people can see the speaker is another bully. When it uses the voice of hysterical denunciation most people can see that the speaker is a thug. When it uses the voice of the scholar most people can see that the speaker is a lecturer. But when a speaker leaves religion behind and bears witness to reality, people listen, because they know they are getting a dispatch from the front line of the struggle for life.