“I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.  I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.”

 

How many of you know that song?  It will probably be in your head all day now, sorry about that. It’s a song many of us learned as preschoolers and many of us probably taught to preschoolers.   It’s easy to sing, with lots of repeating words and melody lines.  I probably learned it at least ten years before I ever actually went fishing, but I learned it with motions for casting and reeling in fish.  I remember singing it, but I don’t remember anyone ever telling me what it meant.  I probably interpreted for myself that it meant that we were catching people for Jesus.

 

When I think about that, it’s a troubling image.  The image of fishing includes some sort of bait used to lure unsuspecting people to bite and be caught by or for Jesus.  That troubles me because it doesn’t fit with any story of Jesus I can think of.  Jesus didn’t lure people to him.  That was one of the things the devil tempted him with in the wilderness – “turn these stones into bread, Jesus, and all the hungry people will follow you.”  “Throw yourself down from the temple and the angels will save you and people will be impressed with your magic tricks.”  But Jesus wasn’t that kind of Messiah.  He didn’t bait people.  He also didn’t hook them, not in the sense of catching them against their will.  When he invited people to follow, some did and some didn’t, but it was their choice.  So I am uncomfortable with some of the ways this saying of Jesus has been used. 

 

In the first and second centuries, the fish was used as a secret symbol among Christians. Drawing a fish in the dirt was a coded way of identifying oneself as a Christian, in a time of persecution.  And perhaps by that time, by the time this gospel was written,  “being fishers of men” had already begun to mean something about sharing the good news of Jesus.  But Mark wrote this gospel about 40 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Forty years earlier, there was no fish symbol for Christianity, so what did the words “fishers of men” mean when Jesus first said them? 

 

The prophets used a similar expression.  From Jeremiah 16 “I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, . . .”   From Amos 4 – “they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks”   and Ezekiel 29 “I will put hooks in your jaws . . .”  In each of these texts, God is speaking against those rich and powerful people who oppress the poor and needy.

 

It seems likely that Jesus would have been familiar with these words of the prophets and that his Jewish audience would have as well.  So, if Jesus’ reference is about fishing for those who oppress the poor and needy, who did he mean?

 

Much of Jesus’ ministry takes place in and around the Sea of Galilee, which is a major inland lake.  In the decade before his public ministry, major changes have come to this region.  Herod Antipas, the ruler who beheaded John the Baptist, the one Jesus called a fox, has built a capital on the western shore.  He named it Tiberius, after the Roman emperor who is his patron. And sometimes the lake is called the Sea of Tiberius.

 

In this time frame, a sort of “progress” has come to this part of Galilee.  For centuries, people have farmed their own land and provided for their families with their harvests. But now, agriculture is being commercialized.   The empire needs more food for export.  Instead of living off the land, farmers are paid in cash for their crops and that cash is increasingly insufficient to meet their families’ needs.  The same thing is happening on the Sea of Galilee.  “The peasant fishermen could no longer cast their nets freely from the shore.  They could no longer own a boat or beach a catch without being taxed.  They probably had to sell what they caught to Antipas’ factories.”[1] The cost of getting a fishing license, the taxes they would have to pay, and the rates that they would be paid for their fish, would all be determined by sources higher up than they.  This is a system where the rich get richer and the poor become more and more impoverished. 

 

It may be hard for some of us to hear this, because since we were in preschool, we’ve been taught that this passage is about saving souls for Jesus.  But what if it means something entirely different?  What if Jesus was talking about hooking the big fish, the people of power and authority who were oppressing the little fish?  What if Jesus was inviting Simon and Andrew and James and John to join him in the struggle against the status quo?  

 

Simon, Andrew, James and John are aware of economic oppression.  They’ve probably seen other fishing families lose their livelihoods.  They’ve felt the pressure to keep up with quotas, to make enough to stay in business and support their families.  Perhaps they know that it wasn’t always like this, not for their father’s and grandfather’s generations. 

 

Jesus says that they have bigger fish to fry.  And so they drop their nets and follow him. They opt out of the system that is oppressing them and others. They accept Jesus’ invitation to form an alternative community that won’t play by the Emperor’s rules.  This is a risky decision.  It has implications for their financial security and their family relationships – for every aspect of their lives.  It means leaving a way of life that was killing them, but it was the only life they knew. 

 

After President Lyndon Johnson left office, talking about the war in Vietnam, he said, "I never felt I had the luxury of re-examining my basic assumptions. Once the decision to commit military force was made, all our energies were turned to vindicating that choice and finding a way somehow to make it work."[2] Regardless of what we think about Johnson’s presidency, we can probably sympathize with his predicament.  We have each made decisions that have set us on a certain path, and in the midst of our busyness, it is hard to stop and re-evaluate, re-examine the basic assumptions that got us where we are.  Some courses of action that might get us off the hamster wheel never occur to us because we are so busy running.  Our way of living might be killing us, but it’s the only life we know.  Here at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus calls people to repent, to reflect, reconsider, re-examine our lives in the light of his good news.  

 

Jesus didn’t just call other people to act in counter-cultural ways.  He did it himself.  His public ministry was a series of skirmishes with the authorities, beginning with local clergy and escalating all the way to the top religious and political authorities in Jerusalem, which got him killed. 

 

I believe that in that time in the wilderness, he reflected and considered and examined his own assumptions.  I believe he was very intentional in how he began his ministry.  In Jesus’ day, rabbis did not advertise for students. Rabbis stayed at home and waited for potential students to come to them.  When potential students showed up, they had to convince the rabbi that they were worth his time, that they were smart enough and disciplined enough to learn. They had to prove themselves worthy to be called his students.

 

Jesus didn’t act like a normal rabbi, did he?   Jesus left his home in Nazareth and moved to Capernaum, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  He didn’t wait for students to come to him, but he took the initiative. He went out looking.  And he didn’t look where you might expect.  He didn’t look in a holy place, in a temple or a synagogue, but in the midst of everyday work, everyday life.  Normally students followed a teacher only as long as it took them to attain rabbinic status themselves, but Jesus’ call was absolute.  It was life-long.  There was no graduation.  Those who followed him, spent maybe 3 years learning from him, and then after his death and resurrection, they continued to follow to the ends of the earth, forming that alternative community of love and justice  that was so threatening to the earthly powers. 

 

Most sermons on this text would invite us to consider Jesus’ call to us.  The word call is often used about a task, like serving on a certain commission, or participating in a mission trip; or it’s used about a vocation.  Both of those uses are good and appropriate.  But the question I’d like to ask today is not about occupation or vocation, not about a specific task, as important as those things are.  Instead the question I’d like to ask is “To what life is God calling you and me?” 

 

This text is a call to re-examine our assumptions, the assumptions that we have built our lives on.  Perhaps our assumptions were wrong and we need to repent, to change course.  Perhaps we need to let go of some nets of economic security, of social status, of doing things the accepted ways, like the fishermen did.  Perhaps we need to question the assumptions of the American dream or capitalism or a free market or whatever it is that is creating economic oppression in our own time.   Perhaps we need to look at our religious assumptions. Have we set a certain course, in our personal faith and in our religious institutions?  Are we still the alternative community of love and inclusion that Jesus formed?  Are we the community that allows and even encourages people to leave a life that is killing them?   If not, where do we need to repent, to change course?  To what life is Jesus calling us?

 

“Come and follow me,” Jesus said then and now. 

“Come and follow me.  We have bigger fish to fry.”