Epiphany 3A Calling the Fishermen

Mt. 4:12, 18-23:

12 Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. ... 18 As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen.

19 And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21 As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

 

A young lady was accosted by her father one morning after she had come in very late from a date with her newest boyfriend. Dad demanded to know why she had allowed him to keep her out until well after midnight. “Oh, Daddy,” she exclaimed, “he just has that certain something!”

Dad reflected on the young man’s appearance when he had arrived the night before: he was not especially well mannered, he had ragged hair, wore baggy clothes of no particular fashion, and drove a dirty car. “Well,” Dad told daughter, “he may have that certain something, but it would be much better if he had something certain.”

I wonder why Simon Peter and Andrew dropped their fishing trade and walked off after Jesus when he told them to do so. The Gospel gives no indication that they knew Jesus before this time, but they might have known him or at least known about him. In either event, when Jesus said, “Come,” they followed. Then the brothers James and John did the same when Jesus called them, leaving their hapless father to mend nets alone.

Was Jesus’s charisma, that “certain something,” so strong that grown men engaged in their trade would just drop it – immediately – when he said to?

Few people are blessed with such charisma. Everyone else has to develop high expertise to be successful leaders. They have something certain – competence. People do not follow these leaders because they are charismatic or personable. For every Robert E. Lee whose regal appearance and courtly demeanor could cause his soldiers to weep with devotion, there are a dozen like U. S. Grant, whose appearance was uninspiring and mannerisms dull to all who met him. But Grant’s competence was legendary.

Charismatic leaders cause change, and so do competent leaders. When charisma and competence combine in one person, an explosion of change results. George Washington combined these two natures. So did Billy Graham.

Jesus may have combined charisma and competence so supremely that his call to follow was irresistible, which would explain very well why men and later, women, would just up and leave their homes and way of life to follow him. But to follow Christ was different than following Washington across the Delaware River one night and different than helping Billy Graham build the furthest-reaching ministry the world has ever known. Washington’s soldiers and Graham’s workers had first devoted themselves to a cause greater than all of them – the former to freedom and the latter to evangelism. They had a prior commitment to the larger mission, and to accept the leadership of Washington or Graham resulted from their commitment rather than caused it.

Such was not the case when Jesus walked along the lakeshore. No doubt these four fishermen were religious. They probably worshiped faithfully at the synagogue and made the necessary pilgrimages to Jerusalem for Passover. But there was no cause Jesus served to which Simon, Andrew, James, and John had already committed themselves. There was no Gospel yet, there was no church yet, there were no great social or political movements Jesus headed. There were, apparently, no prior points of contact between Jesus and the four men. Yet when Jesus simply told them, come, and they dropped their work and went.

The men could not yet have known of Jesus’ unequaled competence. Jesus was an expert prophet, teacher, preacher, and healer; his expertise in conducting his ministry was unparalleled. He made no mistakes. He did not waver from his mission even when arrest and cruel death threatened. This fantastic level of competence is not hard to accept if one has already accepted the fact that Jesus was the son of God, and that in him dwelt the godhead fully. But none of the disciples knew any of this when they began to follow him. Jesus was still mostly unknown to them when they left their work and homes to follow him.

And Jesus may not have been very charismatic. Isaiah prophesied of the messiah in another passage that, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isa 53:2). Jesus may well have been a plain-vanilla sort of man to look at, with no imposing physical presence. We don’t know.

So the riddle of what made these men follow Jesus remains a riddle.

“A reasonable response to his command ‘Follow me’ would be ‘Where are you going?’ The fishermen do not yet know the destination, which they must learn along the way. . . . The fishermen are already at work, already doing something useful and important, thus they are not looking for a new life. Jesus’ call does not fill an obvious vacuum or meet an obvious need in their lives, but, like the call of prophets in the Hebrew Bible, it is intrusive and disruptive, calling them away from work and family” (NIB).

Jesus did not call the fishermen to admire him or accept his principles, but to follow him personally. Throughout the gospel accounts, Jesus made it clear that those who followed him were to be devoted to him personally. To what degree Jesus understood he was God-in-the-flesh is argued among New Testament scholars; his self-awareness of his deity seems stronger in some parts of the gospels than in others. But it cannot be doubted that Jesus saw a co-identity between his work and the work of God and thus believed that loyalty to him and loyalty to God were so close that the difference was nil. In fact, Jesus said that God enabled people to follow him.

His call to follow him was primarily to follow him personally, not to adhere to some ethical principle, success program, political campaign or even a ministry of compassion. The ethics and ministry of the apostles and the church grew out of personal loyalty to Christ, but before all, there was loyalty to Christ himself. The first devotion of the apostles was not to good works, or to faith statements, or to social justice, or to religious propositions, or to a church organization. It was personally to Jesus Christ.

We don’t easily realize what an extraordinary thing this is. Throughout history there have been many men who demanded personal oaths of loyalty, but even the best results have been tragic, more often downright evil. Here is a short list of examples, none of which turned out well, most of which became evil outright:

• The cult of the Roman Caesars that began during Jesus’ lifetime,
• In the late 1700s, the rule of the French monarchy,
• Adolf Hitler, who required the proud German army officer corps to pledge its honor and loyalty to him personally rather than the German nation,
• The cult of the Japanese emperor,
• American Jim Jones founded a “People’s Temple” and demanded complete obedience, even to requiring all 900 of them to drink poisoned Kool-Aid and die in 1978.

The historical record is not kind to those who make themselves the first and foremost object of loyalty or worship for people. Yet Jesus of Nazareth is a singular distinction. He did not found a “Jesus cult.” His disciples sometimes got into serious arguments about what following Christ meant, and Jesus just let them work it out. Jesus would patiently explain what his teachings meant when the disciples didn’t understand, but he never attempted to compel people to follow him. They were free to answer his call or not. And some changed their minds: Jesus was abandoned wholesale by many disciples in John’s Gospel, and Jesus just let them go without a word. On the night he was arrested, Jesus seemed more pitiable than heroic in Gethsemane. Before the soldiers arrived, he had to plead with someone to stay awake with him. Then his disciples abandoned him as the soldiers took him away. Jesus was either history’s most spectacular blunderer in creating a personal cult about himself, or he was so purely good that complete devotion to him personally could serve only God’s good purposes, even when that devotion faltered.

But Jesus’ tragedy and triumph were far in the future when Jesus walked along the lakeshore summoning the two sets of brothers. We are no closer than before in understanding why these men, successful in their trade, would give it up to follow Jesus with just a word of a summons.

Perhaps we need to remember that the gospels don’t quite tell history in the way we think of history. The gospels are not simply accounts of what happened. When their writers set the story down, they knew how it would end. From the beginning of these accounts, Jesus is known to them as the Risen One. Thus, the individual motives that each disciple may have had in following Jesus at the beginning of his ministry do not seem very important. The point is that they did follow the One they later came to know as their risen Lord. Matthew simply ascribes to all of them, including himself,

“a common denominator: ... People become believers by the power of Jesus’ word; they follow him because he has spoken to them, and his word generates faith. For Matthew, Jesus’ call to discipleship was spoken not only to a few disciples in first-century Galilee but to the church throughout history (28:20). ... In and through the words and deeds of preachers, missionaries, teachers, family, friends, and the nameless doers of Christian service, the voice of the Son of Man continues to speak and to generate faith” (NIB).

So for Matthew and for the church in every time and place, the call to follow is given to us just as it was to these four men beside the lakeshore. Yet only a few of us will immediately drop everything to follow him. (I certainly didn’t!) The rest of us will wrestle with the call. We’ll temporize and delay. We’ll ask for the details of the program and want to have the objective explained to us. Or we’ll show Jesus all the other work we have to do and all the obligations we have, or we’ll love our leisure time too much and treasure our entertainments and pastimes.

Jesus has heard it all before. He won’t try to coerce us into following him, and we sure can’t talk him out of calling us. To all our objections, Jesus makes no argument. He simply says, “Come and follow me” and walks on. He will do this over and over and over, until we finally realize that all our encumbrances and reasons to go on with life as usual mean not a thing any longer, not to Jesus, not to us, and then we have to follow him – not to join a new project or find a new cause, but simply to be with him and to have him be with us.