Mark 1:14-20 Jesus Calls Fishermen Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, two brothers who are fishermen. Follow me, he says to them, and I will make you become fishers of men. Then he goes further along the Sea of Galilee and he calls two more brothers, James and John, also fishermen. We don t know for sure but we might assume he said the same thing to them. Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men. We don t know that for certain. But it s safe to assume. Two sets of brothers, each of them a fisherman. And that s all we are told as Mark brings them on stage for a story that is fast-paced and filled with high drama. Mark s goal is to get Jesus to Jerusalem where he will face his cross. These four fishermen show up again and again later in the story, but all Mark seems to be doing here is getting them on the stage. He s telling us now up front that we need to pay attention to who these men are; they are central characters who will later be named disciples and become his closest companions. But take note. The first people Jesus calls to follow him are not scholars, or teachers. Not political leaders, or celebrities like John the Baptist. No one who is on the cutting edge of religion. The first four to be called are fishermen. And with no explanation at all from Mark on why Jesus would select them and without any explanation on why any of them would choose to follow. That annoys some of us who are curious for the details. What would the psychologists William James, or Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud say lay behind their motivation? What was in their past that made them say, Yes. Had Zebedee mistreated his boys? Had he deprived them of education and 1
forced them into the family business? And now was the business on the verge of disaster? Was it the off season for fishing? Or, were these men all going through a mid-life crises? Were they ready at the drop of a hat to hike the trail or sail the seas or climb the mountain? And as soon as they had the chance, off they went. Were they in unhappy marriages? Mark tells us Simon was married. What was it like for him to explain to her, Honey, I m quitting my job, and I m going to follow this new rabbi who has come into town. And when James and John left their father in the boat, did old Zebedee shake their hands and wish them well, or did he shake his fist and say, goodbye and good riddance.? We d like to know? Maybe, just maybe, if I could find that out, and see that something extreme lay in their backgrounds, then maybe I could excuse myself from following by saying, Well, of course if those sorts of things had happened to me, then I would have followed Jesus as well, while silently thanking God that such things have never happened to you. There is something too simple for us about these men just up and following Jesus, but in reality, the skeletal nature of this story is true enough about what it is like to be called to follow him. You re going about your business, doing what you do every day. And suddenly you become aware that Someone beyond and greater than this world is saying, Here I am. Follow me. Follow you where? It s best that you not know that right now. Who are you? No one you can yet understand completely. But I have a family. 2
I ll make your family even bigger. What do you want of me exactly? Right now, just to be with me, and observe me and then tell others what you will discover. What s the five year plan? It s day to day, my friend. I m going to teach you to live in the moment and in the very presence of God. Will it in any way harm me? No, in no way will it harm you, but it will sometimes hurt you. Being made into a new creation can sometimes be painful. But trust me. Follow me. These four fishermen take Jesus up on the invitation. And they follow. Later on, in Mark s Gospel we are told that Jesus will call a tax collector named Levi. Nothing said about making him into a fisher of men. We are simply told that when Jesus saw Levi sitting in the tax booth He said, Follow me, and Levi is up and following. Very next thing Mark tells us is that Jesus is at a party and eating with many, many tax collectors and sinners, and so we can naturally assume that Levi is at least partially responsible for the type of people invited to the meal. So in a sense, Levi can be called a fisher of men. Or better still, a collector of tax collectors bringing people who are like himself, people with his own sort of background to a come-and-meet-jesus supper. When Jesus tells the first pair of fishermen that he will make them become fishers of men, he is saying that I am going to take what you have been doing with your life and transform it into something bigger and more important than anything you have been doing. Follow me and I will 3
transform you in such a way that you will bring about transformation in the lives of others. All four of these fishermen, and although Mark never says it -- Matthew will later equate Levi with the disciple Matthew -- all of them become part of the twelve. And what does he appoint the twelve to do? Here I quote Mark he appointed them to be with Him and to preach. At least one third are fishermen. But I still want to know. Why these people? Why fishermen? Now maybe to a first century audience that s all they needed to know. Fishermen! Ah, yes! Of course! Fishermen! We don t say that because we have two thousand plus years and our own quaint images and prejudices about fishermen to navigate. Please don t think that Galilean fishermen were anything like my uncle. My uncle and I used to go fishing and what that meant was his gathering up the rusty green tackle box and his bamboo cane and his folding chair and his round carton of Red wiggler worms and his red and white bag of Red Man chewing tobacco. He was a great fisherman, my Uncle Calder. A graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology, he had a keen mind and had fishing down to this science -- that if you spit the tobacco on to the worm and you informed it that it had been born for this one great purpose to catch me a fish you hear, catch me a fish, and sent it plunging to its destiny that the worm would do its ordained task, and he would pull up a catfish. And I would try the same. I try it without the Red Man, and catch nothing. Try it once with Red Man and still get nothing except nauseated. Calder usually caught fish. But sometimes he just sat there content to be out on the bank, relaxed and watching the sun go down and hearing the crickets start up their evening son.. 4
Going fishing was like taking a vacation or re-telling stories, or just settling in to a relaxed contentment. If that s your image of fishermen, you can preach or hear nice sermons on, Set your bait for people, and once they bite, reel them into the church. I ve heard a few of those sermons, and they re all fine and good, but those images have nothing to do with what these Galilean fishermen were doing. For them fishing was work. They were casting their nets into the sea, Mark says. Huge nets, pulled along the shore, or as with the case of James and John, pulled between two boats like a sieve or a strainer. And to pull those nets back into the boat with a load of fish was backbreaking work. And if you caught any, then you had to sort them and salt them and take them to market and sell them and then go clean and mend the nets, and then go back out into the waters again. When they said, Let s go fishing, it was often with prayer that we catch enough to feed the family and make the next payment to someone like Levi the tax collector. And if you had a successful catch today, there was no guarantee that you would have success tomorrow. A fisherman knows what it is like to fail and make himself get up and go back to work the next day. You re not defeated by frustrations. And you never know what the world is going to look like. You can be out on the water one day and the surface is as calm and smooth as glass, and within an hour be battling whitecaps as the world suddenly begins to churn beneath your feet. Plus, you never know exactly what might be lying just beneath your feet. A few years back Candi and I went on a cruise. I tricked myself psychologically into enjoying it by imagining that the boat had a flat bottom 5
and if I fell off I could easily touch bottom and within two seconds push myself to the surface. I prevented myself from thinking about what might be twenty fathoms below. Orca the whale, Jaws, the Great White shark, the Beast from Twenty-thousand fathoms. Some spiked fish with twelve eyes that all glow in the dark. You never know what might have been down there. A fisherman on the sea would know there is more to the world than what he sees on the surface. There is a world deep and mysterious and boundless. Jesus will speak of such a world. Of things both seen and unseen, of principalities and powers of darkness and wickedness in spiritual places. A world in which the Holy Spirit can dive beneath the surface of a person s heart and dwell there. Maybe someone with the heart and experience of a fisherman won t argue and say, I see only what I believe. Why you can t see five feet through the water here. You don t really believe the world is that shallow, do you? Life is more than what you can see. You have to open your mind and your heart to the unseen. You re going to have to believe in a God who can do things that many will say is impossible. To follow Jesus, you must respond to the unexpected. You must think on your feet in difficult situations. You must face obstacles to overcome, and you must work at times without seeing any tangible resolution or evidence of a reward. And yet you must believe that in the long haul, it is worth it to follow Him. Maybe that s why he called fishermen. And I emphasize the plural Jesus calls fishermen. He called them in pairs; Simon and Andrew are called while working together. James and John, who live right down the street are called while working together. They are called in pairs. They become a pair of pairs. It takes a team to cast these nets. It takes a team to 6
haul in the fish. It takes a team to transfer and transport. Fishing in Galilee is never a solitary activity. It takes two or more. Jesus will send them out in pairs. Because you need a team. Jesus did not call monks who would climb flag poles and wait for the kingdom of God to come. He called people who knew they must depend on one another to get the job done. If you are not part of a community in your spiritual life you will die at sea. You will wilt on the vine. Your love for Jesus will dry up. You will be unproductive. You ll become disinterested. You ll quit caring for people. You ll quit hearing from God. Because his main reason for wanting to feed you is so that you can feed the other person. And so when Jesus sent out the twelve, and when he sent out the seventy, he sent them out two by two. He knew that in order for his church to be productive and for the kingdom of God to come alive on earth, His followers would not only need Him, but they would also need one another. Let s be real. We have a need for other people. You find that out some morning when the tree limb has fallen across the electrical wires. Someone somewhere has made a candle. Someone else has made the matches with which to light them. Someone is out repairing the line to get the electricity back on. Who made the clothes you re wearing today? Did you make them yourself? If you did, did you manufacture the cloth or the needle and thread? Did you shoot and skin your breakfast this morning? Did you pick the coffee beans yourself? Did you build your own car? Did you manufacture the tires for your car? Did you locate and refine the gasoline? Did you pave the road you drove on? If you say you don t need anybody, you are only fooling yourself. 7
Your own livelihood is dependent on whether or not someone needs you. If you are not needed to repair someone s house or teach their children or protect their investments or to keep them transported or fed or comforted, you won t have a livelihood. If you are not needed to console or encourage or guide or love or care for someone, then you haven t been fishing. Someone somewhere needs that sort of care, but sometimes to find them, you have to go fishing. Or like Levi, send out the invitations and set the dinner table. Well, I m not a fisherman. No, but you have gifts and abilities to bake a loaf of bread, to read to a shut-in, to play with a child, to listen to a neighbor, to listen to someone -- anyone. To teach a child to read. To get out of your comfort zone to enter a world where things may not always be so certain but which may be the missing link to the sense of well-being missing to so many people. I don t know where to start? Find someone who ll do it with you. Become part of a team or a group. Jesus didn t call just one fisherman. He called Andrew and Simon, brothers! James and John, brothers, who after facing all the hardships they faced together became not two sets of brothers, but four brothers. The story is simple. Jesus calls fishermen, and they follow. But what happens during their transformation, is that their friendship, their fellowship, their developing love for the one who had called them, and their developing love for one another would come be known as the church. 8