The Way of Love … a meditation on Jesus’ call to “fish for people”
Friday, January 30th, 2009At our best I think we’re half-hearted lovers. Even in our best moments, we love with hesitation and we place qualifications on love.
Tell me, how is it Jesus could love such an unlovable group of people as we read in the gospels? Winos and poor folks … shysters and street kids … people with issues of all kinds, “God’s little broken people,” we might even call them. Jesus challenged our limited definitions of love by offering himself as friend and companion to persons most of us would have trouble accepting. And to this world, he called us to “follow” in order that we become fishers of men and women.
That’s the problem with the vision of us modern-day followers who are commanded to love. The command to love is what “fishing for people” is all about, isn’t it? I suspect our fishing abilities are rather limited as we’re often more interested in the limits of love.
We’re more interested in placing boundaries around love because loving others is hard to do. We say with our lips that love has no limits and cite Jesus as the example for that kind of care, but in our most honest moments, we recognize our hearts are empty of love and often full of hate and prejudice. Nevertheless, the Jesus we worship compels us to love the unlovables. We’re to love the crazies. We’re to love the despised and the destitute. We’re to fish and whatever comes up from the dark waters of life God intends us to love.
In our gospel lesson, Jesus called his first disciples. The Greek word used here expresses union, likeness, and a way. It’s used literally as they actually put down their nets and “they followed him.” But it’s not limited in that meaning because implied is a metaphorical meaning that suggests a way of discipleship.
In other words, they followed him literally wherever he went and that led them to follow every aspect of him with the desire in their hearts that they would be like him. This notion of following Christ is used 77 times in the gospels and each time but one this dual meaning is implied, both in the literal sense and in the metaphorical sense that describes our own following of Jesus in our day.
“Follow me and I will make you fish for people” he tells them. Jesus called followers who were willing to go out into the world to announce the kind of good news that would set people free from their twisted and wounded selves. To all those people who had lost their way and had ruined their lives, Jesus wanted a band of women and men who believed enough in the freedom of Christ, they would be willing to love even the unlovable.
But Susan Johnson reminds us, “we cannot be fishers of men and women if in our hearts we are haters of them.” Our announcements of Christ’s love are just words blowing in the wind if they are not carried along on the actions of Christ-like loving-kindness …
