Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading includes the moment where Peter and Andrew leave their nets to follow Jesus. In Herman Sutter’s wonderful poem “Peter Returns to His Nets,” the poet imagines what it must have been like, after the crucifixion and resurrection, to return to their old employ. Here’s the initial invitation:
As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.
If Peter returns to his nets, it may be because, after all that has happened, he is seeking something he can be sure of. Sutter plays with the contrast between solid and safe: it seems safer to have water behaving as water normally does than to recall when Jesus walked upon the waves and invited Peter to do the same.
In this final Sea of Galilee scene, resurrected Jesus appears on the beach following the disciples’ fruitless night of fishing and tells them to “throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” Following a large haul and breakfast, Jesus instructs Peter to “feed my sheep.” As a higher destiny calls him, Peter will no longer be free “to sink beneath the waves.”
Peter Returns to His Nets
By Herman Sutter
Before the sea was solid
it was safe for me
to sink beneath the waves
and rise upon each crest.
My only destiny:
nets and hooks and fingers from
fashioning a day
out of sweat and sun,
scales and blood, and the salt breath
of an evening breeze
thick as my lungs.
But I was free
always`
to find my way and sink
beneath the same
waves
I now have walked
upon.
We might say, with T. S. Eliot’s magi, that Peter discovers he is no longer at ease in the old dispensation, familiar and comfortable though it is.
