Luke 6:27-38, from the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany .

“Gospel” means “good news,” but the Lectionary has some especially bad news for us this week, straight from Jesus’ lips.

Got enemies? You must love them. Every time they hate, curse and abuse you, you must respond by doing good to them, blessing them, and praying for them. If one of them slaps you in the face, you must invite them to do it again. If one of them steals your coat, you must add your shirt to the thief’s haul. You may not ask for either one back, either. And if a beggar wants something from you, you have to give it up, no questions, no receipts, no IOUs. Escape judgement by not judging and condemnation by not condemning. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Treat others – all others, not just the deserving ones – the way you want to be treated. Give goodness in the same measure you want to receive it.

If that’s good news, who needs bad news, or even terrible news? Because the news here sure seems to boil down to this: I’m never going to get anywhere near heaven. If someone hates, curses, abuses, smacks or steals from me, they can expect to get the same treatment back in spades. Sure, I’ve let people off the hook now and then. But not every time. Not even most of the time. Whoever Jesus is talking to, here, he’s not talking to me, or even to someone I could become.

In fact, this whole Gospel thing – is this some kind of bait and switch? Sure, Paul scribbled all that stuff about our being made righteous by faith alone. But here’s Jesus, himself – Paul’s boss, so to speak – going on about a moral code that’s impossible for me, or, really, anyone, to live by.

And since I’m asking hard questions, here’s another: How come this high moral code Jesus is describing never seems to come up when Christians get all enthused about denouncing sin? They’ll work themselves into a lather about sex, drugs, booze, rock ‘n’ roll, uppity women, rebellious kids, and baking wedding cakes for gay couples. But they never seem to denounce being armed to the teeth against thieves and attackers, reducing to rubble countries that threaten ours, making poor people work for their SNAP benefits, or wiring death row inmates into the power grid long enough to fry the life out of them. How do these glaring omissions square with Jesus’ commands to turn the other cheek, to give beggars what they ask for and thieves even more than they steal, and to neither judge nor condemn?

In sum, the “good news” looks like bad news and probably a swindle as well, and the people pushing it usually seem more hypocritical than holy.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve got this Gospel all jumbled up.

Maybe Jesus is describing God-level morality to disabuse us of the idea that we’re at all capable of practicing it. Maybe Jesus’ point is that even the most uptight Pharisee (or Family Research Council acolyte) still comes up short and would do well to remember it. Maybe Jesus knew that yet another moral code wasn’t going to fix the world, and maybe that explains his determination to fix the world by dying for it on a cross.

And maybe Paul’s great insight was that Jesus’s death somehow made it possible for God to just dismiss all charges against the world and everyone in it – possible for God to offer righteousness “given though faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” (Rom. 3:22), righteousness so complete and permanent that there remains “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1), and that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).

Now that right there is some actual good news. Not coincidentally, it’s also some actual Gospel.

Luke 5:1-11, from the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany .

Luke’s story in Chapter 5:1-11 about the calling of Peter shows just how dangerous it is to let Jesus set foot in your boat.

Compared to Luke’s account, the versions in the other Gospels make the whole affair look perfectly rational and safe. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus spots Peter fishing, calls him to follow, and Peter decides to do it (Matt. 4; Mark 1). John tells us Peter met Jesus through an introduction by Peter’s brother Andrew, who was a disciple of John the Baptist (John 1). Luke’s account, alone, shows just how doomed you are once the Messiah has set his sights on you.

It all seems harmless enough at the start of the story. Jesus is preaching on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and the crowd of listeners is so enthralled that it is literally driving him into the water. Not salt water, by the way. When we hear “sea,” we often assume it means “ocean.” But the Sea of Galilee is really a freshwater lake on the border between Northern Israel and modern-day Syria. So, think Percy Priest, not Gulf Shores.

Perhaps shortly after Jesus realizes his feet are wet, he climbs aboard a nearby fishing boat as if he owns it. Because he does, although he’s probably the only one present who knows that he does. The nominal owner, Peter, is washing his nets nearby, having fished all night with his crew without catching so much as a minnow. Peter and Jesus already know, or at least know of, each other by this point. The end of the previous chapter describes how Jesus healed Peter’s mother in law, who had been suffering from a high fever.

Given the experience, maybe Peter though it would be handy for his village to have a holy man around. Maybe that’s why Peter didn’t object when Jesus hopped into Peter’s boat, sat down, and asked Peter to edge the craft out into the water a bit so Jesus could teach without getting drowned. But then Jesus, having ended his sermon, goes a bit too far.

“Put out into deep water,” Jesus tells Peter, “and let down the nets for a catch.”

How about that? Let the local holy man sit in your boat for a few minutes, and the next thing you know, he fancies himself the captain. And never mind that the nets have just been washed. And never mind that Peter and his crew have just pulled a long, but unproductive, all-nighter. And never mind that any fool knows you don’t fish during the day.

Peter does it – God knows why – but not without grumbling. “Master,” he says – maybe adding a little ice to the word, “we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

So Peter and crew do as Jesus ordered, and you probably know the rest of the story. So many fish fill the nets that the nets begin coming apart. Frantic, Peter signals his partners in a separate boat to come help. Both boats end up so full that they begin to sink.

And somewhere amid this chaos, Peter realizes Jesus is no ordinary holy man. Falling at Jesus’ knees, surrounded by, maybe even nearly covered in, flapping, flopping fish, Peter shouts essentially the same thing Abraham (Gen. 18:27), Job (Job 42:6), and Isaiah (Isaiah 6:5) had exclaimed upon realizing they were eyeball-to-eyeball with God.

“Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!”

Turns out “Captain Fool” is “The Admiral” in disguise, eh, Peter?

Then this strange story gets even stranger, because Jesus, having just made Peter’s fishing business a smashing success, fires Peter from it. He doesn’t ask, or even order, Peter to leave behind the fish, the nets, the boats, everything. He states it as a fact.

“From now on,”Jesus tells Peter. “You will fish for people.”

So, be warned, my friends: This is exactly the sort of thing you can expect will happen when you look up from your daily life to see this Jesus fellow helping himself to a seat in your boat or a moment in your day or a few of the dollars in your wallet. You might think it will be OK. Where’s the harm in being owed a favor or two by a guy with miracle power at his fingertips? Don’t be fooled, though. There might be an unexpected pile of fish in your near future, but he’s not ultimately interested in granting you wishes, like some genie you can keep stashed in a lamp. He has come for you, for every bit of you, and once he has you, he will share none of you with anything or anyone else. Taking a seat in your boat is just the start. Soon, he will take the whole boat, and you as well, out into the deep water. He will order you to toss overboard the nets you have worked so carefully to wash and dry. And when you do as he orders, the result will leave your beloved nets in tatters, your beloved boat foundering, your deck piled with not just more than you need, but more than you want.

And in the end, you’ll drag all of it and your very self onto the shore and simply abandon it there to go chasing after him and his crazy plans. Because the end of it all, you will learn, is the beginning of all that matters, and be you a sinful man, woman, boy or girl, he wants all that matters to be yours.