Beyond Business as Usual Mark 1: 14-20 Third Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 25 th January 2009 Just as Marylanders love our crabs, citizens throughout the Roman Empire loved their fish heads salted, of course, and chopped up into pieces called salsamentum, a kind of fish salsa. They were also obsessed with spicy, smelly fish sauces called garum. Both were highly valued as daily condiments and even used for medicinal purposes. Once the Greeks and Romans figured out how to salt and pickle fish, the fishing industry exploded and took advantage of a vast and growing market. The demand was great throughout the empire. One of the most lucrative sources for this fish salsa was in the Galilee, the vast territory around the Sea of Galilee. 1 Perched on a hilltop in the Galilee, Herod Antipas (c. 20 B. C. - 39), one the Roman-appointed kings of this section of Palestine during Jesus time, established a massive hilltop fortress called Autocratis, meaning Imperial or Belonging to the Emperor. It was an imperial city that the Jewish historian Josephus (c.37-100) called the ornament of all Galilee, with impressive streets, squares, and a large Roman theatre. It was also a regional market, a tax depot, and a military arsenal. 2 From that vantage point Herod could look out over the Galilee and see the vineyards, olive groves, grain fields, and fishing boats on the Sea of Galilee and see all that wealth, most of which would be heavily taxed by him. It was a region full of shadowy figures, corrupt tax collectors, toll-takers, estate stewards (many of whom show up in the gospels), where the rich and powerful imposed considerable hardship, oppression, and debt upon 1 Scholars suggest that we should refer this region as the Galilee as denoting a vast territory or province instead of town or city name. See Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002). The description of the fishing industry in the Roman Empire is also found in Horsley & Silberman, pp. 24-26 2 Horsley & Silberman, 25. Herod Antipas was the tetrarch (meaning, ruler of a quarter) of Galilee.
the working and peasant class, located in an empire demanding more production more olives, more grain, more wine, and more fish. About fifteen miles to the east of Autocratis, is the lakeside town of Magdala (which tradition tells us was the home of Mary Magdalene), where recent archeological excavations have discovered one place where Herod would have been able to obtain more fish. When I was in Israel, we had access to the excavations in Magdala and witnessed the site where sauce was produced. Archaeologists have unearthed the town of Taricheae, meaning Salt-Fish, where large hauls of fish were salted, pressed, fermented, and refined into salsamentum and garum, which were stored in large amphorae (large earthen containers) and then shipped overseas. Now in order to produce even a modest amount of these goods required an enormous amount of fish hauled out of the sea and transported to the processing plant. The excavations have uncovered the buildings where all that fish was processed. It is also obvious that some were making lots of money from this venture (there is at least one spacious villa whose owner installed a mosaic depiction of a boat and a large fish at the entrance of his courtyard), and for others you can imagine the misery and hardship and the stench (!) of such a life. 3 It is into such a life, in the Galilee, in precisely this place that Jesus chooses to begin his ministry, preaching: The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news. It is significant for Mark s gospel that Jesus begins his work in the Galilee, with the fishing boats in full view, working a trade that had been sucked into a large corrupt industry where few were becoming very rich at the expense of almost everyone else. We have been misled for too long by images in illustrated Bibles or Sundayschool flannel-graphs depicting the bucolic life of these fisherman Andrew, Simon, James, John lazily spending the day on the water, 3 I m indebted to Horsley & Silberman for opening up the wider historical-social context of Mark s gospel, 24-25.
trying to eke out a living, waiting for a good catch. We have to remove these images. We also have to set aside the notion that when Jesus calls them to become fishers of men, he s not granting them instant evangelist status, or calling them to catch souls or save souls, or give them a better job to do because they were peasants and really didn t have a future. 4 This metaphor was carefully chosen by Jesus. In fact, there are three places in the Hebrew scriptures where a similar metaphor is used, where the hooking of fish is a euphemism for Yahweh s judgment of the rich and powerful. 5 In Jeremiah 16:16, it is an image used by Yahweh to criticize the abuses of Israel, where Yahweh is the fisherman who will fish after the dishonest wealthy and hook them. The same image is at work in Amos 4:2, where God strikes out against the oppressors of the poor, who crush the needy, saying, They shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks. And in Ezekiel 29:4, Yahweh says he will hook Pharaoh and all of imperial Egypt and fling them out of the water to die in an open field because of their oppression. God has something very particular in mind when God asks us to go fishing! When Jesus used this metaphor, Andrew and the others would have known exactly what Jesus was talking about, they would have known the euphemism. What s also significant is that these metaphors identified with the acts of God, Jesus now takes for himself. The work of God is his work and Jesus is calling these fishermen to join him in a struggle against abusive power and privilege that s oppressing the poor and crushing the needy. In doing so, we begin to have a clearer picture of how Jesus (and Mark) understand the preaching of the kingdom of God, what Jesus was 4 Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 132. 5 This significant point is made by Myers, 132. I m indebted to his exegesis of the fishers of men reference. He writes, There is perhaps no expression more traditionally misunderstood than Jesus invitation to these workers to become fishers of men. (132)
born to do. The overarching theme in Mark s gospel is the primary importance of the kingdom of God. We could even call it the Empire of God, in contrast to power of the Roman Empire. Every verse and chapter allude to the centrally of the kingdom. 6 The kingdom is not up there in heaven in the great by-and-by, but here and now. God s kingdom exists where the needy are cared for, the oppressed are liberated, where the abusive wealthy are brought down and the poor lifted up. You see, there s a tendency with this text and so many other texts in scripture to spiritualize our reading. What I mean by this is we assume Jesus was only concerned with spiritual or religious things pertaining to our individual lives, our spirits or our souls. There is a tendency to read scripture with the assumption that Jesus had no interest in social issues or economic issues or political issues. A close reading of the gospels, especially Mark and Luke, dismantles this view. Just the opposite is true, really, because the life Jesus invites these fishermen to experience, hooking the rich and powerful who are making their lives miserable, in order to bring God s justice, God s wholeness to all people, will have far-reaching social, economic, and political implications. That s what the gospel always does and that s why it s good news. It s also why they could leave and followed, risked following him because they knew it was worth it. Leaving that day with Jesus cost them something. They weren t poor, they were the working peasant class, but they weren t poor. Leaving with him cost them something. It always does. The rule of God in the kingdom entails a demonstration of God s power, not to overwhelm and abuse, but to heal and make whole, and that s the kind of life Jesus is calling his disciples to take up. And the ones who probably will resist Jesus preaching the most (maybe even this interpretation of the text) will want to spiritualize the message away because they are the rich and powerful, because they have the most 6 Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 74-75.
to lose. The ones who resist the call are often the ones who have so much to lose. The call to follow Jesus, to follow the vision of the kingdom Jesus sets out for us it isn t easy. It s really difficult and most of us (including me) fail miserably, churches fail miserably in realizing it, maybe because if we were to succeed, as Jesus defines success, we d have so much to lose. Still this is what we re about and what Jesus calls us to. Several years ago during worship we sang, Here I am, Lord, I have heard you calling in the night It s based on Isaiah s response to God s call in his life, Here I am, Lord. Send me (Isaiah 7). Someone said to me after the service as they as he was leaving the sanctuary, We might say, Send me, but what we really mean is, Here I am, Lord. Comfort me. While it is true that our life in God gives us comfort and assurance, God is concerned about the comfort and care of God s people, however, the life of faith, the life of being a disciple, the Christian life is not first and foremost about comfort, security, and protection, it s a call to a high-risk adventure, it s a summons and a task, it s a call to a life of sacrifice, of giving up in order to take up, and it s costly. This leads me to consider these questions in my own life: If walking with Christ isn t costing me something, then it s cheap and not really worth all that much. If walking with him doesn t inconvenience me, doesn t take me out of my comfort zones, then can I say that I m walking with him? If walking with him doesn t knock my ego off from dead-center, ask me to give up control, acknowledge that my destiny is not in my hands, then can I say that I m walking with him? If walking with him isn t stretching me, isn t challenging me,
then can I say that I m really walking with him? If walking with him is easy and doesn t ask much of me or requires little thought or effort on my part, then can I say that I m walking with him? If walking with him doesn t require my absolute faith and trust in him, then can I say I m walking with him, when I m really putting more faith and trust in myself? His way is the difficult way, the way of suffering, the way of cost, but it s also the joyful way, and the peaceful way, and the most meaningful way, but we don t know the latter until we face the former. 7 What s true for us individually is also true for all of together in this community of faith. We can t reach Easter morning without going through Good Friday. When Jesus said, Follow me and I will make you fish for people, when he asked them to leave their nets behind, he invited them to make a break with business as usual. He invited them and invites you and me to break with business as usual and step out into a larger life and fully embrace his way, God s way to live. Leave your nets behind. Let them go. Let them go! Rev. Dr. Kenneth E. Kovacs Catonsville Presbyterian Church Catonsville, Maryland 7 Cf. the quotation from the worship bulletin, by the English Roman Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), who once quipped, The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found hard and left untried. What s Wrong with the World (1910).