Last week we heard John’s version of Jesus calling the first disciples, and this week the Gospel reading gives us Mark’s account of the same story. And I bet if I asked any of you to tell me what you remember about Jesus calling the first disciples, this is the story you’d think of. It’s so familiar, this beloved tale of Jesus coming across Simon and Andrew, James and John on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and saying to them “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Fishers of men in the older translations, but I’ve come to love the NRSV’s translation “fish for people.” Something about it makes me chuckle. Anyway, whether they’re fishers of men or fishing for people, the response is the same, “immediately they left their nets…they left their father Zebedee in the boat…and followed him.”
I’ve preached and taught on this text so many times, and I always make the same points. I talk about how striking it is that Jesus called fishermen from Galilee to be the first leaders of his new movement. Not powerful political figures or brilliant scholars or strong warriors, he called fishermen from rural Galilee. These guys were definitely not wealthy, they were probably not well-educated, and they were certainly powerless in the grand scheme of the Roman Empire, or the Jerusalem political scene. They would not be the first on anyone’s list of likely candidates to lead a revolution, yet Jesus came and found them. If these guys are Jesus’ first choice for disciples, this should give us all sorts of confidence in being part of the movement. That approach would make a pretty solid sermon.
The other thing this story is great for is talking about commitment. Jesus came and said “follow me,” and immediately they left everything, even their poor dad sitting in his boat, and they followed. The story of Jesus calling the first disciples can be a good challenge for us in thinking about our own discipleship. Maybe we are not being called to literally leave our dependents sitting alone by themselves while we go off on some grand adventure, but certainly all of us can think of things that we know we should drop in order to follow Jesus more closely. Our pride maybe, or our guilt, or our desire to be self-sufficient, or our feelings of unworthiness. That too is a good starting place for preaching.
But here’s the thing I love about the Bible. The more you dig into it and learn about it, the more layers it reveals. In all the years and all the study I’ve put into the Gospel of Mark, I learned two new things about this text this week, and it caused me to read this so familiar story in a whole new way, opening up new thoughts, new questions, a new sense of hope, and a new challenge. So here are the two new things I learned.
First off, and I’d never thought of this before, but this call by Jesus to have the disciples fish for people is a radical departure from how fishing imagery was used in the Old Testament. There are lots of examples of fishing imagery in the Old Testament, but we don’t talk about them very often, because they are all negative. To the last, when fishing is referred to in the Old Testament, it refers to trapping or catching someone against their will, like you might a mouse in a mousetrap. Just a couple examples. From Ezekiel, “I will put hooks in your jaws…I will draw you up from your channels…To the animals of the earth…I have given you as food.” Or from Amos, “The time is surely coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks.” Or from Habakkuk, “The enemy brings all of them up with a hook; he drags them out with his net.” There’s more but you get the point. Now we think of fishing for people as this great thing, but when Jesus told the disciples he would have them do it, he was bucking all the traditional narratives.
What is so amazing about what Jesus did here was he took these guys with this skill set that had always been considered negative and showed how it was positive. Fishing in scripture had always been viewed in this negative way, in trapping or capturing, but Jesus showed how it could just as easily be viewed in positive light, this expansive gathering of all sorts of different people, drawing them in to the kingdom. Jesus didn’t undo years of scriptural understanding, he just expanded it, complicated it. We see in Jesus’ ministry that he was not advocating for the things fishing had historically stood for. Jesus wasn’t telling the disciples that they should go out and hook people with their nets and drag them against their will to Jesus. But what I think Jesus was saying was the narrative used about fishing was too simple. This worn old imagery could be interpreted in a new way, a way that brought life, and hope, and promise.
So that in and of itself I found super interesting and powerful. But here’s the thing that tipped it over the edge for me. I had always thought of the disciples as powerless. These poor, uneducated, subsistence fishermen, slaving away in their boats at weird hours of the night, rough and gruff and uncouth. In my mind they were nobodies until Jesus called them to follow. But here’s what the commentary I was reading pointed out. These guys were not poor, subsistence fishermen. They weren’t wealthy, sure, but it wasn’t like they had nothing. In verse twenty-nine we’ll find out that Simon and Andrew owned a house. Home ownership is a big deal now; it would have been a huge deal in the first century. And James and John left their father in the boat with the hired men. This meant they were successful enough fishermen to be able to pay other people to fish for them. So no, Simon and Andrew, James and John, were not Herod or the High Priest or anything like that. But they weren’t the leper or the man born blind begging at the city gates either. They had power, they had skills, they had some resources. Jesus didn’t call them from nothing; he also did not call them to give up their power. Jesus called them to use the power and the skills they had in this totally new and different way, a way that no one had thought of before.
This is good news because so often I think we feel powerless. Or, at least I know I do. I look around at a broken world and I feel like there is nothing I can do to change it. So much of our current political climate is fueled by fear. Fear of the other, fear of change, fear of losing what we have, fear of being powerless. And rather than retreating or giving up or fighting to hold on to what it feels like we’re losing, recognizing that the disciples had power, and that Jesus called them to use it, invites us to think about the power we have, and how we might use it to bring about the kingdom. Jesus was not some lone do-gooder wandering around the Galilee healing sick people so they could go about their lives as they had been before. Jesus was a community organizer, he brought people together, he showed them how to advocate for themselves, to use their skills, to work together for change, and through that community to change the world.
Dear sisters and brothers, the good news is not that Jesus calls the powerless. That is good news, but this good news is better than that. The good news is that we are not weak, that we have power. God created us with power. That power is different for all of us. Andrew and Simon, James and John, were fishermen, they had skills and gifts for gathering in diverse crowds. In chapter two, Jesus will call Levi. Levi was a tax collector, he had gifts with budgets and finances. Paul was a zealot. No one would have thought that was exactly a useful gift, but look what Paul was able to do, once he figured out how to channel his zealotry in the right direction.
We have power. You are powerful. The God who spoke the universe into being formed you in God’s own image and endowed you with your own skills and gifts, talents and abilities, that you can use. The challenge, then, is to not give in to the fear. To not give in to the rhetoric that the world is off its axis and there’s nothing we can do. As resurrection people, we testify that there is always something we can do, and this story of the calling of the disciples assures us that, as unorthodox as it might seem, we have the skills and the gifts to do it. Sure, maybe no one’s done it that way before, but no one had ever thought of fishing as a good metaphor for evangelism before and look how well that turned out. So claim your power, dear people of God. Claim the skills and gifts, the talents and abilities, that God has given you. Claim them, and let’s go out and bring in the kingdom of God. Amen.
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