18 - Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII THE FISHING NET
ONCE again, in a scene as familiar to his hearers as to himself, Jesus sees an illustration of a point he wishes to make clear. He has often noted how the fishing-net, working unintelligently, inexorably, ruthlessly, drags within its meshes all kinds of marine objects, animate and inanimate. When the net is drawn to the shore, the fishermen set to work on the motley collection; for the first time an intelligent principle is brought to bear on the seething mass. A selection is made; the fishermen are after fish that they can sell; all objects that answer this description are carefully separated and placed in baskets. The other objects in the net may have other uses; some of them certainly have: but they are of no use for the fisherman’s purpose; in them he is not interested and they are tossed outside.
There is no parable to which hilicher’s main principle is more applicable. There is one point, and one only: the Kingdom works as a divisive force. We are to find here no teaching of the fate in this life or in the life which is to come of those who are cast aside. God has still his relation to them; the citizens of the Kingdom have still their duty towards them. Our Lord was speaking out of his experience; as he came in contact with one after another, and delivered his message, he acted as a touchstone. Some gladly accepted; some turned against him with scorn and malice; some begged to be excused. Our Lord seems to have been deeply impressed with this selective power of the Kingdom. Many of those who are tossed aside as being useless for the Kingdom may have capacities very valuable for other purposes. They may be poets or artists, inventors or business organizers, good fellows, amusing fellows, and so forth; is all this to go for nothing? Is not life a far broader and richer thing than these narrow ethical and spiritual tests of Jesus would make it? Many would tell us that he ignores some of the most important and valuable spheres of life. Art has its kingdom and its kings, its citizens and its laws. There are realms of knowledge as well as the realm of God, princes of science and discovery as well as sons of God; there are industrial triumphs and political achievements which take their place at least alongside the spiritual victories to which the followers of Jesus attach so much importance. In the saner forms of this criticism there is a real difficulty, but our Lord would accept the challenge. The Kingdom does not exist in a vacuum; its forces can be seen at work only in life’s other activities, but its place among them is always the supreme place. For Jesus the Kingdom of God is not a kingdom but the kingdom. Its aims and tests and values are the ultimate aims and tests and values, in the long run the only ones that count. Our Lord’s means of locomotion were his feet, the fishing boat, and a horse or ass. There is no indication that he felt his ministry impeded by the primitive nature of his means of communication, that his work would have been more effective had he used a car, or that he would have considered the inventor of such a machine necessarily entitled to a high place in the Kingdom. He had never seen a mill or factory. If he had, his one question would have been: “ Have they brought men nearer God; the men and women that work in them as well as the men and women who consume their products? ’ There are indications, in the story of the Syro-Phoenician for example, that he appreciated ready wit, and recognized that a healthy humour gives salt to life. In all his recorded utterances there is no reference to a picture, save those which God has drawn with his own hands; or to a piece of music, save the Hosannas of the children; or any certain reference to literature save the sacred books of the Jews. But neither do we find any depreciation of these things, and in so far as they enrich and uplift life, surely our Lord would have welcomed them as allies. The subject is one on which it is easy to depart from reality and become priggish. There are whole realms of life and many spheres of pleasant activity in connection with which moral questions can hardly be said to arise. To suggest that one should not enjoy a play of Shakespeare or Aristophanes or play a game of golf except in so far as one’s character is improved by the experience would not be a sign of moral health and would find no support in the teaching of Jesus. The late Dr. Denney spoke of the welcome relief he found in Homer from the strain of the spiritual tension of the New Testament. Surely every good gift of God is to be received with thanksgiving, and we do thank God for a thousand precious gifts which at first sight seem to have very little relation to the Kingdom of God. It is not for us to assess the relative values of the intellectual and artistic triumphs which have exalted human nature and made us feel that the world is a good place to live in.
It is very possible, also, to exaggerate the extent to which Jesus ignores all spheres in life save the ethical and spiritual. His parables, like so much of the rest of his teaching, testify to his vivid interest in the varied activities of men and in the world of nature. Jesus was no aesthete in the narrow sense of the term; but he had the artist’s hatred of ugliness, and a determination, which not all artists have, to do his part in abolishing ugliness from the earth.
Many of the sights that met his eye were as offensive to the senses as to the spirit: beggars, lepers, demoniacs, epileptics, people with loathsome sores. He felt that such sights were out of place in God’s world; he pitied the victims and sought to deliver them from their repulsiveness as well as from their pain. The coming of the Kingdom of God would mean the fulfilment of the loftier dreams of the artists as well as of the moralists.
“ The love of God is broader than the measures of man’s mind; ’ there are first which shall be last and last which shall be first. We may be far astray in our judgments of men’s contribution, of our own contribution, to the welfare of the world. None of these things alter the central fact: our Lord’s mission was to seek to turn the world as it is into the world as God meant it to be, and in this work to invite the co-operation of all men of good will. There are those who gladly respond, and there are those who decide that for them other interests are supreme.