Abundance is abundant in the Gospels. We see it in last week's story of the water turned to wine; we see it this week with the miraculous catch of fish. Abundance is a core principle of God-Life, one of the ways God most often shows her hand – when there is unexpectedly enough, and even too much. That is what Simon Peter and his fisher-friends experienced on the lake that morning, when Jesus said,
“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 break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.
I experienced this abundance when I was heading to Yale Divinity School and invited fellow congregants at my church to help me pay for it. I thought I might get a few hundred, maybe a thousand dollars to help defray the costs… and the money just kept rolling in, sometimes four figures at a time. In the end some $20,000 was given to support my theological education. Every time I expressed amazement, I could sense God laughing and saying, “See? Now do you believe me?”
If abundance is a principle of God’s realm on earth, why is there so much scarcity? In part, it’s because we’re more wired to see, to expect scarcity than we are abundance. We default to “not enough” – that’s what Jesus’ disciples saw when faced with the challenge of feeding a crowd of thousands. But God invites us to look beyond the “not enough” in front of us to the “what else?” all around us. God invites us to look beyond what we can see, period, and call God’s power to flow into situations of need.
Scarcity on a global level is due to human choices and to sin – greed, fear, and the damage to our planet which those forces wreak. The earth has the capacity to feed everyone on it, but some nations hoard food and water and play havoc with the environment. Most often the ruinous consequences like disease, famine and flooding fall upon the poorer nations. We can make better choices as people of prosperity – both because Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors, and from self-interest. Bono, the lead singer of U2, has written, “In the not-too-distant future, the rich world will invest in the education of the poor world, because it is our best protection against young minds being twisted by extremist ideologies - or growing up without any ideology at all, which could be worse. Nature abhors a vacuum; terrorism loves one.” We are still waiting for that day.
I have wandered far from our lakeshore and its boats sinking with the weight of such a large catch. That day in Galilee, the abundance was all from God. It was a sign to these fishermen in their own language that Jesus meant business, that this was what they could expect in a life in God – along with hardship and hunger. Over all, there would be enough, and often too much to handle.
This miraculous catch of fish was Jesus’ work. Yet it could not have been realized without the participation of the men on those boats. Abundance comes from God – and God always reveals it through people. Are you ready to catch a boatload of fish?
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