Enough for Everyone

“[Jesus] said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to burst.” — Luke 5:4–6

Jesus was particularly skilled at using simple everyday images to convey profound spiritual truths. The image of fishing nets straining and breaking at the weight of their haul is likely not familiar to many of us. But for Jesus’s audience — working-class folk living in a place where harvesting food directly from the sea was the norm — this image would’ve been strikingly familiar.

Whether or not we’ve been surprised by an unexpectedly large haul of fish, we can no doubt identify with the disciples, the fishermen in this story. They’ve worked through the night, tried everything. Doing things the way they’ve always done them, again and again they come up empty.

When we push and strive and still come up empty, it’s easy — tempting, even! — to view the world through a lens of scarcity. In a scarcity mindset, there’s never enough. We’ve got to go without and hold tightly to what’s ours. But Jesus invites the disciples to try again; he pushes them to change their perspective. (In other versions of this story, he asks them to drop their nets from the other side of the boat.) In this moment, Jesus invites them to participate in something much larger than themselves.

Jesus encourages his followers to make a small but ultimately upending shift in their approach to life: from an attitude of scarcity to a practice of abundance.”

In the Gospels, Jesus calls a group of fishermen, sex workers, tax collectors, and outcasts to join him in his mission of sharing the love of God not only with some people but with everyone they meet. He encourages them to make a small but ultimately upending shift in their approach to life: from an attitude of scarcity to a practice of abundance.

Jesus points to a world in which there is more than enough — food, water, shelter, resources, and love — to go around. A world of such abundance that to gather all of the world’s resources into one place would strain our proverbial nets past the point of breaking. When we receive it, God’s abundance tears down the things we build to contain it.

That group of outcasts believed Jesus and followed him. With Jesus, they saw and accomplished such amazing things that their witness changed the world forever. How might our lives change if we, too, let down our nets in a new place? How might God surprise us with the abundance of God’s creation if only we looked at things a little differently?

Read all of Sunday’s scriptures

Step Into the Story

Here are some ways to think about the surprise of God’s abundance in our lives:

Visual Art

Emphasizing the disruptive effects of Jesus’s miracle, African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Miraculous Haul of Fishes depicts the disciples’ boat nearly capsizing under the weight of the fish. If we let it, God’s abundance might destabilize our scarcity-based ways of living.

Music

Bluegrass artist Rhonda Vincent’s song “Fishers of Men” is a simple yet beautiful rendition of Jesus’s words to the first disciples after they leave their boats to share God’s love with all the world: “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”

Theology

Trinity Book Club has been reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s collected sermons in Strength to Love. Preaching on the parable of the foolish rich man, Dr. King notes how a scarcity mindset has led Americans to spend money storing up food rather than storing it for free in “the stomachs of the millions of God’s children . . . who go to bed hungry tonight,” and he challenges us today to adopt an abundance mindset.

Father Matt is priest and director, children, youth, and family, at Trinity Church.