Stretching a net to make a point
AM Psalm 37:1-18 • PM Psalm 37:19-42
Dan. 5:13-30 • 1 John 5:13-20(21) • Luke 5:1-11
St. Luke is variously described as being a physician, an artist who improbably painted a portrait for which Mary and the infant Jesus sat, and as the patron saint of bachelors. (I wonder how the text of Saturday night intercessory prayers to St. Luke goes.)
While the vocabulary, grammar, and style used by Luke in his gospel and in Acts makes it clear that he was highly educated and much comfortable writing in Greek than any of the other evangelists or the compilers of their sayings, the one thing Luke clearly was not was a fisherman at the sea of Galilee.
In chapter 5 of Luke’s gospel are a number of details about fishing operations he gets right, but others maybe not so much. There is washing of the fishing nets after a night of disappointment with no catch. Fishing at night was made possible because torch lights attracted fish to a boat. The washing makes sense because slimy algae and seaweed left too long can rot nets made of natural fiber.
Simon Peter has a fishing partner, Zebedee, whose boat was manned by his sons James and John and some hired help, a highly probable situation. The sons were suddenly called to action, ostensibly only because this particular big catch happened. But in fact, daytime fishing on the sea of Galilee at that time routinely involved a net stretched wide between two moving boats which made it more difficult for the fish, made warier by the greater visibility of daylight, to escape before they became entrapped.
I suspect that the mention of the miraculous catch was put in there to make more credible an even greater miracle for those times: two sons leaving the family business on the spot without any extended discussion with their father, who was left with only two boats full of fish and his remaining hired hands.
Now back to Luke, who made the news as late as the 1990s. Exhaustive scientific testing of his relics (the skull was in Prague, the rest of the body in Padua) made it highly probable that these remains were from the right era and ethnicity—from Syria or Turkey which at the time had multiple academies and whose educated class were Greek speaking—so as to be at least someone like Luke was thought to be. This led to an impassioned plea from Greek Orthodox prelates to give them the relics, since they had maintained a supposed burial site of Luke in Thebes for over 1,000 years, apparently with the wrong body, or no body at all, within it. After much prayerful ecumenical discussion (aka haggling) the Greeks were given the rib said to be closest to Luke’s heart, which put a whole new spin on the concept of prime rib.
Written by Tony Stankus
Tony is the first librarian ever to be promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor at the U of A. Now 70, he became an Episcopalian at age 66, because he could no longer resist the transcendent joy of the liturgies at St. Paul’s, nor the warmth of its priests and people.