Somewhere You Never Meant To Be
Reflections on the Lectionary for May 4th
The lectionary this week tells two different stories of ending up somewhere you never meant to be.
After everything—after all the traveling, all the teaching, all the strange sayings and indecipherable parables, after all the healings and arguments and miraculous moments and after all that time—they were back where they started, hauling in the nets and scanning the horizons for weather.
Seven of the disciples went fishing one evening. That might have been a comfortable thing to do, and maybe even a comforting thing to do—to return to the old patterns and ways of life they had known before everything changed. Fishing might have been a small bit of normalcy in the wake of so much trauma—some peace and calm back home after the calamitous violence and outright confusion of Jesus’ arrest and trial and crucifixion and resurrection. The disciples must have been ready for something familiar and knowable. Or maybe their families had berated them into it, seeing them come home after so long an absence, pointing to hungry half-grown children who needed feeding and run-down houses that needed repairing. Maybe wives and mothers and brothers and aged fathers had sent them straight back to the water to retake their rightful place as breadwinners. Whatever it was that made him do it, Simon Peter took the boat out of dry dock, dusted off the oars, and told the others. They climbed aboard, and the seven of them made for the deep part of the lake.
Of all the reasons they might have gone fishing that night, there’s one reason that feels more right to me than the others. I think the disciples just didn’t know what else to do. They had been following Jesus around for so long—a year? two or three years?—that they had become used to the strange rhythms of itinerant preaching and faith healing. They had become accustomed to the dusty roads and the half-excited, half-wary looks of the village kids who always met them on the edge of every new town. They had gotten good at sleeping in the lees of small hills and eating whatever they could scrounge up. And now it was all over. They had watched as Jesus—another hometown kid like the rest of them, one of the ones they had grown up with—had become famous, and then notorious, and then dangerous. They had seen him scooped up by night and dumped into the kind of opaque system of criminal justice that’s favored by empires and despots—no transparency, no real hope of fairness, just control and violence. Then they saw him strung up and killed, they saw him buried and dead, and then they saw him again—they still didn’t know what to make of it—they saw him bleeding and walking through walls.
Finding themselves reeling and placeless in the big city, unable to make sense of any of it, the disciples just started walking home. It probably took them a week or two to get there, but once they did, they fell back into doing the thing they had done before. They went fishing. It was like all the time in the middle had never passed, like they had picked up the nets the next moment after they dropped them, and their hands remembered what to do. Their bodies remembered how to move with the water. It must have been frustrating, then, when they fished all night without catching anything. They were out of practice, maybe, or the fish could smell the dry rot on the nets. The hull was empty when the sun came up, and I imagine that they let the unladen boat drift aimlessly through the water, turning it all over in their minds.
Saul, on the other hand, knew just where he was going. He walked with the confidence of a man carrying letters from important people, giving him permission to do the very thing he had long been wanting to do. Acts 9 tells how he walked the road to Damascus, righteousness at his back, a crew by his side, ready to do his worst to any followers of Jesus he might find when he got there. Saul was the leader of a theological hit squad, “breathing threats and murder,” eager to abduct anyone he found who didn’t fit his own criteria. He would have done it, too, if a light from heaven and a voice from Jesus hadn’t stopped him in his tracks.
Or at least that’s way the story goes.
Scholars spend a lot of time debating what to make of this story. Some call it a conversion, as if to emphasize that it’s turnaround tale, an account of a man whose purpose was interrupted and then transformed. Paul’s Conversion, the section headings confidently proclaim, which sets up a whole story about Paul where he was once one thing and then became another—once a Jew and now a Christian, once a persecutor and now an evangelist, once a skeptic and now a believer. That framing makes Paul into the paradigmatic convert, the example to end all examples of the person whose purpose was arrested and turned around mid-life.
I’m not so sure. When Paul tells this story for himself (as he does in Galatians 1:13-24), he hits all the same beats but he declines to call it a conversion. He still tells a history of being a persecutor, he still sets a scene somewhere not far from Damascus, he still thinks of the whole thing as an interruption, just like Acts does. But Paul pointedly does not use the language of conversion, and instead he talks about revelation and he talks about calling. Paul thinks something was revealed, and he thinks he was called. It was, in Paul’s telling, the kind of thing that one could not have resisted, even if one had wanted to. Paul’s own version of the events on the road to Damascus are written like a call narrative—the kind that the Hebrew prophets got when they were snatched out of everyday life and recruited into some divine mission. Paul makes a big point, several times in his letters, of emphasizing how very Jewish he still remained, and how important it was to him that he belonged to Israel, how he had never converted away from anything. It’s just that, midway on his journey, the same old God he had always known had given him a special and important job to do—a job just like God had given to the prophets.
Maybe in some sense it doesn’t matter terribly much which way read this story. In both the versions of the story we have in Acts and the version we have in Galatians, it’s about a life being interrupted, and it’s about having to change your mind about whatever purpose you thought you had. Saul thought he was on the way to Damascus to do one thing for God, but it turned out God had something very different in mind. It’s not so different from the story of the disciples in John 21. They are both stories of ending up somewhere you never intended to be, and finding yourself in a place you never meant to go. For the disciples it was a return, a reset, a kind of a reboot, like their life was making a circle—back to the boat. For Saul it was a detour, a dogleg off the plotted route. But either way, everyone ended up right where they never meant to be.
I have noticed, after having lived my way into middle age, that this is how most people’s stories work. We often end up right where we never meant to be. It’s rare to meet someone who plotted a path for themselves and followed it in some uncomplicated way. Instead, most people I know have wandered for a time, or they have seen their plans thwarted, or they have stumbled on something only after a long and arduous period of not looking for it. I was on a panel of professors last week, and we were invited to share the stories of how we made it to where we are. I think the students who had called for the panel were looking for a road map through the inscrutable and fraught world of academia, where qualified candidates far outnumber decent jobs and careers can take decades to take shape. But if they were looking for a tidy map, all they got was here there be dragons scrawled everywhere. None of us were able to point to any straightforward or simple pathway, even in hindsight. We all told stories of failure, luck, second and third and tenth tries, and heaping disappointment. Everyone on the panel had made it; that was the good news. But the bad news that none of us could tell a story of how we had made it that gave confidence to anyone else.
The same seems to be mostly true for everyone else I know, in one way or another. Almost nobody has a straightforward story; we have all taken paths that we didn’t plan and could not have predicted. This seems to be the way life is. But in the passage from John 21, and in the passage from Acts 9, the vagaries and unpredictable happenstances of life are given the shine of divine intervention. The seven guys on the boat were fishermen until Jesus showed up, and then they were disciples for a while, and then they were fishermen again for a night, until they were called out of the water and into some new and vague command to “feed my sheep.” Saul was certain that he had been sent by God to be a boundary-keeper and an enforcer of orthodoxies, until a light and a voice knocked him down and told him that he needed to be a boundary-crosser and a freelancer of what some people would call heresies. In both stories, we are led to believe that when our lives are interrupted and changed and when our paths suddenly start winding, we have God to credit, or to blame.
Maybe there is something divine about the way lives unfold—mysteriously, unpredictably, and with little regard to what plans anyone had ever made. Maybe these stories of interruption and change and calling are nothing more than heightened versions of what so many of us already know so well—that there’s no telling where anything will lead. One day we can be doing the things we think we were put here to do, and the next day we can be knocked down and called out and sent in another direction, to somewhere we never meant to be. Perhaps we are supposed to count all our failures and frustrations as messages from the divine; perhaps we are supposed to look at our empty-hulled boats and understand it as a blessing. Perhaps when we are knocked down in the road, stymied in our journey to the place we thought we were meant to go, we are supposed to listen for a call. Perhaps, when the paths wind most sharply and then disappear, we are supposed to call that holy.
Much to ponder here. Thank you.
Lovely insight and interpretation, Eric.