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| Domenico Ghirlandaio, Calling of the Apostles (Sistine Chapel, 1481) |
"As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him." (Matthew 4:18–22)
Have you ever noticed that the Gospels give two different versions of the calling of the disciples? We just heard Matthew’s version: Jesus shows up and says, “Follow me,” and “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” But John’s Gospel says they were called in a different way. We heard John’s version last week. Do you remember it? Two of John the Baptist’s disciples are hanging out with him and Jesus walks by and John says, “Hey, there goes the Lamb of God.” And the two disciples get curious and tag along after Jesus, and he sees them following him and asks what they’re looking for, and they ask to see where he’s staying, and he says, “Come and see,” and so they do. Anyway, one of these guys was Andrew and the next day he gets his brother, Simon, and brings him to Jesus, and Jesus looks at him and says, “You’re Simon; I’m going to call you Rock” (which is what Peter means). Pretty different from Matthew’s version, right? In John’s version Andrews calls Peter, but in Matthew’s Jesus calls them both. There Jesus says “Come and see,” here he says, “Follow me.” Why the difference?
Back in the fourth century, a preacher named John Chrysostom wondered about the difference, too. Here’s what he suggests: What if Matthew is telling the story of the second time Jesus called Peter and Andrew, and John’s version is the story of the first time? He notices that in John’s version John the Baptist is not yet in prison, while Matthew goes out of his way to say that John the Baptist had already been arrested when Jesus calls the disciples. What if Andrew and Peter followed Jesus for a while and, hearing that John the Baptist was arrested, went back to their old way of life, leaving Jesus to return to fishing? What if Jesus finds them fishing because they had stopped following him? If this is the case, what does it say about Jesus?
Chrysostom sees in the different stories a Jesus who is as persistent and patient as a master fisherman. He says, “Jesus neither resisted them at first when they desired to withdraw from him, nor having withdrawn themselves, did he let them go altogether. He gave way when they moved aside from him and came again to win them back. This, after all, is exactly what fishing is all about.”[1] He sees Jesus as a seasoned fisherman, rather like the one in the Old Man in the Sea, who can tell from the pressure of the line between his thumb and finger when to let the line run with the fish and when to reel it in, who feels a gentle touch on the line and is happy. [2] If Jesus is like a master fisherman, he says “come and see” to bait the disciples and “follow me” to hook them.
If Jesus is like a fishermen, then he’s fishing for you and for me. He wants to catch us. He wants to draw us out of the deep. He wants us, but he will not force us to come to him. He is patient, luring us to him, calling to us, “Come and see, taste and see my goodness.” He does not force us to follow him, but lets us nibble at the bait. But he is persistent, and he does not give up on us. He keeps casting his net. And there comes a time when he says, “Follow me.”
Stanley Hauerwas says there’s a difference between admiring Jesus and following Jesus. [3] Lots of people admire Jesus; he’s a pretty impressive guy after all, going around healing people and driving out demons and talking about love and forgiveness and peace. Crowds of people admired Jesus; they were attracted to him, and came from all over to see him preach and teach and heal. Maybe Andrew and Peter initially admired Jesus; they went and saw where he was saying. And then they went back to their fishing and their nets. But Jesus doesn’t let them go altogether; he fishes them out and says, “Follow me.” “And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”
You see, that’s the difference between admiring and following Jesus. You can admire Jesus all day long and then go back to whatever you were doing before. But if you want to follow Jesus, you must change your life. You’ve got to leave your nets behind. And not just once, but again and again.
What are “nets”? Well, lots of things! Good things and bad. “Nets” can be anything that draws us away from the love of God, anything that keeps us from putting our whole trust in the grace and love of the Lord Jesus. The world, the flesh, and the devil—the things we renounce in Baptism—are “nets.” The idols in the epistle lesson are “nets”; the many false gods from which the Thessalonians turned “to serve a living and true God” (1 Thess. 1:9). Greed and envy and ambition are nets. Fear is a net and shame, and so is regret over past choices.
But good things can be the most subtle nets. In the Gospel lesson, the “nets” are, well, nets. But they’re not just objects; they represent the source of livelihood of Simon and Andrew, and James and John; they represent their wealth. And what did Jesus say about that? “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt. 6:24). And James and John didn’t just leave their nets behind, they left behind their boat and their father. Even our families can be nets. A respectable, responsible middle class lifestyle can be a net. Our loves can be nets.
Whether good or bad, “nets” are those things that keep you from giving your whole self to God. “Nets” are those things in which you are tempted to place your entire trust, which you are tempted to idolize. For, as Martin Luther said, “to have a god is to have something in which the heart entirely trusts.” [4] But, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”—only the living God, who raised Jesus from the dead and called Israel from Egypt and light out of darkness, is worthy of your entire trust. If you place your entire trust in “nets”, you’ll find that everything flows through them; you won’t catch what you’re looking for in them.
The problem with nets is that they don’t go deep enough; they only skim the surface. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased,” he says. [5] But Jesus calls us to leave our “nets” behind, because only he can truly satisfy the desires of our hearts. He says, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. […] But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you as well” (Mt. 6:25, 33). Often “nets” are good things, but Jesus calls us to something better. Being with Jesus, putting your whole trust in his grace and love, is the best thing. As Augustine famously confessed, “You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Jesus calls us to leave our “nets” behind because he wants what is best for us. When he says, “Follow me,” we can hear him saying, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Mt. 11:28–29). Because Jesus gives us in himself what we are seeking in our nets, we can let them behind and follow him without fear or worry. Because we find what we seek in him, we can bear the cost of discipleship. Because Christ is our life, we can risk the loss of our lives in following him.
Paride Taban is a retired Roman Catholic bishop from southern Sudan. He was ordained priest in 1964, and was one of the few remaining priests in southern Sudan during years of war. He was made bishop of the Diocese of Torit in 1983 and lead his people for two decades through some of the most difficult years of Sudan’s brutal civil war. When he retired in 2004, he moved to a remote area of Sudan and founded the Holy Trinity Peace Village where people of different ethnicities and religions live together. Bishop Taban knows what it is to risk his life to follow Christ. I can scarcely imagine the sacrifices he has made. I mention him, though, not because of how much he has left behind to follow Christ, but because he says something that suggests that what really matters in discipleship is how we hold what we have. He says, “Life is a very precious gift. If you grasp it or hold on to it with all your might, you will crush it. Hold it loosely in your hands, grateful for the gift.” [6]
In other words, discipleship is a matter of the heart, a matter of holding your life loosely, a matter of lifting it to God the Giver of Life. And God wants your whole heart, your whole life. As Gregory the Great puts it, “the kingdom of heaven is worth as much as you have.” [7] And what do you have that you have not received?
You can only give your life one day at a time, though. You can only follow Jesus one step at a time. When Jesus called the disciples and they left everything and followed him, they did not know where the road would lead. But they took the decisive step out away from their nets toward Jesus. I wonder what concrete step Jesus is asking you to take today? I wonder how you will leave the shallows and cast out into the deep, into the deep, deep love of Jesus?
Maybe, though, you feel all tangled up in your nets and that you can’t get free. You’re all tangled up and you’re gasping for breath. The good news is that Jesus wants to come to you and slowly disentangle you.
At the end of John’s Gospel, Peter is all eaten up with shame because he’s denied Jesus. That’s the net he’s tangled up in. But the risen Jesus comes to him on the shore one bright morning and asks him three times, “Peter, do you love me?” “Do you love me?” “Do you love me?”
You see what Jesus is doing? He’s disentangling Peter from his net, from his shame and regret. And then he says to him, “Follow me.”
We can follow Jesus because he comes and frees us from our nets.
[1] John
Chrysostom, Gospel of Matthew, Homily 14, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture:
Matthew 1–13,
p. 71.
[2] Cf.
Hemingway, Old
Man in the Sea.
[3] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Brazos Theological Commentary), p. 57.
[4] Luther,
Large Catechism, 3.10.
[5] C.S.
Lewis, The
Weight of Glory.
[6] Paride Taban, The
Long Road to Peace,
quoted by Ross Kane, "We Need Training in Transcendence," Faith & Leadership.
[7] Gregory
the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, 5.2, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew
1–13,
p. 71.