Jesus the Disruptor: Luke 5:1-11 - Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Recently, a new setting appeared on my phone called Reduce Interruptions. Using artificial intelligence, this “feature” prioritizes information that’s most important to me while filtering out all the rest.

It’s ironic to me that a device which creates about 75% of all distractions in my life has tasked itself with reducing them. Hopefully, it will effectively silence spam calls, scam text messages, and app notifications which do not require my immediate attention, such as “one dollar off” promotions from Dunkin Donuts.

But nothing can make all disruptions go away. Disruptions are simply part of life.

Photo credit: Image by Falkenpost from Pixabay

In today’s Gospel, Simon Peter, along with James and John and their father, Zebedee were having a terrible time. They’d been fishing the Lake of Gennesaret all night but hadn’t caught anything. They had just gone ashore to wash out their nets when Jesus asks to use their boats as a makeshift pulpit and PA system to teach the crowds. Perhaps to delay having to go home to their wives penniless, they permit him. But when Jesus is finished speaking, he tells Simon to let down the nets.

Click here to read the Scripture text

By now, Simon and his colleagues were beyond exhausted. If there were any fish in the sea, they would’ve caught them by now. But because Jesus said so, Simon lets down the nets. Within moments, there were so many fish that the nets began to burst, and the boats began to sink when they pulled them.

Yet even though this was the catch of a lifetime, Simon wasn’t celebrating. He cries, “get away from me, Lord, I’m a sinful man!”

The Scriptures don’t tell us of the skeletons in his closet, but Simon had not been walking a godly path, and he knew it. But like the fish in the nets, Jesus had Simon right where he wanted him. He said, “follow me, and from now on, you’ll be catching people.”

As soon as they reach the shore, Simon, James, and John leave everything behind: the nets, their boats, the jackpot catch of fish, and, in James and John’s case, their father.

The way Luke describes it, they had just caught enough fish that they all could’ve retired and never worked a day again. But it’s even more striking that James and John leave their father behind. One New Testament scholar suggested that the giant catch of fish was Jesus’s way of “buying out” Peter, James and John from Zebedee, since they would no longer be working for him.

Think about it: what would it take for you to leave behind your job, your home, your family, and follow Jesus into a new life you’d never planned for or even wanted?

I’ll never forget my first day of classes in seminary. The professors gathered all the new students in a big room, and each shared their call story. I was astounded by what many of my classmates left behind: they sold their homes and nearly all their possessions, left good-paying jobs, they moved away from their spouses and children. As a single man on the cusp of burnout at my previous job, I left practically nothing behind compared to them.

Still, what we learn from this Gospel is that Jesus’s call comes not as a fulfillment of your plans, but as a disruption to your plans.

To be clear, Jesus disrupts your life because he loves you, and because he has a plan for your life that cannot be fulfilled if you continue on the pathway you’re on. As a sinner, you need Jesus to disrupt you when you’re going down the road to own ruin.

But most of life’s disruptions come not from Jesus. They are just part of life. They are the daily annoyances, aggravations, and mistakes you make.

Then there are the major disruptions: a loved one dies. You fall ill. You lose your job. A natural disaster strikes. You’re injured in an accident. Disruptions that turn your life upside-down. That’s when you can count on Jesus showing up, because that’s when you realize how much you need him.

In Christ, new life begins where plans are broken, and dreams lie in pieces. Hopefully, each of you can point to moments in your life when Jesus rocked your world with his mighty, gracious hand. You probably witnessed God’s mighty acts not when everything was going your way, but when everything was not going your way. Yet, from that point on, life was never the same. You were never the same. That’s what we see with Simon, James, and John.

Jesus’s call either disrupts your life, or Jesus calls you when your life has been disrupted. Either way, that’s when you Jesus catches you like a fish, draws you closer to himself, leads you to the life you were created to live.

In the end, your life is not yours to possess. You can make plans all you want, but do you trust yourself (or anyone else) more than Jesus to lead you on the path of life?

Jesus calls you because God’s Kingdom and its righteousness is worth leaving everything else behind. Thanks be to God that Jesus will not stand idly by while you lose your life to your desires and ambitions, to worry and fear, or to your self-destructive habits and lifestyles.

Blessed be Jesus, the great disruptor of sin and death. Blessed be the disruptions that turn us to Jesus, to follow him to new and abundant life.