Would You Have Followed Him?

January 21, 2018

Linda Murphy

Epiphany 3     Mark 1:14-20

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Today’s gospel from Mark is very different in style to Helen’s gospel from John last week. Mark is simplistic and economical with his words however he is dramatic in his presentation.

Mark allows Jesus merely to appear from out of nowhere, emerging humbly from the heat vapours emanating from the desert floor to be baptised by John. Then at the very moment when we expect the curtain to rise on the drama to come, we end up in Galilee.

Why on earth did these four ordinary Galilean fishermen just drop everything and follow Jesus?

James and John, the sons of Zebedee immediately followed this itinerant man, Jesus. What must have Zebedee thought when he saw his otherwise sensible sons all of a sudden do the unthinkable, by leaving their workplace, family and community behind to follow a little-known travelling preacher?

The fact that Jesus is out alone at night and that the four all leave their families to follow him was considered abnormal and deviant behaviour in 1st Century Palestine. Their families, friends and whole community would view this behaviour with alarm and suspicion. It was tantamount to a contradiction to their social fabric.

Loyalty to one’s family and strictly observing all social convention’s, were paramount in world in which Jesus and his followers inhabited.

To follow Jesus, as admirable as that may seem from our advantaged perspective, meant James and John were not only giving up of a not insignificant amount of trade from their fishing, but also their family and their community.

Peter and Andrew, also fishing on the Sea of Galilee that early dawn, “followed him”.

Mark’s Jesus gives no explanation for his challenge. Nor does he give his followers any idea why and what they are in for other than… ”The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Peter, Andrew, James and John have just got up and followed him, without thinking about the offer of becoming ‘fishermen of people’. No discussion took place with their families and friends. Few of us today would leave our nets, much less the comfort of our homes to follow in the Jesus footsteps as did James and John, Peter and Andrew.

So why did they do it!

Let’s look at what life was like for these fishermen in Galilee. Galilee had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity for centuries. Rome had been particularly brutal to Galilean people after the revolts preceeding Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE. Galileans owed tithes to the ravenous Temple treasury and Rome exercised control over every aspect of Galilean life through the puppet administrator, Antipas.

The fishing industry was steadily being restructured for export, so that the majority of fish were salted or made into fish sauce and shipped to markets throughout the Roman Empire. All fishing had become state-regulated for the benefit of the urban elite, made up of Greeks or Romans who had settled in Palestine following the military conquest or Jews connected with the Herodian family. Thus fishermen were falling to the bottom of an increasingly elaborate economic hierarchy. The elite looked down on them, despite them being dependent upon their labour.

With such rigid state control of their livelihood and the oppressive economics of export, it is hardly surprising that in Mark’s story fishermen were the first followers of Jesus’ message of an alternative social vision. Restless peasant fishermen had little to lose and everything to gain, by overturning the status quo.

If fact Jesus actions was not unlike Gandhi’s attempt to mobilise the “untouchable” classes in India, with campaigns such as his famous Salt March, or similarly Martin Luther King’s fateful choice to stand with the sanitation workers of Memphis in 1968.

These fishermen had little to lose. In this ancient world leaving the workplace would have entailed both loss of economic security, as well as a rupture in the social fabric of the extended family. In that sense, to join this movement demanded not just assent of the heart, but an uncompromising break with “normal life”. Jesus has called these disaffected workers out of an exploitive system and back to a network of “fictive kinship” that practiced mutual aid and cooperation.

Jesus did not look like someone who offered riches. But perhaps he did look like someone who offered these men a chance to bring people into the Kingdom whose nearness, Jesus had been talking about ever since arriving in Galilee. Possibly the thought of transformation into that better place was sufficiently enticing to motivate these men to start modelling their lives on the life of an unknown man whom they did not know, but who believed in a future greater than could be imagined at that present moment.

“And Jesus said to them, Follow me and I will make you fish for people”. This well-known verse is beloved to evangelicals, who traditionally interpreted it to represent the vocation of “saving souls”. However we miss the point if we remove this text from its social context and if we ignore the roots of this metaphor in the Bible.

This image of “fishing for people” then, should be understood more in the sense of Dr. King’s struggle “for the soul of America” than in terms of the evangelical call of “saving souls”.

Now it makes a bit more sense.

Our first reading from the book of Jonah is also a story about ‘calling’ but with an ironic twist. Jonah is called to proclaim a message to people he doesn’t like. A message he hopes will not be accepted. After trying unsuccessfully to avoid his calling, he finally arrives in Nineveh and delivers the shortest sermon in the Bible, an eight word threat of destruction. To his surprise the sermon is effective. The book of Jonah ends as God makes clear to Jonah that mercy is for everyone who repents.

Jonah’s call included the message he was to deliver, but in our story today the four fishermen are called with no further instructions whatsoever. They are called to a completely uncertain future and would surely have been scared out of their wits had they known what lay in store for them.

What the early disciples must have instinctively known, is what we must not forget – In following Jesus we leave everything but lose nothing. That is “the good news of God” that Jesus and his disciples proclaimed, with great joy throughout Galilee, and to us and across our world today as well.

To follow Jesus is to commit ourselves to intentional time with the One who, even now, calls us. To repent, to change our mind, is to shake off the regret and worry that holds us hostage, and to recognise that the God of the everlasting present, The God who is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, is now and forever truly with us.

Amen.