Fish

There’s a peculiar and usually unnoticed detail at the end of John’s Gospel. After the horror of the Crucifixion and the bewilderment of the Resurrection, the Apostles – surely drained emotionally and physically – did something extraordinary: they went back to their jobs as fishermen. 

This was during that foggy time between the Resurrection and the Ascension when the Apostles were unsure of what to do next. “Our Lord was not with them regularly,” Saint John Chrysostom explained, “and they had received no commission. They had nothing to do.”¹ And so Peter announced to the group: “I am going fishing” (Jn 21:3).

You’ll remember that, after catching nothing, Jesus (unrecognized at this point) shouts to them from the shore telling them to fish from the other side of the boat. We have seen this before, when Peter and Andrew first encountered Jesus and, like that first miraculous catch, once again “they were not able to haul [the net] in, for the quantity of fish.” Peter then famously leapt into the sea. 

But there’s another, perhaps even more peculiar detail in this scene. Indeed, John’s Gospel actually recounts the exact number of fish they caught: “Peter went and hauled the net full of fish ashore,” we read. “There were one hundred and fifty three of them” (Jn 21:11).

There’s a comical reflection on this scene in David James Duncan’s 1983 novel about fishing called The River Why:

When the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to the famous catch of John 21, we learn that the net contained not “a boatload” of fish, nor “about a hundred and a half,” nor “over a gross,” but precisely “an hundred and fifty and three.” This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that in the net there were “great fishes” numbering precisely “an hundred and fifty and three.” How was this digit discovered? Mustn’t it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven…” all the way up to an hundred and fifty and three.²

The Church Fathers read the 153 metaphorically. They symbolized the variety of souls the Apostles would “catch” as Christianity spread throughout the world. Indeed, Saint Jerome noted that Greek zoologists had identified 153 different species of fish around the world.³ The 153, caught and counted on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, then, were a clever way of saying the Apostles, about to be sent on their worldwide mission, will catch souls of each and every type and from each and every nation.⁴

But I also can’t help but wonder, with Duncan, if there isn’t something to the very literalism of the scene. Surely they really did count their catch. “They were fishermen,” we are told (Mt 4:18; Mk 1:16), and fishermen are preoccupied with these kinds of things – with weights and statistics.

Statistics are more serious than we might think. Some numbers reach to the very heart of things. When a child is born, the first thing we do (like we do for a fish) is measure and weigh it, and these numbers are then seared into the memory of the mother for a lifetime. I was 7 pounds and 2 ounces, my mother tells me. My brother was 7 pounds, 6 ounces. 

It is just the same with fishermen. Duncan goes on: “Statistics are a tool upon which anglers rely so heavily that a fish story lacking numbers is just that: a Fish Story. A fish without an exact weight and length is a nonentity, whereas the sixteen-incher or the twelve-pounder leaps out of the imagination, splashing the brain with cold spray.”⁵

There is something about the literal numbers that recall and inflame the original experience. For the mother, the 7 pounds and 2 ounces are something concrete to hold onto from the mists of the most intense of moments. The statistics are so tied up with her motherhood and the start of this new life that they are simply unforgettable. It is similar, I think, for John and the rest of the Apostles. The 153 were so tied up with the very mystery of the Resurrection and with the birth of their new life that the number was simply unforgettable.

The fish is one of Christianity’s oldest and most recognizable symbols. You’ll find it in Christian art, in Christian literature, in the stained glass windows of churches. Images of fish appear on the walls of the Roman catacombs. Of course, there’s also the popular “Jesus Fish” bumper sticker.

Part of this is that Jesus frequently utilized fishing images. He compared the Kingdom of Heaven to “a net thrown into the sea gathering fish of every kind” (Mt 13:47). Or again: “what father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent” (Lk 11:11)? He promised to make Peter and Andrew “fishers of men” (Mt 4:19). 

But there is more going on here. The fish is not just an image familiar to the Apostles.

In the Scriptures, especially in the New Testament, the appearance of fish is accompanied by the mysterious and the supernatural. There is the “friendly little miracle” (as one commentary put it) when Peter inquired with Jesus about paying the Temple tax.⁶ He was told to “go to the sea, cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up. When you open its mouth you will find a shekel” (Mt 17:27). There are also the two miraculous catches from the Sea of Galilee wherein Peter, the first time, fell to his knees (Lk 5:1-11) and, the second, threw himself into the water (Jn 21:1-14). Jesus even likened his death and resurrection – the entire Paschal Mystery (no “friendly little miracle”) – to the moment when “Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jnh 1:17; see Mt 12:40).

Pitying the hungry crowds one day, Jesus multiplied a few loaves of bread to feed several thousand. You’ll remember, though, that, among the loaves, there were also a boy’s two small fish (Jn 6). Jesus went on to tell the crowds not to “labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life” (Jn 6:27). I wonder if something can be said here about the history of Christians turning to fish during times of abstinence, like Lent. This is about more than just avoiding meat. The fish itself places us in a space. It directs us to the “food which endures to eternal life.” Above all, it directs us to the Eucharist. Indeed, on the walls of the Roman catacombs, the bread and wine of the Eucharist were depicted alongside fish. In Da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper, plates of fish rest among the Eucharistic bread and wine.

For all their ordinariness, there remains something primordial and deeply mysterious about fish – something that touches the abyss and the beginning. The Book of Genesis opens with a “darkness upon the face of the deep” and “the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:2). God brings forth from it “swarms of living creatures” – “the great sea monsters and all kinds of crawling living creatures with which the water teems” (Gen 1:20-21). The fish, the sea monsters, the wriggling things – they were there at the beginning. Indeed, the text speaks of four rivers flowing in the Garden (Gen 2:10). It’s as if the fish – from whichever streams they’ve come – are still joined to those primordial waters. Indeed, where there are miracles, there are the fish. They, more than any other, can still reach the abyss.

We sense this at an intuitive level. This is why so many classic stories – The Odyssey or Moby Dick or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or even Jaws – are about encounters in the sea. There is something to be found out there and in the creatures of the deep – something hidden and ancient. This is Leviathan; this is Behemoth – the great chaos monsters that the Book of Job describes as somehow wrapped up with the very foundations of the earth (Jb 40 and 41). 

Ultimately, I think, these are stories about God. He is the “thing” which can be “found” out “there.” This is what fishing is about. For all the dramatic stories – for all the great catches fishermen talk about – the most elusive and mysterious thing anyone ever fishes for or hunts for or searches for is not game or food or sport but meaning. Indeed, it is God himself we are fishing for. Thus the fish appearing throughout Jesus’s ministry signaling the end of the Apostles’ search. Thus the very symbol of the Jesus fish. Thus the fish upon the Eucharistic table. “Put out into the deep water,” Jesus told the Apostles, climbing into their boat (Lk 5:4).

The Apostles remembered that they’d caught not a boy’s two small fish that day on the Sea of Galilee but one hundred and fifty and three. And yet the real “catch” was what Peter leapt into the sea for, what he fell to his knees for. It was Jesus. It was the God who gives himself to us – who feeds us with fish and with loaves and, above all, with his very self. 

1. Saint John Chrysostom, Homily LXXXVII on the Gospel of John.

2. David James Duncan, The River Why (Back Bay Books, 2016), 20.

3. Saint Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, §14 and §47.

4. See Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 200.

5. Duncan, The River Why, 20.

6. See The Navarre Bible, The Gospel of Saint Matthew (Four Courts Press, 1991), 159.