How to read this page

An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

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Intertextuality Pair

Luke 5:10 → Jeremiah 16:16

Echo

Later text

Luke 5:10BSB

and so were his partners James and John, the sons of Zebedee. “Do not be afraid,” Jesus said to Simon. “From now on you will catch men.”

Earlier text

Jeremiah 16:16BSB

But for now I will send for many fishermen, declares the LORD, and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill, even from the clefts of the rocks.

Walk the Square · a single-voice walk of this pair around the Clowney square13:26

Significance

Jesus tells Simon, "Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men." Luke's verb is ζωγρέω (G2221) — to take alive, to capture without killing, used in the Septuagint of prisoners spared in war. Behind the fishing image stands the prophetic figure of Jeremiah 16:16, where the LORD says, "I will send for many fishermen, and they will catch them" — and there the catching is judgment, gathering Israel to be hauled off into exile. The same figure runs through the prophets: Amos 4:2 threatens the complacent women of Samaria that they will be "taken away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks," and Habakkuk 1:14-17 pictures Babylon dragging the nations in a net. The Old Testament's fisherman is consistently an agent of judgment, and the fish are consistently caught to be destroyed.

Found via: No public domain commentary confirmation available
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Contrast

Jesus takes that image and inverts it with a single verb. His fishermen will take men alive. The net that in Jeremiah and Amos and Habakkuk drags people to death becomes the instrument by which they are rescued from it. And the commission comes not after the disciples prove themselves but immediately after Simon has fallen at Jesus' knees, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man" — the first man caught alive is the fisherman himself. Where the prophets' catch was gathered for ruin, Christ's catch is gathered for life; the mission of the church is the glad reversal of the prophetic net.