Fear Not

Simon Peter had been fishing his whole life, and on the morning we meet him he’d caught nothing. The nets were washed and folded. The boats were empty. He and his partners had worked through the whole night, which is when the fish run on that lake, and they’d come up with nothing to show for it. If you’ve ever poured a full day, or a full year, or a full season of your life into something and watched it come to nothing, you know the particular tiredness in that boat. It isn’t only in the arms. It’s in the chest.

That tiredness has a name in Scripture, and we heard it this morning from the Preacher. Solomon had tried everything a man can try. He built houses and planted vineyards, he gathered silver and gold, he denied himself no pleasure his eyes desired, and at the end of it he looked on all the works his hands had wrought and said, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. That’s the sound of labor done under our own power. It’s the empty net at dawn.

Here’s the claim I want to set before you, Encouragers, and I want it in front of us before anything else: when the holiness of Christ draws near to a sinner, the honest thing that sinner says is Peter’s word, depart from me. And the whole Gospel, the reason we’re at this altar this morning, is that Christ will not.

Look at how it happens. Jesus is pressed by the crowd, so He gets into a boat. Not any boat. He gets into Simon’s boat, the failed one, the empty one, and He asks the tired fisherman to push out a little from the land so He can teach. And when He’s done teaching He says something that makes no sense to a professional: Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. Peter has every reason to say no. He’s the expert here. He knows the lake, he knows it’s the wrong time of day, and he knows they’ve already tried. What he says instead is one of the great sentences of the Bible: Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net.

Nevertheless. On the strength of nothing but the word of Christ, against everything his own experience is telling him, he lets down the net. And the net fills until it breaks. Two boats fill until they begin to sink. And that’s when Peter falls down. Not in triumph. He falls at Jesus’ knees in the bottom of a sinking boat full of fish and says, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.

Why? Nothing bad has happened to him. He’s just been handed the best catch of his life. But that’s exactly the trouble. Peter has seen that the holiness of God has climbed into his ordinary working boat, and he knows what he is. This is what happens when the light gets close enough. It doesn’t flatter us. It shows us the truth, and the truth is that we’re not clean. Augustine said it in one line that has never worn out: our heart is restless until it rests in thee. Peter is feeling the restlessness of a man who has met the One his heart was made for and knows he has no standing to hold Him.

Now hold that scene, because everything Christ does after this is His answer to depart from me.

Think of the whole life. The Son of God didn’t wait in heaven for us to make ourselves worthy. He climbed down into the boat. He took our flesh, our tiredness, our nights of catching nothing. That’s the Incarnation: not God summoning sinners to a clean temple, but God getting into the sinful man’s own vessel and sitting down beside him. He sat where Peter sat, handled the same wet rope, breathed the same morning air off the water. The eternal Word by whom that lake and every fish in it was made asked a tired working man for the loan of his boat.

Then think of the cross. Peter says depart from me, and on Good Friday it’s the sinless One who is departed from. It’s Christ who cries, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. The one sending-away that our sin deserves, the word Peter had no right to escape, falls instead on the one man who never deserved it. He’s forsaken so that we never have to hear depart spoken over us. That’s the exchange at the heart of our faith. The sinner is kept; the Holy One is sent into the dark.

And then think of Easter. The call by the lake doesn’t end at the lake. The risen Lord comes back to that same shore, in the last chapter of John, and He does it all again, another boat, another impossible catch of fish, and He turns to the same Peter, the one who by then had denied Him three times, and He gives him his work back: Feed my sheep. Resurrection is the mending of the broken net and the broken man both. The same hands that were nailed reached back to a fisherman who had failed twice over, once at the nets and once at the fire, and put the work back in them.

And then the Ascension. Christ has gone up, and He isn’t gone. He stands now where He stood all through this story, on the shore, and He gathers the catch through our nets. Fear not, He had said to Peter, from henceforth thou shalt catch men. The whole Church is fishing on the word of an ascended Lord who tells us to let down the net where we’re certain there’s nothing.

So bring it home, here, to this room in Bellville. Every Sunday morning we are Simon Peter. We come in tired from a week of nets that didn’t fill the way we hoped. And in a few minutes we’ll kneel and pray the truest words we know, the ones the Prayer Book puts in our mouths: We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness. That’s Peter’s confession. That’s depart from me; for I am a sinful man set to music and prayed at an altar rail. And do you hear what Christ answers back? He does not say depart. He says Take, eat. He feeds the very man who confessed he had no business being fed.

That’s the whole thing. The sinner who says depart is not sent away. He’s kept, and fed, and then something more. He’s made a son. He walks in as a failed fisherman and he’s lifted into the family of God, given a Father he could never have earned, and handed the same work Peter got: go and catch men. That’s who we are as the Encouragers. Not clean people who’ve earned a place near the altar. Forgiven people who were told fear not, and sent back out to bring others in. That’s the dignity Christ hands a sinful man in the bottom of a boat: not a pardon only, but a place at the Father’s table and a share in the Father’s work.

Saint Peter learned what the catch would cost him, and he wrote it down in the Epistle we heard: Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another. Return blessing for railing. If ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye. The men and women Christ catches He then sends into a world that won’t always thank them, and He tells them, through Peter’s own pen, to sanctify the Lord God in your hearts. Keep Him holy inside you, and the friction outside won’t move you off the boat.

So here’s where we land, Encouragers. If Christ did not depart from Peter in the bottom of that boat, then He will not depart from you at this rail, however empty your week has been. If the net could hold an abundance it was never strong enough to carry, then you need not be afraid of your own weakness, because the strength was never in the vessel. And if the Lord who was forsaken on the cross came back to a shore and gave a coward his work again, then there is no failure of yours He cannot mend and no life of yours He cannot use.

Wait still upon Him. My soul truly waiteth still upon God; for of him cometh my salvation. Come to the rail this morning not trusting yourselves. Come to be fed. Come hearing the only two words that finally matter over a sinful man: Fear not.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.