LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Concordia Lutheran Seminary

LTR XII (Academic Year 1999-2000): 104-7
SERMON:
WE ARE FISHERS OF MEN (MT. 4:12-23)
Harold Ristau
W
hen Jesus calls His disciples “fishers of men”, it’s kind of a
strange image. After all, fishing is about tricking fish, catching
them, and then eating them. To the fish, the fisherman is an
enemy. Yet I remember once watching some forest rangers netting fish out
of a dirty river headed towards a polluted lake—not to eat them, but to
transfer them to a clean lake. In that case, the fishermen were friends: they
saved these fish from certain death. This is more like the kind of fisherman
that Jesus promised to make His disciples—not harming, but helping people
by fishing them out of the waters that kill, and transferring them to the
waters that give life.
Jesus promised to make His disciples “fishers of men”, there to catch, to
save people from death and the darkness in which they sat by “hooking”
them with the Gospel, the light of Christ. But Jesus was not just talking to
His first disciples. He is also talking to us. We, too, are His disciples.
Therefore, we also are fishers of men. People are dying spiritually, they are
headed down the river leading to Hell, and Jesus uses us as fishers to transfer
them to the river leading to heaven. Much of discipleship is evangelism:
fishing for people; leading them to God. God calls us in much the same way
that He called these first disciples.
“But surely I can’t be compared with these great men of faith. God chose
special men for His task. I don’t measure up.”
But when we look at the text, we see that God didn’t choose special
people, but ordinary people to be His disciples. The disciples were normal
simple men. They were merely fishermen. God made “unimportant”
fishermen into “important” fishers of men. What could be more important
than saving people’s lives? Jesus says, “Repent, the kingdom of God is at
hand”, or “turn towards Me; swim into My net so that you can be scooped
out of that polluted water and be saved.” This is the reason our holy and
glorious God came to earth in the form of the Man Jesus, and these simple
fishermen got to be part of it. The first disciples didn’t have a lot of
education, nor were they morally cleaner than others. They were just simple,
down to earth, paycheque-to-paycheque kind of people. Our mighty and
great God used lowly, “not-so-great” ordinary people to build His holy,
extra-ordinary kingdom.
And like the disciples, we are simple people, too. We live ordinary lives,
have ordinary jobs, and from a worldly perspective, we are really not that
important. If one of us passed away, the world would continue on as if