The Donations is based on Matthew 13: 47-50
Fishing
A fishing net catches anything too big to fall through the netting, all jumbled up together. After they’ve brought up their net, fishermen would need to sort through the catch. They’d keep the fish that were edible (had visible scales and fins) and throw away anything that wasn’t.
As far as we know, Jesus only told one parable about fish. It’s surprising, because Jesus spent a great deal of his ministry around and on the Sea of Galilee and several of his disciples were fishermen. The various Gospels contain many passages where Jesus is on the lake – telling the disciples where the fish were, sorting out a sudden squall, taking a short cut across the lake instead of around it. Perhaps, in this case, actions spoke louder than words.
Chaos
Seas and lakes, in Jesus’ time and culture, represented a chaos that only God could control. A fishing net, dragged along the bottom of the lake, would bring up everything – good fish, bad fish, old sandals… Perhaps that’s why Jesus uses this imagery for one of his ‘end of the age’ parables. Things now may seem chaotic, good and bad jumbled up together – but God knows which is which. The seeming chaos (actually a complex ecosystem) is the way the lake works; a living habitat rather than a dead sea.
Retelling
If people live close enough to the sea (or a really big lake) to know about net fishing, this parable doesn’t really need retelling. The boats would now have engines, but drag nets were a mature technology even in the stone age; the image of something that catches everything is still true.
What if people aren’t familiar with drag nets? The image is of something that catches everything, then sorts out the good and the bad. One of my first thoughts was ticket inspectors – where I live, they often turn up in a group at the station entrance, checking every passenger, sorting out the ticketed from the ticketless. Eventually I went with people sorting through donations, because I thought that more places have charity (thrift) shops than mass transit systems.
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