The Man Who Asked Him to Leave

The fishing on the lake of Gennesaret was done at night, and the boats came in at dawn to wash and mend the nets. That was the morning Jesus found Simon: onshore, bent over empty nets, with nothing to show for the dark. With the crowd pressing in to hear the word of God, Jesus got into Simon's boat, asked him to push out a little, and taught from the water.

When he had finished, he told a professional fisherman how to fish—in daylight, in the deep, after a night that had failed: "Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch" (Luke 5:4). Simon's answer carries his tired skepticism and a thread of something else: "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets" (Luke 5:5). They let them down, and the nets came up so full they began to tear; a second boat was called, and both sat so low they started to sink.

A man who has just hauled in the catch of his life does not celebrate—he falls down and begs the source of his good fortune to go away: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord" (Luke 5:8). It had come in the one arena where Simon was the expert, and the full nets exposed not only a sinner but a man whose worth had been riding on those nets. He had come close enough to holiness to see himself by its light, and the sight undid him. Isaiah said the same thing, standing in the temple instead of a boat: "Woe is me! For I am lost"—then the coal from the altar touched his unclean lips, and only then the sending, and only then "Here I am! Send me" (Isaiah 6:5–8).

We would expect the Holy One to grant the request and go. Tim Keller reads the scene as a mission that begins where self-sufficiency runs out.¹ I had always heard that as a word about effort. In this boat it is a word about shame. We know only two answers to a holy God: keep him at a distance, or come back when we are clean. Neither religion nor irreligion has a third. To take him at his word is to let him see us, and being seen through is good news only if the one who sees refuses to go. He refuses: "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men" (Luke 5:10).

What I cannot account for is that he never argues with the self-assessment. He does not correct it, does not say you're not that bad; he changes the subject to fish—and I have not decided whether that silence is the kindest thing in the passage or the most unsettling. The pattern runs through Luke: the Holy One does not withdraw from the unclean—he touches the leper, eats with sinners—and at the end he is "numbered with the transgressors" (Luke 22:37), led outside the city to die among the condemned, bearing the exclusion our sin deserves.

Back on the lake, they brought the boats to land, left everything, and followed him (Luke 5:11). Peter answers nothing. He does not say what Isaiah said; he simply gets out of the boat—hineni, here I am, given with his feet, not by a man with his life in order but by one who had just found out he did not. The man who begged him to leave is sent out instead as one of his ambassadors. We come the same way: with nothing in the nets, at his word.