Text: Mark 1:14-20 (Jonah 3:1-5, 10)                                                                                         3 Epiphany

Going Fishing

            In the name of him who calls us to follow him, dear friends in Christ:

            In this morning’s Gospel lesson, we find Jesus on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  We are at the very beginning of his public ministry. He has only recently come up to this pleasant and relatively cool region around the lake where he’s going to end up spending most of his time during his first year of teaching.  He had been down in the mercilessly hot Jordan River valley to the south.  There he had gone from Nazareth, where he grew up, to be baptized by John; and following that, he spent forty days in the desolate eastern desert, fasting, praying, and being tempted by Satan.  All of this was preparatory work.  Last week we heard about how (after his temptation) he returned to the area where John was baptizing and began gathering disciples.  There he called Philip and Nathanael to follow him. There also Jesus became acquainted with Andrew, Peter, and another unnamed man who is most likely the one we know as the apostle John – but they had yet to be called to discipleship by Jesus.

            That’s what we heard about this week.  We’re not sure how much time elapsed between the call of those first two disciples and the four that we heard about this morning, but it was probably a matter of several weeks at least; enough time, anyway, for Jesus to come north to Galilee, for John the Baptist to be arrested, and for word of his arrest to reach this far north.  The arrival of the sad news seems to be the signal that tells Jesus that it’s time to launch his own preaching and teaching ministry.  And so he begins by speaking to small groups in the towns and villages around the lake.  His message is simple:  “The time has come, the Kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent and believe the good news.”  I suspect that’s actually a summary statement and that his sermons were quite a bit longer (probably a lot longer than mine—better and more interesting, to be sure, but much longer).

Now, during this interval of several weeks between meeting Jesus and the start of his ministry, Andrew and Peter have returned to their work as fishermen; and John too has rejoined his brother James and their father in the family fishing business.  And it only makes sense:  that’s what they do.  That’s what they’ve always done.  And that’s what they plan on doing the rest of their lives.  It’s how they pay the bills; and in Peter’s case at least, that’s how he supports his family.  My point is this:  they know Jesus, they’ve been told that he’s the Christ, by this time they’ve heard him preach and teach some, but they are fishermen.  They have no thoughts about becoming disciples.  Their plans, hopes, and dreams for the future do not include what they still do not know Jesus has in mind for them.  And the reason we know this is that in that day and age, if you wanted to study under a teacher or Rabbi, you went to apply in person – and you offered to pay tuition for the privilege of learning.  Then the teacher would quiz your knowledge and wit to see if you were worth his time to try to train, haggle a bit over tuition perhaps, and then, maybe, accept you as a disciple.  These four guys just don’t seem interested.

Jesus upsets the natural order of things by dropping by to visit them at work. And he finds them hard at it:  we read that Andrew and Peter were “casting their nets into the lake.”  The words used there suggest that they were using the round, cone-shaped nets common at the time.  They were thrown out into the water sort of like a lasso, making a circle on the surface maybe fifteen or twenty feet in diameter.  Weights attached around the edges of the net caused it to sink, capturing everything underneath it.  Then, when it reached the bottom, the net was retrieved.  You did that by pulling on the line that formed the lasso, so that as you drew it up, the bottom of the cone closed, like pulling on the drawstrings of a cloth moneybag.  Once you got the net back on board the boat, you took out the fish, unsnagged the sticks and other debris, untangled and loosened the net, and then you were ready for the next cast.  Between that and repairing the nets, maintaining the boats, and the business end of things when it came time to sell the fish, it was all a lot of hard work. But it was not without its rewards. We can only assume that these men liked their work, that they had developed the skills to do it well, and that they had lot of time and money invested in it.  And here they are doing it, when all of a sudden, Jesus steps up and says, “Hey fellas, stop what you’re doing.  Come on, follow me.”

And let’s put this in perspective.  Imagine that you’re, say a man thirty-five years old.  You have a wife and a few children.  And you’re busy at your work – for argument’s sake, let’s say your farming.  You’re out in the field planting your corn or beans.  You come around a corner, and there’s Pastor Dudley standing at the edge of the field waving his arms for you to stop.  You idle the engine, lean out of the cab to hear what he’s got to say. I say, “Climb down out of there. You’re going to seminary.  Right now.”  And you do it.  You leave the still idling tractor, the field, the farm – I don’t know what you tell your wife:  “Change of plans Hon’, I’ve decided to do something else for a while.  Oh, and did I mention?  It doesn’t pay anything.”  Got the picture?

All right:  if you can imagine that, then you can understand what these four disciples are doing when they drop the nets, get out of the boats, and walk away with Jesus. It’s stunning.  We have to ask, “Just how could they do that?”

And so it happens that a text like this normally serves as foundation for a sermon on faithful discipleship, about how we too have to be willing to forsake everything, pick up our crosses, and follow the Master wherever he leads.  The focus of such a message is about the disciples’ response and how we all need to learn to be more like them.

            And while it’s certain that there is some validity to striving to imitate their faithful performance, I’m equally certain that such a focus misses the main point of the story entirely.  It really isn’t about the relative responsiveness of the disciples; but rather it’s about the awesome power of Jesus’ call.  What we are witnessing here is what has been called “the miracle of sudden persuasion”.  A few weeks ago, when we celebrated the Baptism of Jesus, we read in the Psalm a passage that said, “The voice of the Lord is powerful”.  That is to say, When God speaks, things happen. His voice creates changes.  In this particular case, Jesus’ call, “Follow me”, converts the natural unwillingness of the fishermen to do what he asks to willingness.  If there had only been one man called at this point we might have missed it.  But the fact that there are four who without question or hesitation drop what they are doing and go shows that Jesus is the one who’s in charge of the action.  And so I hope you see the irony of the situation:  they are in their boats fishing by casting nets – but it is Jesus who is casting the net and drawing them in.  And just like the fish, the disciples here don’t have a lot of control over it.  They have been captured by the voice of the Lord Jesus.

It’s a fundamental truth of our Christian faith that whatever God requires of us, he himself must first provide.  We are born in sin and so we are by nature opposed to the Lord and his will for our lives.  Our innate attitudes and motivations are hostile to God.  So, left to our own powers and abilities, we would never do anything he desires.  But the Lord’s spoken Word itself contains the power we need to respond.  His Holy Spirit is operating in and through the message to overthrow the hostile nature that says, “No, I don’t want to!” and to empower the new nature to respond, “Yes, Lord, lead and I will follow.”

In the same way, prior to this when Jesus begins his ministry, his message is, “Repent and believe the Good News.”  Again, without the voice of the Lord calling us to repent, we couldn’t do it. It’s the Spirit working through the message that reveals sin, makes us feel ashamed and fearful of judgment, and literally drives us to repentance.  So also, it is the Lord’s invitation to believe the Good News that creates faith.  When he says, “Believe this.  Believe that your sins are forgiven for the sake of Christ who died for you and rose again”, the message itself creates and reinforces the belief that the Lord requires. That’s why it’s so vitally important that as Christians we continue to expose ourselves to the Lord through his Word. The more we hear him, the more faith we will have, and the better equipped we will be to follow him faithfully. It’s really that simple.

            Now, somebody’s probably wondering, “Well, what are we then, just a bunch of mindless zombies who have no choice in this matter at all?  [Monotone] ‘Yes, Lord; I hear and obey’.”  It might seem to be better for us if we were; but it’s not quite that simple.  First, the believer within us is very much his own person – it’s just that he’s right with God and so it’s only natural that he seeks to follow the Lord and do his will.  He knows that whatever God wants is the wisest and best thing to do.  Following the Lord is a no-brainer.  The problem is that the old defiant nature is also still very much present within.  It takes a licking, but it keeps on ticking, you might say.  And what we are left with is sort of a tug of war for our ultimate response. 

We see a good example of this in today’s Old Testament lesson.  You may have noticed that the text said, “The Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time”.  You probably remember what happened the first time the Lord’s Word came to him.  Like the disciples in the boats, the Lord asked Jonah to do something; specifically, to go to the city of Nineveh and give them a message.  And that’s when the battle began.  The believer in Jonah said, “Sure, Lord, what a great idea!” And the old nature in Jonah said, “No way.  I hate the Ninevites.  If I go there they might repent; and the truth is that I’d rather see them all fry.” A man with the real heart of an evangelist, Jonah.

Anyway, even though Jonah knew what was right and wanted to do it, the old, defiant Jonah ultimately defeated that part of him.  But don’t think the new nature was quiet about it.  I’ll bet that as Jonah got on that boat bound for Tarshish the Holy Spirit was still speaking to his heart through the Lord’s Word. “Jonah?  What do you think you’re doing?  You’re going the wrong way.”  It took constant and active defiance against the Word of the Lord to do what he was doing. He had to suppress God’s Word.  He tried to silence it from speaking to his mind.

Unfortunately some people are ultimately successful doing this.  Let me give you a good example.  From time to time I’ll make calls on members who are habitually absent from church, or just I’ll run into them when out and about. I’m usually met with a sort of sheepish look and an uncomfortable, “Oh, pastor … heh … good to see you.  (Right!) You know, I’ve been thinking about how I should be coming to church an all … but you know how it goes.  There’s this and that” and all sorts of other excuses that have to sound even weaker and more pathetic to the person giving them than they do to me.  But my point is that there’s a struggle going on in such a person.  He’s not lying:  the new changed nature really does want to be there to hear God’s Word – but that old nature is dragging him in the other direction.  Come Sunday morning, he makes a conscious decision to not listen to the Spirit of God speaking within.  And over time, if he keeps doing it, he slowly stifles the Word until it becomes just a small whisper – and eventually, he might not be able to hear it at all.  No more voice, no more Spirit, no more repentance, no more faith.  It doesn’t get sadder than that.

But we can be grateful that the Lord does not give up as easily as we do. Very often he will intervene like he did in Jonah’s case – or as in the case of the absentee, with and “accidental” encounter with the pastor or another member of the church.  Jonah’s case shows to what great lengths the Lord will go to do it.  Jonah experienced some rough treatment – I’m sure I wouldn’t want to endure what he did – but we need to see even those three days and nights in the dark, cold, stinking belly of a fish as an act of divine mercy to call the wayward prophet back to the right path.  The Lord did what was necessary to get Jonah to hear to his Word again – and to use him to share that Word with others.  And in light of today’s Gospel, there’s some real irony here too:  because Jonah won’t go  “catch fish” for the Lord, the Lord arranges to have a fish catch Jonah.  Let it be that we never need anything so drastic to get us to answer the call to follow.

            Because we have all be called to follow Jesus and to be fishers of men for him.  No, he’s not asked us all to drop what we’re doing and go to seminary.  But in his great commission for his whole church, he’s asked us all to share the good news as we go about our lives and in the various vocations and roles we play.  And today we see how this is to be done:  it’s not rocket science.  All we are to do is to speak God’s Word – deliver his message – because it alone has the power to effect the changes God desires.  So many people worry about witnessing their faith to others. “I don’t know what to say or how to say it.”  Others get tied up in endless philosophical arguments trying to prove the existence of God and so on.  There’s no point to it.  All we need to do is say what the Lord has already said to us:  “Repent of your sin, and believe the Good News.”  You don’t need to be a pastor to make a sermon from that outline.  Show a person where God’s law stands against him, and let the Holy Spirit work the repentance in his heart.  Then tell the person what Jesus Christ has done for them by his sacrificial death and resurrection, and let the Spirit work the faith that believes it.  That’s it.  That’s all there is to it.  So, let’s go fishing, in Jesus’ holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!