Today’s gospel from Luke is a shorter and more direct version of Matthew’s coverage of the Beatitudes:the teachings of Jesus Christ. In Matthew the sermon takes place on the mountain top, in Luke it is on a stretch of land down below. The certainty of the locale is not all that important, but rather the teachings and their meanings are the key message.

This Sunday’s gospel offers us the story of exhausted fishermen who have experienced what seems to have been a fruitless, night-long fishing trip and now the good Lord is telling them to get back into their boats and back to work—during the daytime? The first question in any fishermen’s mind, according to scripture scholars, would have been: “what does this rabbi (clergyman) know about fishing?” After all, any fisherman would tell you that the best time to fish is at night and the best place is close to the shoreline, where the water is shallow and the plant life, which the fish feed on, is plentiful. So why listen to Him?

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While the headline above may not be a direct quote from Jesus—it does carry a warning and has meaning for every generation, in every time and place. In this Fourth Week of Ordinary Time, the Gospel of Luke takes us to a hillside in Nazareth, the hometown of Jesus, to a place called Mount Precipice—just on the southern edge of town—which is thought of as the site where today’s gospel takes place: “…and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong…But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away.