The Hundredfold Promise
Michiel Peeters - Let’s imagine the scene. Simon, James, and John, Jesus’s new friends, have a small common business; they own some boats with which they catch fish on the Lake of Galilee.
The best time for fishing is nighttime. One morning, they had been fishing all night and hadn’t caught one fish. We can imagine them, tired and disappointed. While cleaning their nets, they see a great crowd arriving, and when they look better, they realize that they are “pressing in on Jesus,” who is “standing by the lake.”
We are in the first period of Jesus’s preaching. His words, his accent, the way he looks at people, his “authority”—in the sense that he knows what he is talking about—and the correspondence of what he says with the heart, attract a lot of people, especially those who have a question, who are open.
They perceive that what he says is “the word of God”: it explains their lives, it gives meaning to their lives, to their questions, to their wounds, to their relationships, to their work. So much that they come to listen to Him from the break of day.
When Jesus sees the boats, he gets into one of them and asks Simon “to put out a short distance from the shore.” From there, he can more easily speak to the crowd. After he has finished speaking, Jesus proposes something strange to the fishermen: “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.” Logically, Peter answers: “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing…”
If during the whole night, we haven’t caught one single fish, during daytime, it’s even more improbable. However, they already have some experience with the “Master.” What he says, whatever it is about, is never absurd, without meaning.
They have experienced this already. Because of this experience they already had with him, Peter says: “But at your command, I will lower the nets.” Then they see how, on Christ’s word, with Him, according to Him, their same activity, their same fruitless, disappointing, tiring, ultimately sad activity, becomes unexpectedly fruitful: “They caught a great number of fish, and their nets were tearing.” It’s one of the many examples of the “hundredfold in this world” Christ promises to those who follow Him: “Anyone who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and the sake of the Gospel will receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands.”
When we do the things according to Christ, for Christ, with Christ, we receive them back, a hundredfold. That is the promise. We are invited to verify it.
How did Simon, John, and James become Christians? By seeing this kind of thing happen again and again. Christianity is true because it “works;” it enhances daily life; when verified, it makes daily life more human, more “life.”
How can we become Christians? In the same way. By experiencing that the Christian proposal works. By experiencing that our studying or working, our relationships, the way we treat our boyfriend or girlfriend, the way we look to our parents, the way we live our friendships, when lived “at Christ’s word,” because of Christ, in his presence, change, become better: the same activities, the same relationships, instead of ultimately deluding and sad, become fruitful.
It takes fatigue—the fatigue of following, of starting again, of accepting to learn again the things we thought we already knew—as it was for Peter. But the real question is not: does it take a sacrifice? Everything beautiful and true takes a sacrifice. The question is: in experience, is the sacrifice worth it?
20250209 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time C (Lk 5:1-11)
(Homily by Fr Michiel Peeters, Tilburg University Chaplaincy) The author has not revised the text and its translation.
