It's easy for me to read a lot of the Bible, especially the gospels, allowing myself to operate under the assumption that the historical events that we read of there were of a special nature. Surely Jesus isn't going to come walking down the road and ask me to drop everything to follow Him, so how can I relate those first followers of Jesus who left behind their nets, and sometimes more, to follow Christ?
When we begin to move beyond their immediate context, we see some challenging similarities between their situation and ours. First of all we, like them, are called by God. The call seems more explicit in these few verse of Mark's gospel, because Jesus specifically addresses a few men, issuing them an invitation. What it's easy to lose sight of is the universal nature of Jesus' invitation. We may think that at some moment in our lives we made the conscious decision to seek out God, but if we are honest with ourselves we will open our eyes to the reality that God has already sought us out. The cross stands dominating the landscape of history, a giant invitation for humankind to be reconciled to God. Paul would put it this way, "for while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6) We may never see Jesus face-to-face on this earth, but his invitation to us to "follow me" is just as real for us today as it was for those first disciples.
A second challenging similarity is found in the nature of Jesus invitation. Jesus invitation is a call to action, but more specifically it is a call to apprenticeship. "Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men." The implication there is that they are not already fishers of men, and that there is something they need to learn from Christ before they will be fully capable of "fishing" as he does. The tragic irony is that too often we trust Jesus to be our savior, but not our teacher. Or, perhaps a more accurate way of stating it is that it doesn't even occur to us that in addition to being saved by Jesus, it is possible that we might learn something from Him. It has taken me years to come to grips with the fact that Jesus is more than someone we learn about, he is someone we learn from. To be honest, what that means for my life is something that I am constantly in the process of discovering.
A final way that our story relates to that of those first disciples is that we, like them, are going to be called to give something up in order to follow Jesus. The sacrifices we are called to make will differ, both in their nature as well as in their intensity. I find it interesting that from what we can tel, Peter and Andrew simply leave behind a net, while James and John leave behind a boat, employees, and even their father to follow Jesus. It's a safe assumption that the fishing business for James, John, and their father Zebedee was going better than it was for Peter and Andrew. Does that mean that James and John were "better" disciples of Jesus because they gave up more to follow Jesus than Peter and Andrew did? Absoltely not. What it means is that in that point and time, their sacrifice was greater. There were other times that the situation would have been reversed, especially when we consider that James, Peter, and Andrew would all suffer martyrdom, while by all accounts John died of natural causes. The point here is not to quantify the sacrifices we make, or the amount of suffering we endure, but rather to grapple with the reality that at some point in time, we ALL are going to be called upon to leave behind something, or to do without something, or to give something up. I like the way John Wesley puts it:
“This taking of His yoke upon us means we are heartily content that he appoint us our place and work, and that He alone be our reward. Christ has many services to be done; some are easy, others are difficult; some bring honour, others bring reproach; some are suitable to our natural inclinations and temporal interests, others are contrary to both. In some we may please Christ and please ourselves, in others we can not please Christ except by denying ourselves. Yet the power to do all these things is assuredly given us in Christ, who strengthens us.”
Did you catch that one line? In remarking on the many services Christ has to be done, Wesley states very plainly that "in some we may please Christ and please ourselves, in others we can not please Christ except by denying ourselves." Our faith will not cost us every minute of every day, but rest assured there will come a time at some minute of some day, that we will be made to chose between ourselves and Christ. We can borrow language from our text in Mark to ask the poignent question, are you losing sight of Jesus because of your refusal to get out of the boat? Have you become entangled in the nets that you cling so tighly to? Whatever it is that is holding us back, whether it's a boat or just a net, we must put it aside if we hope to truly follow Christ because if there is one thing that I have learned, it's that following Christ is never a stationary act.
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