Mark 1

¹⁶ Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. ¹⁷ And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” ¹⁸ And immediately they left their nets and followed him. ¹⁹ And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. ²⁰ And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.

Sometime between October 8, 1917, and March of 1918, Wilfred Owen wrote his poem, “Dulce et decorum est.” It is considered one the most famous war poems ever written, and rightly so. Owen was a British soldier in World War I and the poem describes the horrors of the war he saw. Owen was killed in action in 1918 just days before the signing of the armistice ending the war. It is said that his mother received the news of his death while the church bells were ringing victoriously to celebrate the end of the war. Listen:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

And what is the old lie? What does Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori mean? It means, “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.”

This war poem, or, more accurately, this anti-war poem, is so very compelling precisely because of its conclusion. The conclusion throws the reader or listener on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, we like to bathe war in a romantic veneer. We tell ourselves, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.” But here we see a soldier contrasting that ideal with the ugly, bitter, realities of war. That is, the realities undercut the ideal and render it a lie.

Owen almost seems to be making an even larger statement, a statement that goes beyond war. He seems to be asking if there is anything for which we should die, if there is any ideal that is worthy of our lives, that is not undercut by the realities of living it out?

As believers we have an answer: Jesus’ call is a call worthy of our lives. Christ Himself is worthy of our very lives. The gospel is a truth we can die for, for the gospel is a truth that calls us to life precisely through death to self. The call of Christ presents itself to us all, and it is the very call He issued to His first disciples that He issues to us as well. It is a call that will, indeed, lead to difficulties, but it is a call that will never be rendered null by the difficulties we face in the living of it. It is a call that has not and will not be proven ultimately to be a lie. Mark describes this call in a most memorable and compelling way.

The call to follow Jesus is a holy disruption initiated by a slain and risen Lamb resulting in a revolutionary redefinition and reorientation of life itself.

Jesus calls His disciples with a kind of startling brusqueness and a conspicuous absence of concern for their plans.

¹⁶ Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. ¹⁷ And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” ¹⁸ And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

I am struck by the fact that Jesus’ evangelistic technique violates almost all of the standard principles of evangelism we take for granted today. We are concerned with building careful bridges before we present the gospel, with first creating points of interest, with not moving too fast, with not scaring those to whom we are talking. We are a people who place a high premium on the ease and comfort and sensitivities of those we evangelize.

But contrast this with the simple, stark, blunt call of Christ: “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”

There is a contextualizing bridge, to be sure: Jesus calls fisherman to come and fish. Nonetheless, it is a disruption, for He calls them to this in the midst of their work. It is a holy and sacred disruption. It is meant to be. You do not accept Christ after penciling Him onto your calendar. You accept Christ here and now, in the midst of the plans that did not foresee His call coming. There is a kind of recklessness about it. It is the response of a heart that is broken and overwhelmed by the power of the call that comes.

And it is the call to follow Christ. This is what we are called to. This is who we are called to.

Robert Stein notes that the relationship between Jesus and his disciples differed from the relationship between other Rabbis and their disciples in two ways. First, Jesus approached His disciples and called them to follow him instead of them approaching Him and asking if they could follow Him. Secondly, Jesus does not call them to the study of the law but to follow and study Him.[1]

In other words, the call of Christ to His first disciples differed from the norm in that it was the master who called and in that the master called His disciples to Himself. He did not call them to a body of learning, to a philosophy, to scholastic inquiry, to an idea, to a notion, to a compelling proposal. Christianity, of course, contains elements of all of these, but they are not the sum total of Christianity. They are components. However, Christ called His disciples to Himself. He does so today as well.

We are called to Christ. Christianity is a relationship. It is a knowing. We come to, embrace, and walk with Jesus. We come to know and to love Him and His ways. We follow the Lamb who has come and the Lamb who calls.

The call to follow Jesus is a holy disruption initiated by a slain and risen Lamb resulting in a revolutionary redefinition and reorientation of life itself.

It is a redefinition and reorientation of life itself. Fisherman are called to fish, but in a totally different way.

Fred Craddock once preached on following Christ wherever He leads. Some time after that the mother of a very bright girl in his church called him and asked, “What did you do to my daughter?” Confused, Craddock told her that he had not done anything to her daughter and asked her what she was talking about it. The mother went on to inform Craddock that her daughter had decided to delay a promising medical career to live in poverty with the Native Americans on a reservation in the west. She was now spending her days teaching Native American children.

Now I ask you: in doing what she did, had that girl really abandoned a vocation of healing? No, she had not. She was simply now helping people heal in a deeper and more profound way: she was ministering to the poor, to the least of these, to the forgotten, to those caught in a cycle of poverty.

This is what the sacred, disrupting, life-altering call of Christ does. It takes us in directions we could not have foreseen. Sometimes it literally calls us away from the vocation to which we sense a calling. Sometimes it does not. Regardless, it always redefines what we are doing by allowing us to see it in the light of the Kingdom and the cross. Jesus may ask you literally to leave a job. He may tell you to stay right where you are. But He will never leave you unchanged. Whether where you are or elsewhere, you will have a new sense of purpose, of meaning, of direction. The call of Christ disrupts, transforms, and redefines.

The call to follow Jesus is a call to a new, dynamic, and countercultural social order that exists in the midst of the old, fallen, and decayed social orders as a challenge and a call to the Kingdom of the Lamb.

It is also a call into a new social order. We can see this dynamic at work in Jesus’ call to James and John.

¹⁹ And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. ²⁰ And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.

Interestingly, Jesus calls them and they leave their father. This is no small thing. Ben Witherington points out that in calling these men to leave everything and follow Him, “Jesus is de facto establishing a new social entity, a new community.” Witherington quotes Myers as saying that point of this text is “that following Jesus requires not just assent of the heart, but a fundamental reordering of socio-economic relationship…This is not a call ‘out of the world,’ but into an alternative social practice.”[2]

That is most true! We are called not into a life of solitude but into a new family structure. This truth is presented by Jesus with a kind of hyperbolic ferocity in Luke 14.

²⁵ Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, ²⁶ “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. ²⁷ Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. ²⁸ For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? ²⁹ Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, ³⁰ saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ ³¹ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? ³² And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. ³³ So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

This is not, of course, about literal hatred. Jesus did not hate His mother, but, then, that is not really what He is talking about. He is talking about a radical reprioritization of our affections to the degree that we count all as loss for the sake of the Kingdom. What is more, He is saying that there is now something more powerful than biology, than human names, that our family units, and that is the new social order into which He calls us.

We are now a Kingdom people. This may put us at odds with our earthly families. Oftentimes it does. Later in Mark, we will see Jesus say this in chapter 13:

¹² And brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death. ¹³ And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

It happens, for not all in our earthly social structures share a Kingdom mindset. The mindset of the Kingdom is most often at great odds with the mindset of the world. They represent two different sets of values. The world is terrified of the Kingdom for the Kingdom calls us from the lustful ambitions and acquisitions and consumptions that make up so much of our lives. The world is terrified of the Kingdom for the Kingdom calls us to abandon ego, the need for power, the desire for comfort, and forsake all for the better way of Christ.

And the world hates the Kingdom for the Kingdom is inherently disruptive just as the call of Christ to enter the Kingdom is disruptive. The Kingdom of God is not passive, not timid. It is a Kingdom of loving proclamation and that proclamation grates on the comforts of the world.

The call to follow Jesus is a call to a new, dynamic, and countercultural social order that exists in the midst of the old, fallen, and decayed social orders as a challenge and a call to the Kingdom of the Lamb.

The Kingdom of God as lived out by Christ in and through the lives of His people in the world is an in-house challenge, a prophetic light in the darkness. Thus, Christ’s call for His disciples to become “fishers of men,” a call, we should not, that is inherent in the call to enter the Kingdom, is a call to engagement with the world.

This call to become fishers of men becomes even more interesting when we consider the fact that the metaphor of fishing was always a negative metaphor in the Old Testament. That is, in the Old Testament it is a metaphor for judgment. There, God fishes the wicked out in order to pour His wrath out upon them. Consider:

Jeremiah 16

¹⁴ “Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when it shall no longer be said, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ ¹⁵ but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their fathers. ¹⁶ “Behold, I am sending for many fishers, declares the Lord, and they shall catch them. And afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. ¹⁷ For my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from me, nor is their iniquity concealed from my eyes. ¹⁸ But first I will doubly repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations.”

Ezekiel 29

³ speak, and say, Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams, that says, ‘My Nile is my own; I made it for myself.’ ⁴ I will put hooks in your jaws, and make the fish of your streams stick to your scales; and I will draw you up out of the midst of your streams, with all the fish of your streams that stick to your scales. ⁵ And I will cast you out into the wilderness, you and all the fish of your streams; you shall fall on the open field, and not be brought together or gathered. To the beasts of the earth and to the birds of the heavens I give you as food. ⁶ Then all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know that I am the Lord.

Ezekiel 38

¹ The word of the Lord came to me: ² “Son of man, set your face toward Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him ³ and say, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. ⁴ And I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed in full armor, a great host, all of them with buckler and shield, wielding swords.

Amos 4

1 “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy who say to your husbands, ‘Bring, that we may drink!’ 2 The Lord God has sworn by his holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks.

Habakkuk 1

¹⁴ You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. ¹⁵ He brings all of them up with a hook; he drags them out with his net; he gathers them in his dragnet; so he rejoices and is glad. ¹⁶ Therefore he sacrifices to his net and makes offerings to his dragnet; for by them he lives in luxury, and his food is rich. ¹⁷ Is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing nations forever?

Yes, the image of fishing out men in the Old Testament scriptures is most terrifying indeed, for they are inevitably fished out for judgment.

How very interesting, then, to see the call of Christ. Jesus likewise evokes the image of fishing for men, but in Christ it is most clearly a positive image, an image of being drawn out of the waters to forgiveness and to eternal life. We might almost say that Christ’s call to fish is a call to fish unto life before the final fishing unto judgment! And, most amazingly, we who take up the call of Christ are called to this amazing task!

“The summons to be fishers of men,” writes William Lane, “is a call to the eschatological task of gathering men in view of the forthcoming judgment of God. It extends the demand for repentance in Jesus’ preaching.” Lane goes on to say that the job of these fishers of men is “confront men with God’s decisive action, which to faith has the character of salvation, but to unbelief has the character of judgment.”[3]

Lane is correct in his interesting observation that this fishing for men to which Christ calls us is an extension of “the demand for repentance in Jesus’ preaching,” for it is through repentance and belief, as we have seen, that we are spared the great fishing unto judgment. We are called to become fishermen of salvation in the light of the coming fishing unto judgment. We are called to a Kingdom of life eternal and blessed outside of which there is only the just and righteous judgment of God against our sins. The Kingdom of God is entered through repentance and belief in the One who burst the door asunder so that all may come!

The call of Christ is therefore a call to a grand adventure of countercultural living and Kingdom proclamation. It is a life-saving call, for to us, then to all to whom we issue the call ourselves.

The call of Christ is not disinterested. It is not casually given. It is borne out of the loving heart of God Himself. It is the call to mercy, to peace, to joy, to hope, to meaning, to purpose, to love.

In other words, it is the call to Christ Jesus Himself.

Have you answered the call?

Have you dropped your nets?

Come to Him now!

 

[1] Robert H. Stein, Mark. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), p.78.

[2] Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), p.84,85.

[3] William L. Lane, The Gospel According to Mark. The New International Commentary of the New Testament. Gen. Ed., F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), p.68.