Follow Me: SALT’s Commentary for Epiphany Week 3
Epiphany 3 (Year B): Mark 1:14-20 and Jonah 3:1-5,10
Big Picture:
1) Like last week, this week’s readings focus on the experience of calling, and together open up an opportunity to explore what it means to be called, to be summoned toward a vocation or life purpose. And the diametrically opposed reactions of Jonah on one hand, and the disciples on the other, raise a challenging, fruitful question: are we more like Jonah, or the disciples? Or both?
2) Jonah is a prophet, but a deeply reluctant one, more so than any other biblical prophetic figure. Moses and Jeremiah might be initially unwilling, but Jonah takes resistance to a whole new level. The book opens with God calling Jonah to embark on a mission — and Jonah promptly runs the other way, attempting to escape God’s call. And in fact, Jonah’s claim to fame (being swallowed by a huge fish and then delivered back to land) is a case of God rescuing him, a wayward, disobedient, half-hearted coward, and then calling him a second time, the subject of this week’s passage. It’s a surprising, counter-intuitive move on God’s part, and it embodies one of the book’s overarching themes: to achieve divine purposes, God mercifully saves and sends not “the best” but some pretty questionable, unreliable characters (like us!).
3) And speaking of fish: the image of “fishing for people,” which Jesus evokes in this passage, has an ancient pedigree — but not in the way you might think. In the Book of Jeremiah, for example, in the context of exile in Babylon (about 600 years before Jesus), “fishing for people” refers to God’s judgment: the unrighteous and unjust are caught by divine agents, “doubly repaid for their iniquity,” and only then rescued from the exile (Jeremiah 16:14-18). What’s Jesus up to here, as he borrows this provocative phrase? What signal is he sending? As we’ll see below, he’s inviting recruits into an adventure that ultimately ends with salvation — but includes plenty of struggle along the way.
Scripture:
1) Barbara Brown Taylor has famously called this episode in Mark a “miracle on the beach”: these fishermen have never met Jesus, and yet after hearing just two words from him, they “immediately” leave everything behind — family, friends, livelihood — and follow him. Read this way, it’s a story about God’s power to move us, to turn us around, to miraculously make disciples in the blink of an eye; and at the same time, it’s a story about the sometimes sudden, life-changing power of faith.
2) But the other way to read this passage is to say, “Wait a minute: no-one 'drops their nets' and walks away from everything they know without being good and ready to do so, without some deep, pre-existing longing for a different life altogether.” Read this way, the story prompts us to wonder about those fishermen, and about what it was that prepared them, that made them so ready and willing to hear Jesus’ invitation, drop everything, and go.
3) In Ched Myers’ remarkable post on this passage in Mark, he makes the case that fishermen on the Sea of Galilee in Jesus’ day were caught up in an elaborate, exploitative caste system, and that’s why they’re good and ready to move on. Fishing was considered the lowest of the low professions, Myers argues, and so Jesus’ invitation was to join him in ushering in a whole new way of living, economically and otherwise. Myers points out that the verb translated “they left their nets” (aphiemi) is used elsewhere in Mark in the context of leaving behind debt, sin, and bondage. Accordingly, aphiemi is what Myers calls a “Jubilee verb,” a verb of release and new life — and it’s into a new Jubilee world that Jesus invites these exploited, disenfranchised people to follow him. It’s as if he says: Leave the reign of Rome behind, and come, follow me — for the reign of God, the Great Jubilee, has come near!
4) We can imagine a skeptic standing there on the beach looking on, saying, Sounds great — but why should we believe in such deliverance? The death-dealing power of Rome is overwhelming! Jesus’ initial answer is embedded in the invitation itself: the reference to Jeremiah (“I will make you fish for people”) evokes the ancient deliverance from Babylon, as if to say, Remember, God delivered our ancestors, and behold, God is doing it again!
5) The upshot of all this is that the dawning “reign of God,” while ultimately emancipatory and restorative, will also involve difficulty, and ultimately, mercy. Just as it was in the days of Jeremiah, to “fish for people” is to enter into a struggle — not a military struggle, as we’ll see in the weeks ahead, but a struggle nonetheless, a wrestling match with the dehumanizing, death-dealing powers that be, both in our hearts (like shame, resentment, or contempt) and in our communities (like injustice, unkindness, or violence).
6) After his disastrous attempt at fleeing from God’s presence and call, Jonah delivers his terse prophetic message to Nineveh, just five words in Hebrew — and the entire community (even the animals!) is immediately roused into action. The principal contrast in the story is between a) Jonah’s foot-dragging reluctance and b) Nineveh's heartfelt repentance. The king of Nineveh outshines Jonah, the people change their ways, and God extends mercy to the once sinful city. This mercy is extraordinary not least because it’s given to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, Israel’s arch enemy (which likely accounts for some of Jonah’s reluctance)!
Takeaways:
1) How do we discern and follow God’s call? One fruitful way of receiving these stories is to think of them as opening up spaces for us to think and reflect: are there nets God is calling us to drop today, ways of life we are ready to “immediately” release and leave behind? Has the decisive, consequential moment arrived? Do we hear an invitation from Jesus to set out in a new direction, a path toward God’s Jubilee? Are we behaving like Jonah, either fleeing God’s call outright or reluctantly, half-heartedly straggling behind? Perhaps the best thing we can do in order to discern our vocation or life purpose is to keep these questions warm and open, returning to them again and again. And perhaps the best way to do that is to intentionally form a small group (even as small as two or three) devoted to that task, providing both ongoing support and accountability.
2) It’s worth thinking about that Jesus doesn’t say to the first disciples, “Believe in this way of thinking, and follow me” or “Sign on to this cause, and follow me.” He simply says, “Follow me.” The sheer minimalism of the call is striking. It may signal that while beliefs and behavior do play a role in discipleship, they’re not really the heart of the matter; rather, walking alongside Jesus is the heart of the matter: listening, reflecting, learning, and listening again. For the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the most remarkable thing about Jesus’ call is that it’s “void of all content.” There’s no program here, no platform, no set of opinions or list of rules. Only a call to companionship, to closeness, to living together as we walk toward God’s reign. Follow me…
3) God’s call manifests in a thousand different ways, and we respond in a thousand more, from courage to reluctance to hopping on the next ship out of town. But there’s at least one golden thread running through it all: God’s calling is frequently surprising and unpredictable, spilling over the edges of conventional wisdom in ways that are more than a little bit wild. Who is called? Not the supposedly brightest and best, but a half-hearted coward (Jonah), or the lowest ones on the ladder of social status. And to what end? So God might save our supposed enemies (Nineveh). So the world might turn upside down in a magnificent Jubilee. Or for no apparent reason at all (“Follow me”) apart from companionship itself, that mode of love that lives and walks together, calling and supporting each other as we go.
4) Many of these sentiments — lifting up the disadvantaged, mercy toward supposed enemies — are well-timed for a week in which an anxious, divisive election season gets underway in the United States, and when multiple wars rage around the planet. God’s call is always toward the Beloved Community, never away from it. Follow me…