Extravagant abundance was Jesus’ signature style.
In today’s Gospel passage,* that unnerving profusion is manifested at Lake Gennesaret. Jesus tells Simon to take his boat back out in the lake and cast his fishing nets out again, though was exhausted from having just been fishing all night. After some well-justified resistance, Simon did as Jesus directed. Now, the catch wasn’t simply enough to make the extra work worthwhile. It was so plentiful that it almost sank Simon’s boat, plus another boat that had come to help pull up all the fish.
When I’m reading Gospel accounts of miracles, I read with one eye out for seeing God’s miraculous ways in and around me these days. Reading Luke’s account of the surfeit of fish seemed remarkably easy to relate to my own life.
Here’s how: I’ve have long loved to write. But my reaction to the possibility that I might really be meant to write has been to run to hide that particular light under the nearest bushel basket. In December, though, I made a commitment that I’d write at least two hours a day, six days a week for at least 12 weeks. I created a network of accountability by telling a number of people what I was going to do.
In response, one dear friend mailed a copy of a page from poet William Stafford’s essay, “A Way of Writing”. Here is an excerpt:
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that … brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions.
From the first, when I began to try to write things, I felt this richness. One thing would lead to another; the world would give and give. …It is like fishing. But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble. Something always occurs, the possibilities are endless. If I put down something, that thing will help the next thing come, and I’m off.
When I think of Jesus’ signature extravagant abundance, I free-associate to my personal favorite outrageous super-abundance of God as Creator. And that’s the universe itself. It’s not simply and merely awe-inspiringly large: it goes way beyond mind-boggling, beyond conception. Our own Milky Way galaxy consists of 100 billion stars, which is breath-taking enough. But the Milky Way is just one of uncounted billions of galaxies! I’ve often thought that God plays around with astrophysicists, by continuing to enlarge, elaborate and complicate the universe just to confound and perplex them.
So God knows there are enough sounds, syllables, thoughts, feelings, words, sentences, memories, stories, poems, prayers, essays, plays, and screenplays to fill the space and time of any writer, and all writers. Maybe more than all the fish in the sea! If I can trust, not that I’ll be a great writer by external standards, but that the world is wide and deep, then I suspect I’ll find freedom and gladness in playing with the extravagant abundance.
At Lake Gennesaret, Simon was so overwhelmed with the crazy impossibility and holiness of the moment, that he wanted it to end, and for Jesus to leave. Instead, Jesus invited them to step out of their fear, and into trust. Hard as it was for them to believe, these folks could, and would, become channels for the same kind of abundant creativity Jesus manifested, if they had trust enough to let their lives unfold into a new way of living. So maybe…, possibly…, I could take a few steps out in crazy trust myself.
And you?
-Jeanne Marcus, Alumna member of CoS communities
*Luke 5:1-11
