When I picture it, I imagine Habakkuk tossing and turning one night, on his bed in his temple apartment. He's not having a pleasant night's sleep. He's having a nightmare – and no wonder, after hearing the news of what happened in Ashkelon when they tried to hold out against Babylon. The city destroyed, the king caught and taken away as a captive... Horrible to think of. Horrible to dream of, too. But now Habakkuk dreams such a dream. In his dream, Jerusalem was underwater, but that was alright – he was a fish. They all were. A big school of fish, but Habakkuk recognized people he knew in the waking world. That big fish sticking with his head out of the palace, that was the king. Oh, that fish nearby in the temple court, that was one of Habakkuk's priest friends, Buzi. They swam and swam, but big fish kept biting smaller fish, gobbling them up – injustice under the sea.
Then a splash, and a few hooks descended from... well, what was there above the water? He felt so immersed in his dream, he could hardly recall. But he saw the hooks stick themselves into the mouths of a few colorful fish near the palace, and draw them up, up, and away. And for a moment, it seemed like it might stir up the pond. But the big fish went right back to eating the littler fish and polluting the water. Soon, another hook came, and it hooked the king fish. A small net splashed down into the water, scooping up many bigger fish and even smaller but colorful fish. Buzi's son Ezekiel was one – he was just close enough for the cast net to catch. Habakkuk watched in horror as up, up, and away they went, hauled out of their watery world into who-knows-what...
But the big fish left kept gobbling up smaller fish at an even faster rate. The new biggest fish, the new king, had his fins all over the situation. The water pollution got worse and worse. Until finally, a massive net dropped into the water. Weights at the bottom, floats at the top, it stretched as far as little fishy eyes could see in either direction, and it curled around the city. There it waited forebodingly, until at last it rushed in, the weights smashing Jerusalem, smashing the palace, smashing the temple. And all the fish, as they bolted up or down from the destruction, got caught. Habakkuk ran into the net, couldn't squeeze his way through the mesh. He felt himself dragged upward, upward... suddenly out of the water. Flopping and flailing in panic, his gills dry, his eyes wide, he fell to the floor of a boat, and heard voices speaking in the tongue of Babylon.....
And Habakkuk woke up in a cold sweat. That, at least, is what I imagine. Over the past few years up to this point, Habakkuk has been deeply concerned, as a temple singer and cult prophet, about what he's been hearing and seeing in Judah's society – the evil that surged back up as soon as righteous King Josiah was dead and his heir Jehoahaz was trapped in Egypt. It had seemed God's Law had lost its effectiveness, that unchanged hearts had outlasted a changed society. Habakkuk cried out with all the questions he'd brought from the downcast and downtrodden (Habakkuk 1:2-4). And in return, God had directed his attention above Judah's bubble to the international stage. God had spoken of a dreadful wonder he was doing: raising up a Chaldean dynasty to lead Babylon, to not only shatter Nineveh but to spread violence throughout the earth. It was hard to believe these distant reports could have any relevance to Judah, but God told Habakkuk they would, and that this evil's rise was his doing, his tool (Habakkuk 1:5-11). And now they'd been here. They'd scared off Egypt's armies, taken the reins as Judah's overlord, made an example of Ashkelon. And where Babylon's rise against Assyria had seemed good news just a few years ago, now the cure looked as bad as the disease. Habakkuk felt confused, frustrated, disgusted – if the Babylonians are who they act like, how can their rise be in God's hand? How can their idolatry and brutality be tolerated by a God whose eyes are too pure to look at evil (Habakkuk 1:12-13)?
Habakkuk has been troubled by God's answer ever since he heard it. And now that he's begun to witness what it looks like in practice, he's all the more bothered by what God professes to have unleashed. In the beginning, the Lord had said to the first human beings, “Fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea” (Genesis 1:28). Humans are humans, fish are fish, and there's a clear pecking order: fish are subjected to human dominion. But now, Habakkuk sings out in tears, God has turned him and all his friends into fish, given them the place of fish in the order of creation. Although the Babylonians are so beastly – like leopards and wolves and vultures (Habakkuk 1:8) – God has given them alone the dominion bequeathed to Adam and Eve. “You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler” (Habakkuk 1:14).
When Habakkuk thinks of the way Babylon has been treating nations left and right, the way they've begun to treat even Judah – which, mind you, is still the kingdom of the sons of David, still the priestly nation, still the place where the LORD God Almighty dwells – well, Habakkuk feels demeaned, feels depersonalized, feels dehumanized. God has demoted them to the status of sad little fish, and in this unfolding nightmare, God seems to keep looking the other way as Nebuchadnezzar takes one fishing expedition after another. One day, he catches a king on his hook. Another day, he casts a throwing-net over the upper-crust of this or that city. And in extreme cases, he threatens to stretch out his long dragnet from pole to pole and scoop up whole populations – entire cities, entire nations – and haul them out of their natural environment, lift them away from their lake and everything they've known, to be dumped in some Babylonian aquarium. “He brings all of them up with a hook, he drags them out with his net, he gathers them in his dragnet – so he rejoices and is glad” (Habakkuk 1:15).
Nebuchadnezzar may be glad, Nebuchadnezzar may find cause for rejoicing, but Habakkuk sure doesn't. And God allows all of this even though the Babylonians are both brutally violent and stupidly pagan. They worship, for all intents and purposes, their own military might and prowess. They rely on every victory to vindicate their false faith. In Babylon itself, literal fishermen were tasked with supplying fish for the cultic meals in Babylon's temples, and it was from these fish offerings that Babylon's priests ate.1 And so Habakkuk charges that the Babylonian fisher of men, to express his grateful joy for all this brutal military fishing, “sacrifices to his net and burns incense to his dragnet, for by them his share is sumptuous and his food is fat” (Habakkuk 1:16).2
But while Babylon is living large in this idolatrous frenzy of tyranny and destruction, Habakkuk feels like a fish in a small and vulnerable pond. And he's not worried just for himself, or even just for Judah. The Babylonians, militarily speaking, are setting out to be chronic overfishers. In killing thousands and taking thousands captive in every place they go, it's like they leave this or that pond empty, throwing entire ecosystems out of balance. Is God happy with that? Is he going to let it go on? Will this continue until the whole world has been fished to the point of a mass extinction event? “Is he,” Babylon the fisher of men, “to keep on emptying his net, and mercilessly killing nations forever?” (Habakkuk 1:17). Will Habakkuk's nightmare come true? That's what Habakkuk wants to know. That's the challenge Habakkuk's laying at God's feet. It's not too late, Habakkuk hopes, for God to find a less dreadful way, a more pure and humane and human way. “I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me...” (Habakkuk 2:1).
And there we leave Habakkuk. His nightmare did become a reality, though not a universal one or eternal one. As he and the other prophets warned, Nebuchadnezzar led quite a few fishing trips to the Promised Pond, until at last his dragnet cleared out Jerusalem all but entirely, and settled them in exile. It was a mass deportation – first a few, then a bunch, then the nation. Buzi's son Ezekiel was one of the bunch. But in rural Babylonia, when Ezekiel's thirtieth birthday saw him grieving the life he'd never live, a vision called him to be a prophet. Years later, in his last visions, he saw dusty bones come to life as a mighty army of hope. He saw Jerusalem remeasured, bigger and better than ever. He saw a new temple vastly outshining the one where Habakkuk had worked. And he saw a river of life come flooding out, deeper and wider, so potent it could take the sterile Dead Sea and make it a paradise. “And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish... Fishermen will stand beside the sea. From Engedi to Eneglaim, it will be a place for the spreading of nets. Its fish will be of very many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea” (Ezekiel 47:9-10).
Ezekiel's vision was packed densely with symbolism, and is all the more surprising because Judah never had a fishing industry. Habakkuk never went on a fishing trip, and neither did any of his neighbors. It just wasn't a thing you could very feasibly do there. But Ezekiel sees God's people as fishermen spreading out their nets in what was once the most lifeless place, and catching more fish than Hebrew had words for. And this is a great mystery. For in time, people came to read one of Jeremiah's prophecies, not as judgment, but as hope: “I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their fathers. Behold, I am sending for many fishers, says the LORD, and they shall catch them” (Jeremiah 16:15-16) – fishers to undo the Babylonian fishing of men.
And then Jesus Christ entered the world. He pointed to his very own body as the Temple which Ezekiel saw (John 2:21). From him would flow “the river of the water of life, bright as crystal” (Revelation 22:1), the Holy Spirit gushing out of any faithful heart united to his (John 7:38). In him, Ezekiel's prophecy was beginning to come true. And so, as he walked the shores of Galilee where a fishing industry had now begun, he came face-to-face with ordinary fishermen casting their nets into the lake for tilapia and carp and sardines. And it was here he found his first few disciples. “Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, 'The time is fulfilled! And the kingdom of God is at hand! Repent and believe in the gospel.' Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew (the brother of Simon) casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them: 'Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men'” (Mark 1:14-17).
What he said to them had the potential to be mighty disturbing. Had Habakkuk been standing by to hear Jesus say it, Habakkuk might've shuddered with dread. Because the Babylonians were fishers of men. It was wicked Babylon, idolatrous Babylon, that treated the nations like ponds of fish to hook and net and scoop for their own use. Babylon's 'fishing' was a merciless military action of extraction. Habakkuk might well have run over, interrupted Jesus, and asked, “Oh no! Are you raising up a New Babylon in Galilee?” Is that what this is?
And Jesus' answer would be no. This is not about the bad news of Babylon, but about the good news of God. Babylon's fishing of men was predatory, meant to deprive and dehumanize and destroy. It extracted people from their natural environment to haul them into an unnatural one, to put them in a more vulnerable and unhealthy position – that was the Babylonian fishing of men. But Jesus is appointing fishers of men who will do the opposite. For even in Galilee and Judea, let alone throughout the world, people are living like fish boxed up in aquariums of tainted water. Oh, they've acclimated to it, to the point where pure water feels like burning, seems toxic at first touch. But these tainted waters – waters of sin and death, under the devil's captivity – are slowly killing all the fishy people who've forgotten where their natural environment is, and that they were made to swim in strength and life and glory. Bred in a hurtful and unnatural captivity, we fish need to be caught, for our own good, and released into the heavenly waters we were made for. Only there can we rediscover our deeper humanity.
And so Jesus called Simon and Andrew and the rest to become for him “fishers of men,” but for the most un-Babylonian of reasons. And the same call he gave to them, he gives in some little measure to you and to me, to all who've already been snared by the gospel, all who've already been reintroduced to the holy baptismal waters, all who are re-acclimating – however painful that struggle – to the heavenly waters we were made for. We, too, are summoned to be a crew of fishers of men, likewise catching our fish, catching people, in the gospel.
Fishing is an act of love. And we've been told how love behaves. Any experienced fisherman knows he needs a great deal of patience when out fishing, doesn't he? And when Paul starts talking love, what's the first thing he says? “Love is patient” (1 Corinthians 13:4). Love looks like a patient fisherman, waiting all through the day by the side of the river or sitting in his boat, listening to the crickets chirp and frogs croak as he waits and waits and waits for a bite on the line. He's not rushed, not stirred up by urgency, no matter how hungry. He accepts the limits of his control over the situation, entrusts himself to God, and patiently fishes. And so must we, as fishers of men. We aren't sent into the world to hard-sell people, not called to use pressure tactics. Too often, we Evangelicals have tended to evangelize in the manner of blast fishing! But love is patient, and love is kind.
What else does Paul say? “Love does not envy or boast” (1 Corinthians 13:4). What's one of the most popular stereotypes about fishermen? The fish story. “It was this big!” We tell tales of the one that got away. We show that photograph of us next to our catch. We boast in the size of what we caught, we envy our neighbor his catch. Maybe that's good enough for fishermen after the flesh. Maybe it's good enough for Babylonians, too. But when Jesus calls for fishers of men, envy and boasting lose their place. Sometimes, we Evangelicals have tended to bring envy and boasting back into it, though. Ministries justify themselves based on counting up their massive catches or landing the city's bigger fish – that's how they promote themselves and raise funds, after all. Or we sit in envy of other believers who reel in what we wish we'd reached. But we're all part of Jesus' fishing syndicate. In this fellowship of fishermen, we aren't competitors, to envy or boast over one another. To spend your days hauling a single sardine into life is as much a cause for joy as to land marlins by the millions.
Paul adds that “love... is not arrogant or rude,” that “it does not insist on its own way” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). The Babylonians sure did. They used heavy-handed military coercion in their fishing of men – that was the whole point. But our fishing is not to be so. Whether fishing with hook-and-sinker for one or two, or casting a net for a group, or spreading out the dragnet between churches in a great evangelistic campaign, we must not be arrogant, not triumphalistic. We must not be rude and inconsiderate – we are fishers of men, of human beings, who never lose their full humanity, who are never merely targets to be won or points to be scored. We must not insist on our own way, piling all our political and cultural agendas atop the gospel that are foreign to the gospel. We are not sent to coerce, whether at sword-point or word-point. Love is all the method, love is all the goal.
Paul continues that “love... is not irritable” (1 Corinthians 13:5). Should we be surprised if fish try to escape the net, swim away when hooked, make it work to pull them in? Isn't it natural to resist a shocking change like capture? Just so, in fishing for people, even though it's good for them, we'll meet resistance. So we might get frustrated, might be tempted to throw our rod in the river and walk away. But we must not do that. Love is not irritable. (Besides, our lashing out will scare the fish!) Paul goes on: “Love... does not count up wrongdoing” (1 Corinthians 13:5). We might be tempted to look at some fish, some people, as unworthy or unlikely to be caught. We count up wrongdoing. But love doesn't do that, either. Love fishes in unlikely and unpleasant places. Love dissolves all prejudices. It doesn't matter how diseased the fish may seem – it's in an unnatural environment, after all, and that's the point. Just you wait to see what healing the heavenly water does.
Paul further says that “love... does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). If we do, we aren't fishing with love. Too often, we're tempted to fish with deceitful lures, a bait-and-switch that affirms that the heavenly waters will feel no different than the tainted waters of sin and death. We cannot fish honestly for people, cannot cast the gospel-hook or gospel-net with integrity, while affirming sin. That would be to rejoice at wrongdoing. Nor are we sent to dangle flashy artificial lures to catch the eye or to amuse the fish with gimmicks so we can watch them swim in and out of the holes we've cut in the net for their comfort. Our hook and net are the gospel and its truth; our all-natural bait is love itself. We hold out true examples of fish coming to life, thriving in purer waters. Love rejoices in the truth, and we're here to fish accordingly.
Finally, says Paul, “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). A fishing trip may be easy and relaxing, but the life of a professional fisherman is another story. It calls for hardiness, for it sails through hardship. But amidst it all, a loving fisherman will bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things. Because this is his mission. This is his lifeblood. This is more than what he does; this is who and why he is. And when that's true, you bear and endure, you believe and hope. And nothing less does Jesus ask when he calls fishermen. He isn't offering a hobby. He's instituting a life.
And to what end? The Babylonians fished for men, and – in Habakkuk's image – they sacrificed to their net and burned incense to their dragnet. They integrated fishing into their religion, and on the literal plane they brought their catch into their temple as an offering, a sacrifice. And maybe it's not for nothing that Ezekiel's vision of Israelite fishermen was downstream of his vision of a glorious temple where God would dwell again. Because where the Babylonians mercilessly killed and sacrificed to their net, we also fish for people for sacrifice – but not like the Babylonians did. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1). The fish we catch come alive when they swim upstream to God's temple and offer themselves – ourselves – as living sacrifices to the gospel, for the gospel and the temple are none other than Jesus Christ himself, the Sacrificial Fish on whom we feast in the holy courts. And all God's fishy people can come alive, can become the worship we were meant to be, only as we become living sacrifices in Jesus. That isn't merciless. That's mercy unending.
It's for that mercy, it's for that love, it's for that living sacrifice that we're sent fishing – fishing for men, fishing for humans, not after the manner of Babylon, but after the manner of our Savior. Thanks be to God! He teaches us how to fish his way for his prize. Now may the fishing be good indeed, in Jesus' blessed name. Amen.
Prayer
Most magnificent God of earth and sky and sea, Father of all that lives and moves and has its being in you, but most especially Father of those netted in your gospel: We thank you for saving us from the kingdom of darkness and bringing us into the kingdom of your Son to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. Long ago, one of those saints, a teacher in your Church, depicted Jesus as “a Fish of exceedingly great size and perfect, which a holy virgin drew with her hands from a fountain, and this it ever gives to its friends to eat, it having wine of great virtue and giving it mingled with bread.” Father, make us friends of faith, show us how to be worthy and where to eat this Perfect Fish under the outward forms of bread and wine. Bring us into the school of this Perfect Fish, to ever swim after him. Make us, too, fishers of men and women and children, fishers to catch all people with your gospel by love, and to lead them from darkness to light, from death to life, and deeper into holy and heavenly waters. And make us all, catchers and catch, living sacrifices united to your Son and his sacrifice most holy. For by this, and this alone, can we become holy and acceptable to our God. Without holiness, we can never swim the heavenly sea, and for nothing else than to swim in you eternally were we made, beholding the bright abyss of beatitude as perfect love gazes into perfect love. So give us in this life the grace of true fishermen and healthy fish. O Lord, show us favor! O Lord, grant us success! In Jesus' name. Amen.
1 Tyler R. Yoder, Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men: Fishing Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns, 2016), 24.
2 Tyler R. Yoder, Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men: Fishing Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns, 2016), 75.
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