The Wise-Guy Fish Who Saw Everything

At the end of my last post, I promised to tell you about a wise-guy fish.

So here he is.

His story began with one of the more peculiar moments in the Gospel of Matthew.

The collectors of the temple tax approached Peter and asked whether Jesus paid the tax. Jesus then told Peter to go fishing. The first fish Peter caught would have a coin in its mouth… enough to pay the tax for both of them.

And that’s all Matthew tells us about the fish.

Most people read the passage and naturally concentrate on Jesus, Peter, the tax, and the miracle.

But once again, my mind wandered toward the margin.

What about the fish?

How did the coin get into its mouth? Why that particular fish? And what must it have been like to be swimming peacefully eight feet beneath the surface of the Sea of Galilee, only to discover it had somehow been given a part in something much larger than itself?

That’s how The Angel and the Fish began.

I imagined a tilapia living near Capernaum. He’s observant, suspicious, a little self-important, and not especially eager to be volunteered for anything. He knows fish. He understands currents, hooks, fishermen, and the importance of not doing anything unnecessarily heroic.

Then an angel arrives with an assignment.

The fish must take a coin into his mouth, find a particular hook, and bite it.

Simple enough. Unless you happen to be the fish.

That was the fun of writing the story. The miracle looks very different from beneath the water. Peter sees a fish with a coin in its mouth. The fish sees a hook, a violent journey into the air, and a plan that makes very little sense while it’s happening.

In other words, he sees what most of us see when we’re in the middle of something difficult:

Only his small part of it.

He doesn’t know Peter. He doesn’t understand the temple tax. He can’t see the conversation taking place on shore. He knows only that he’s been asked to do something strange, frightening, and apparently unreasonable.

And he has to decide whether to do it.

The story is humorous because the fish is a wise guy. But beneath the jokes is a question that isn’t funny at all:

Can we be faithful when we don’t understand the plan?

The angel doesn’t deliver a sermon. The fish would probably swim away if he tried. But the fish discovers that obedience isn’t always a single decision. Sometimes we say yes. And then, when the hook appears and the danger becomes real, we have to say yes again.

The second yes is harder.

It’s also the one that counts.

That little fish became one of my favorite witnesses because he represents something I return to again and again in my stories: someone small, unnoticed, and standing—or swimming—at the edge of a sacred event.

Micro instead of macro.

Everyone remembers the coin.

I wanted to remember the fish.