Philip Jones
Today we hear Matthew’s account of Jesus’s first attempt to gather around him some particular followers. And yet the story leaves us at a point where only 4 fishermen – two pairs of brothers – have been called to follow this charismatic teacher.
We are given no explanation about why these men so readily walked away from their prosperous family businesses and followed Jesus.
In the next six chapters of Matthew's gospel we hear of Jesus undertaking all kinds of teaching and healing activities. Matthew sets out many of the key themes of Jesus's message in this section of the gospel; but he describes only one more disciple being specifically called into Jesus's inner circle – and that disciple is called Matthew.
By chapter 10 Matthew mentions a group of 12, but doesn't give any clues about how they came to join Jesus as close companions.
So according to Matthew, we have Jesus going around the area of Galilee collecting followers of all kinds – listeners, pupils, disciples whose main function was to learn by hearing Jesus’s teaching and observing his actions. Four fishermen are singled out for his special commission to ‘fish for people’ but somehow a group of followers have attached themselves to this itinerant rabbi – an inner core of a handful, an outer core of the twelve, and a much wider circle of the thousands who would assemble on the hillsides to hear Jesus teach.
Right from those first few weeks of Jesus’s recorded ministry around the shores of Lake Galilee, he was gathering a significant number of followers – perhaps not all making the same commitment, perhaps not all grasping the same message, probably not all leaving everything behind to follow Jesus around the region. But these were disciples nevertheless, women and men, young and old, poor and rich, eager to hear his words, trying to learn his message, offering support to his ministry.
When we look at the encounter between Jesus and the four fishermen described in today’s reading, there may be some background that we need to consider.
To my mind, this seems impetuous behaviour to come out of such a casual encounter. What happened to the fishing businesses and the boats? Where did Zebedee, the father of James and John, think they had gone? Where did Simon Peter’s wife and family think he had gone? Does the phrase ‘to leave everything and follow Jesus’ signify something as irrational as it seems to?
To get up and follow so passionately really suggests that there were foundations laid for the relationships between Jesus and that fishing community which had been developing over time – probably through the networks which had built up during John the Baptist's ministry in the region.
Many scholars believe that some of Jesus's followers in the Galilee area may well have been early disciples of John the Baptist. If they – and Jesus – had been inspired by John's message of 'Repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand!', and had become acquainted with each other during John's campaigns, then perhaps we can see a natural tendency to regard Jesus as John's successor after John's arrest and imprisonment and a chance to breathe new life into the movement which John had started.
Matthew may not bother to tell us, as he is urgently moving his story onwards to other events even more gripping. But I have a powerful sense that the call of Jesus to fish with him in other places and in other ways was more reasoned and less impulsive than we might think from the gospel's brief account.
One reason I say this is that I don’t think Jesus calls his disciples today to follow him purely on the basis of a sudden impulse or some miraculous demonstration of power. There have to be firm foundations to our discipleship or it will not thrive – it may not even survive. And seeds take time and nourishment to take root, blossom and flourish. In fact, on occasions when his disciples were impulsive, Jesus rebuked them.
Jesus knew that he was calling ordinary people to be his closest friends and supporters; but they would also be the inheritors of his mission and his message, and from these ordinary people some extraordinary gifts and actions would emerge. In the words of one commentator,
‘And so it has come to pass that not the jargon of fanatics and brigands, but the speech of fisherfolk and their simple craft has become the language and symbolism of Christianity’. (Ronald Brownrigg: Who’s Who: the New Testament, article on Peter.)
If we go beyond the four fishermen, and beyond the circle of twelve, there were many people who both touched, and were touched by, Jesus’s life and ministry.
Non-Jews, foreigners, women, people living in poverty, the powerless, those being unjustly persecuted, the sick, and the marginalised, all inhabited that wider circle of disciples which touched, and were touched by, Jesus the teacher and healer who lived and taught among them. Discipleship never was limited to a chosen twelve: it always encompassed a much wider spectrum of people because Jesus’s message spoke powerfully to a much wider audience. Jesus consciously and deliberately taught crowds of people. He placed himself where crowds could gather and engage with his message. To all but twelve of those first disciples we cannot put names, but their lives were changed by his message no less than the two pairs of brothers in today's reading.
And so it is for us today. We can be called to be disciples without having to take centre stage as bold and charismatic leaders. Our lives will be changed by the message of Jesus no less than the great figures of the Christian faith. As the ordinary people of our day – people who, like the first disciples, can be impulsive, fearful, slow to learn, easily distracted, clumsy and tongue-tied – we are called to become followers who engage with that message which is inclusive and sets no boundaries.
And for many of us, the call to discipleship is not a sudden encounter with a stranger who walks up to us and says 'Follow me'. We will have brushed up against Jesus a few times, probably through friends, or by hearing some part of the gospel story, or through someone’s simple healing touch, or as the voice of love and compassion within a campaign for justice, before we feel called to follow Jesus and leave behind those bits of our lives which hold us back.
When we look at the brothers running their fishing businesses, and the circle of twelve, and the women who devotedly cared for Jesus and were first to experience his resurrection, and the families who sheltered him and fed him and took him into their homes, and the thousands who would crowd onto the hillsides and lakeside to hear his message, we realise that none of us is too ordinary to follow Jesus or to discern his call to a life of discipleship.
But such a life is a journey. It is a growing and continuing experience of an engaging relationship which changes us. Perhaps the challenge comes when, at some point in that journey, Jesus says to us, 'I know you hear my words, and I know you understand my good news, and I call you my disciple. But will you stay on the hillside to listen, or will you join us in the boat to fish for people?'
Amen.
(Philip Jones)