The Call and Consecration

Peter’s home at Capernaum. Miraculous cure of his mother-in-law. the night op pishing. the miraculous draught and acted parable. forsaking all and fol-LOWING Christ.

“Master, speak! Thy servant heareth,
Waiting for Thy gracious word,
Longing for Thy voice that cheereth;
Master! let it now be heard.”

—Ministry of Song.

“Under the rough exterior of the young Galilean boatman, Jesus marked the spirit of hardy zeal, which, purified by contact with Himself, would fit him for his great initiative mission among the apostles.” — Pretsenst.

“Admire the dispensation of the Lord, how He draws each by the art which is most familiar and natural to Him — as the Magians by a star, so the fishermen by fish.” — Chrysostom.

“It was desirable that the first impression made on Peter’s mind should continue to act on him in quiet, on which account Christ first left him to himself. And when, by repeated operations, everything in his disposition was sufficiently prepared, He received him into the number of His disciples,” — Neander.

ing, when the sultry heat of summer had disappeared; when the trees were either bared of their leaves, or seared with latest autumnal tints, and the voice of the turtle was silent. A delightful season — in some respects the most delightful on the shores of at other times sultry Gennesaret. Let one who with an artistic eye has tested the charms of atmosphere during that month bear testimony — and the description applies equally to the Apostolic era —” We arrived there on the 17th of November.... There was sometimes a refreshing breeze, especially on the water, and the colouring of the scenery was really beautiful: the mountains, arid and barren masses of rock on the eastern side, were clothed nearly all day in delicate lilacs and purples, sometimes rosy, sometimes golden — the water was always of a light-greyish blue — the n&bk and walnuts that fringe the western shore were in their highest luxuriance, and the blossoms of the oleanders were absolutely glorious If any one wants to feel the

beauty of the Lake of Gennesaret, let him spend a November or December evening on its bosom, watching the varying scene, till all has faded into darkness — till he has done that, he has not understood that lake; here above all places one realises, in the scenery over which the familiar associations of Scripture have cast their halo, that, —

“‘The colouring may be of earth,

The lustre comes of heavenly birth.’”1

Our blessed Lord had recently returned into His beloved Galilee. Several eventful months were now to be spent on the shores of the Lake of Tiberias ere the next Passover in March or April summoned Him again to the capital. Capernaum was then for the second time, as it continued with little variation afterwards, His Galilean residence, after He had bidden farewell for ever to the sanctities of His old dwelling in sunny Nazareth. It never can cease to be an interesting thought in connection with St Peter, and a special token of honour, distinction, and friendship conferred on the son of Jonas, that it was his home there, as we have already noted, which the divine Messiah made His most permanent earthly resting-place during the years of his public ministry. Nicephorus tells us that Helen, the mother of Constantine, erected a beautiful church on the supposed site of the apostle’s house. £ need hardly say, no

1 Miss Beaufort’s Syrian Shrines. trace of it, amid the modern wilderness of ruin and desolation, can be found. We cannot tell whether the blue waves of the lake murmured under its lattice, or whether it looked out to the vines and olives climbing the slopes behind. But it is enough to know that somewhere nigh was that most consecrated of earthly homes, which stood in the same relation to Galilee as the dwelling at Bethany did to Judea. On one of the Sabbaths of Christ’s sojourn, after the synagogue services were over, we read that He repaired, probably at midday,2 to the apostle’s dwelling, and raised up his wife’s mother from a violent (” great “) fever.8 So that from that hour Jesus must have been linked, not only to the apostle, but to his grateful relatives, by ties of no ordinary gratitude and affection. Here a passing remark may be interposed, and in doing so I shall use the words of another:” This part of the history of the Apostle Peter reminds us that the Evangelists have left, as it were, their protest in making us specially acquainted with the fact, that the man whom the Church of Rome exalts to a supremacy above all the apostles was a husband, and the head of a family. That he continued to sustain these relations after entering upon

1 8ft Mark speaks of it as “the house of Simon and Andrew.” St Lake only as ’ * Simon’s house, ““his stronger personality causing Andrew (though probably with natural prerogatives as the elder brother, and certainly with spiritual, as the earlier called and the bringer of his brother to Jesus) here, as elsewhere, to fall into the background.*’ — Trench, p. 234.

* “The service in the synagogue, the forms and hours of which appear to have been studiously conformed to those in the temple worship, would in all probability have commenced about nine o’clock, and ended sometime before midday.” — Ellieitt, p. 164.

t Dr Thomson remarks,” Fevers of a very malignant type are still prevalent, particularly in summer and autumn As there is considerable

marshy land about Tabijah, may not this account for the prevalence of fevers at Capernaum t” Autumn was the season when this miracle was performed.

Lis apostolic work is shown by the assertion of St Pan], that he himself had the right, although he did not choose to exercise it, of forming a conjugal connection, and of being accompanied bj his wife on his missionary journeyings, as well as his fellow-apostles, naming particularly the subject of our present remarks: ‘Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord and Cephas f Is it not the finger of God that hath preserved these notices of this apostle’s domestic history, immaterial as they might at first havd appeared, and yet rendered very important by the subsequent rise, and an ti- christian errors, of the great Apostacylw 1

But to return. That Sabbath which witnessed the miraculous recovery in the house of Peter was indeed in every respect a memorable one. As it began with a discourse in the synagogue, followed by more than one miracle, so it ended by multitudes at sunset, after the sacred hours were past, bringing their sick from all quarters — probably to the city gates — to receive the healing touch of the Great Physician.” The gate of an Eastern city is the great place of public resort: it occupies the same position as the Agora of Greek cities. In the burning climate of Syria, the cool hours of evening are chosen by the inhabitants for coming out of their houses; then begins a singularly noisy stir of life — the women go to the fountain with their pitchers on their heads, the men gather in groups about the gates of the city to talk over the events and interests of the day.

i Bishop Lee, pp. 28, 20. One cannot note without a smile the easy method by which some Romanists, in their defence of celibacy, g**t rid of the difficulty of Peter being a married man. The gratuitous assertion is propounded, that he was divorced from his wife after becoming an apostle I That evening the report of the miracles of Jeans banished every other theme at Capernaum. Every family brought out its sick; some bedridden, some tossing in the terrible agony of possession. A melancholy spectacle, the epitome in this little corner of the world, of all a world’s sufferings.“1 In the same honoured abode where the miracle was performed, Jesus seems to have spent the night as the guest of His disciple and friend, obtaining under his roof needed rest” The meal would be taken in common; and the disciples receive doubtless from the lips of the Master, the explanation of His discourse in the synagogue. We at least know that such was the wont of Jesus in the familiar circle of His friends.19 From an incidental reference in St Mark’s Gospel, we are almost warranted in imagining Peter’s surprise, if not disappointment, when he found, at early morning (aa great while before day,” ere he himself had embarked in his fisherman’s toil), that the Divine Visitor had left His couch of repose, and had retired for prayer and communion with His Heavenly Father, to some “solitary place,” up amid these quiet hills. The multitude, whom darkness had dispersed on the preceding night, were already gathered around the dwelling, eager to see the wonder-working Prophet. And the same Evangelist alone mentions, that “Simon and they that were with him followed after Him/1 somewhat unceremoniously tracking His footsteps and obtruding on His privacy, addressing the urgent plea for His return, “All men seek for Thee” (Mark i. 37).

We have hitherto pictured Simon and his fellow-fishermen simply as disciples of Jesus, who had been

l Pressensg, p. 351. warmly associated with their new Master ever since the memorable interview at the Jordan. “They were already known as His disciples, and were indeed such in the affection and respect with which they regarded Him, but there was as yet nothing definite in the relation which bound them to Him. On their return with Him into Galilee, they resume their customary labours; but they are ripening for a more positive vocation. Ignorant as they yet are, they have learnt to know and love Jesus, and have a vague consciousness of His exalted dignity. Their hearts are His. There is nothing to hinder the Master’s forming a yet closer tie between them and Himself.” 1

It is at this period, then, to which we have just referred (perhaps the day following), that we are introduced to one of those gospel incidents in connection with Capernaum which has a bearing of special interest on the future apostle. We may suppose it to have been that morning hour when Nature was waking up again to life and energy; the waters of the inland sea gleamirig like silver in the early sun, the innumerable birds twittering in the thorny brakes greeting his rising. The wonted traffic had been resumed in the little seaport; and the fishermen, who had been out the livelong night, were returning to the nearest landing point with their spoil. Peter, along with three brother-seafarers — Andrew, John, and James — had reached the shore. They had been unsuccessful in their labours. Weary and jaded, they had pulled up their boat on the strand, and were in the act of washing their nets before repairing to their hamlets for refreshment and rest.2

l Pressense p. 844.

* Luke v. 2 dWrXwar: “The? washed them off — they cleansed them from But One who was no stranger to them had been noting their unrecompensed toil. There was a deep meaning and reason, which they knew not at the time, for the dispiriting results of their midnight industry, but which was, ere long, to be made manifest. Meanwhile, however, Simon’s Lord, “as one that served,” begs from the lowly fisherman the accommodation of his boat — the crowd unduly pressing upon Him — that He might make it a platform from which to address the multitudes who had gathered on the beach.

We may realise the scene. The lake, as we have seen, often fretted with storms, exposed to sudden gusts coming sweeping down the ravines, was now, shall we suppose, either musical with a gentle ripple, or hushed into a dead calm, — tree and rock, fishing hamlet and villa, mirrored in its quiet waters. Hushed, too, was the dense promiscuous throng on the shore; gathered, not on a Sabbath or other holy day, but willingly suspending life’s “common task” and toil, that they might listen to the Prophet of Nazareth. The great Object of their eager curiosity sat in meek majesty in the fishing-boat, about to speak the words of eternal life. “I was delighted to find,” says Dr Thomson,” small creeks or inlets between Tabiga and Tell Hum, where the ship could ride in safety only a few feet from the shore, and

weeds, Ac., and hung them up to dry till they should be wanted again on the

following night.” — Wordsworth’s Greek Test. “There is the bag-net and basket-nets of various kinds, which are so constructed and worked as to enclose the fish out in deep water. I have seen them of almost every conceivable sire and pattern. It was with some one of this sort, I suppose, that Simon had toiled all night.” — Land and Book, p. 402.

1 Dean Stanley, “Sinai and Palestine, “p. 373, notes, that on another occasion, when Jesus similarly addressed the multitudes ranged on the level shore, delivering His well-known succession of parables, it was from “/Ae boat — the boat of passage that lay close by for the purpose.” where the multitudes, seated on both sides and before the boat, could listen without distraction or fatigue. As if on purpose to furnish seats, the shore on both sides of these narrow inlets is piled up with huge boulders of basalt.“1 Although mountain and shore were not at that particular time of the Gospel narrative carpeted with the emerald of spring, and decked with their profusion of flowers, no season of the year could defraud Gennesaret of its beauty. The lake itself, and its varied surroundings; the balmy air; the fresh sparkle of its limpid waters; its beautiful fringe of rock and sand; the rivulets, rare in other parts of Palestine, furrowing the hillsides; and, above all, glorious Hermon, like a high altar, or rather, the enduring type of Christ’s own eternal power and Godhead, made it a fit and glorious temple for inaugurating a ministry of love.” There was something,” it has been eloquently said,” significant in the place which He chose as the scene of His earliest ministry. St John had preached in the lonely wastes by the Dead Sea waters; his voice had been echoed back by the flinty precipices that frown over the sultry Gh6r. The city nearest to the scene of his teaching had been built in defiance of a curse, and the road to it led through * the bloody way.’ All around him breathed the dreadful associations of a guilty and desolated past; the very waves were bituminous; the very fruits crumbled into foul ashes under the touch; the very dust beneath his feet lay hot and white over the relics of an abominable race. There, beside those leaden waters, under that copper heaven, amid those burning wildernesses and scarred ravines,

1 Land and Book, p. 360. had he preached the baptism of repentance. But it was, doubtless, a part of Christ’s Divine plan that His ministry should begin amid scenes so beautiful, and that the good tidings, which revealed to mankind their loftiest hopes and purest pleasures, should be first

proclaimed in a region of unusual loveliness If

every vestige of human habitation should disappear from beside it, and the jackal and the hyena should howl about the shattered fragments of the synagogue where once Christ taught, yet the fact that He chose it as the scene of His opening ministry will give a sense of sacredness and pathos to its lonely waters till time shall be no more.” 1

His address being concluded, He turns to Peter with the command, “Launch forth into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.” 2 The other replies by telling, despondingly, of their want of success; that “all night” (the best and most likely time for catching) they had laboured in vain; but, addressing Jesus as

i Dr Farrar’g Life of Christ, vol. i. pp. 173, 177.

s My late lamented friend, Dr Norman Macleod, narrates, in his “Eastward” — a book which combines accurate and reliable information with great charm of vivid description — “There are only two boats on the lake, and we sent a messenger to the town to secure one of them for us after dark, requesting that some fishermen with their nets would accompany it. For other reasons than they could conjecture, we were anxious to ‘go a-fishing.’ They came, accordingly, when the stars and moon were out in the sky. Few words were spoken; but each had his own thoughts as these rough men cast out their nets, wholly ignorant of other fishermen who long ago had done the same. It is unnecessary to suggest the memories which arose as the net was dropped in the calm sea, rippling under the .moonlight: or as, after encircling a wide space for our prey, we ‘caught nothing.’” My own experience, and that of my fellow-travellers, was different. We hired one of these boats. Its two Jewish owners had been out all night; but, though now wearied and half asleep with their prolonged labours, their toil had not been in vain — as they came for us after landing their “draught of fish*>” at Tiberias.

“Master” (evidently showing the relation in which ho already stood to Him), he adds, in simple faith and submission to a will he had been, taught to love, “Nevertheless, at Thy word I will let down the net.” For, as Dr Trench remarks, “these must not be regarded as the words of one himself despairing of the issue; on the contrary, they are spoken more in the spirit of the Psalmist when he exclaimed, ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’” 1 The result was, the enclosure of such a vast shoal of fishes that the overstrained net brake. It was a momentous act in the history of the Church; preliminary to the formal setting apart, on an early day, of Simon and his fellow-disciples to the office of the holy apostleship, to feed the flock of God, which He was about to purchase with His own blood.

In that august sanctuary of Nature, the Lord, alike of Nature and of Grace, discourses to His disciples and to the Church of the future by means of an acted parable. He makes the humble calling of the fishermen of Galilee convey — in the first instance to their own minds — lessons of faith and confidence and hope. He takes the nets they were washing as emblems and teachers of great truths, and prepares to make these simple-minded boatmen “fishers of men.” We have just seen, that on the lowering of the nets at the Divine command, the bootless efforts of the long, midnight hours had been more than rewarded. So astonishing, indeed, was the capture of fishes, that Simon had to beckon to Andrew and John to come to their assistance from the adjoining

* Notes on the Miracles, p. 13L boat. The net was discharged of its contents, and both vessels were filled to sinking with the spoil. Peter was in a moment prostrate at the feet of his Master, with the exclamation, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” 1 “The man recognises, as he has never done before, his own vileness and nothingness; rises out of the dust of self-humiliation, a fitting instrument to set forward the glory of God, which he never would have been unless he had first been humbled there.”2 He had evidently a deepened consciousness, altogether of an intenser kind than he had at the meeting at Bethabara, that he was in the presence of no mere prophet or teacher, but of the great Lord of creation, the Owner of “the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea.” The words of Jacob may be taken as the interpreters of his present thoughts and feelings: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not” It was the lesson that prepared him to make the more confident avowal at a later time, “We believe and are sure that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

How gently Christ re-assures him, “Jesus said unto Simon, Feab not.” And then, having allayed his doubts, the Master proceeds to unfold the nature and duties, the responsibilities and discouragements, of the great work which in due time he was officially to undertake r “From henceforth thou shalt catch men;” — words of deep prophetic meaning.” Sinking, as was so often His custom, the higher in the lower, and setting forth

l The Greek word employed for “man * implies a deep consciousness of his personal airworthiness aad sin. It is dvtjp &fMprtalbt (not Wpunros). * Notes on the Miracles, p. 134. that higher in the forms of the lower,” the Divine Speaker made the mute tenants of the lake — that lay in dead and dying heaps in the net — a pledge of far vaster spiritual successes. As, according to the remark of Origen, Paul the tentmaker was to become “the maker of everlasting tabernacles/1 so Peter was to retain his net, but souls were to be the nobler prey. He was to buffet waves still, but they were to be the waves of human passion, and ignorance, and crime. He was to hoist his sail still on a more treacherous sea, but, with a mightier arm than his own guiding the helm, he would reach the heavenly shore with the unbroken net, and lay at his Redeemer’s feet joyous multitudes rescued from the depths of ruin and despair. Or, as Christ’s charge to Peter has been beautifully paraphrased by a writer to whose exposition of the miracle we are much indebted, “Those that were wandering at random through the Salt Sea waves of the world, among its deep, unquiet waters full of whirlpools and fears, the smaller of them falling a prey to the greater, and all with the weary sense as of a vast prison, thou shalt gather into one, embracing them all within the same folds and recesses of the Gospel net”1

It is only further added, “And when they had

i Archbishop Trench, p. 136. Bishop Wordsworth also notes the force and meaning of the word “catch” in the original: “This draught of fishes .... foreshadowed the success that would attend the labours of the apostolical fishers of men, in drawing the net of the Gospel through the sea of the world, and enclosing the wandering shoals of heathen nations within it, to that they might be ‘caught — not. for death, but for I ft eternal.” .... “The expression is stronger than the 4 catch men ’ of our rersion dvOpd)- tovs to~V fapy&v — ‘Thou shalt be a catcher of men alive. This shall be thy future occupation — to catch men for life eternal, Instead of catching fish for death.’ “— Greek TeUament in loo. brought their ships to land, they forsook all and followed Jesus.” Peter was among that honoured band, who have left the Church of God in every age so impressive an example of renunciation and self-denial. It was — it must have been — for him and them a trying hour. At a moment’s warning their occupations were to be surrendered. The hallowed scenes of youth were around them. Every rock and ravine, every sheltered nook and bay in that lovely sea, was familiar to them. The Bethsaida hamlet, from which childhood was wont to rush in its sunny morning to welcome their fathers and brothers as their boats rasped the shallows after a night of toil, was in full view. The strange summons addressed to them, and accepted, implied separation from these homes and scenes, probably for ever. They just had, moreover, their boats filled to overflowing. Elated with success, which they might have been perverse enough to attribute to ordinary causes, they never before had so strong inducement to cleave to their nets -and prosecute their calling. They were about to exchange their little all, in order to attach themselves to the person and fortunes of the reputed Son of a carpenter, who was often unable to tell of so secure a shelter as had the fox of the mountain, or the bird of the forest! Yet, they “straightway,” without delibeiating, without conferring with flesh and blood, without reasoning on matters of expediency, willingly surrendered that all, and cast in their lot with the despised and rejected One!

Were they ultimately sufferers by their devotion? “Lo,” says Peter on an after occasion, “we have left all and followed Thee.” Jesus said, in reply, “Verily, I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God’s sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.” 1

l A part of this chapter is abridged from the author’s “Memories of Gennesarei.”