Sermon - Who's Fishing for Whom? (1/24/2021)
Epiphany 2B (Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:5-12; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20)
And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”
I must confess that I’ve never been all that comfortable with the idea that “fishing for people” is a metaphor for “spreading the gospel” or “making disciples.” For one thing, it’s kind of violent and coercive. Tricking people with some tasty-looking bait until you can stick a hook in them so they can’t get away, sweeping people up with a net so they can be pulled out of the environment where they thrive, starved for air, then fileted, broiled, and eaten – this is not the way to win friends and influence people.
But also – I seriously doubt that the primary intention of Jesus in calling Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John was for them to become the Directors of Recruitment for his new organization. The Kingdom of God that Jesus comes to announce is not an organization or a project with membership goals. It’s simply people living in relationship with God and one another the way God has always intended people to live. As Dallas Willard once said, “The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish, it’s the person you become.” So if we have a specific task or calling in our families, our congregations, our schools or workplaces – I think Jesus cares less about what we accomplish in those tasks than in who we become as we carry them out.
The first reading today from Jonah is a great illustration of this. God gave Jonah a task: to go to Nineveh, the belly of the beast, from which armies had come to kill and pillage and destroy uncounted nations – including, and from Jonah’s perspective especially, Israel. Jonah is sent by God to deliver the word of God’s impending judgment: Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Forty days more and you who have lived by the sword shall perish by the sword. Announce God’s judgment on the evil people of Nineveh: that was the task Jonah was given.
But Jonah didn’t want to do it. At first Jonah runs away, gets on a boat going to Spain, as far away from Nineveh as Jonah could imagine. The voyage isn’t going well, Jonah confesses that he’s running away from God, and his fellow passengers throw him overboard. The whale eats him up, spits him out on the seashore, and God says, OK, let’s try this again. Nineveh.
Then, as we read this morning, Jonah goes to Nineveh and, quite half-heartedly, fulfills his task of announcing God’s coming judgment. And yet his message is heard. The people of Nineveh repent, they change their ways, they give up violence, they turn back to God – and God relents, God takes back his plan to destroy the city. And Jonah is angry.
This is why I didn’t want to go to Nineveh, Jonah says. Because I hate these people. I hate what they have done to us. And, God, I wish you would hate them as much as I do. Yes, Jonah says, I know what it says in the Bible: you are “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (Jonah 4:2, quoting Exodus 34:6). But I wish you weren’t.
Anyone in Old Testament times who heard the word “Nineveh” would instantly know: these are the bad guys. ISIS, Nazis, Al Qaeda, all rolled into one. And yet, at the end of the story of Jonah, who is the bad guy? Who is the enemy of God? Not the people of Nineveh, who did great evil, but then heard God’s word and responded to it with repentance, by changing their ways and seeking forgiveness. No, the one who rejects God in the story is the prophet Jonah – Jonah does not want God to be who God is, who God has been revealed to be.
And so while Jonah was given the task and the calling to proclaim God’s judgment to Nineveh, by the end of the story Jonah has revealed judgment on himself. The people of Nineveh repented, but now the question is, will Jonah repent?
Or, put another way – the reason Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh to announce that God was giving them one last chance to repent is that Jonah didn’t want to hear that God was giving him a chance to repent. And so maybe that’s why God chose Jonah for this mission – not because Jonah was so talented at selling ice to the Eskimos that he could even talk the wicked Ninevehites into repenting. But because God knew that Jonah needed to hear that message, above all, for himself.
So, too, with the call of the fishermen in today’s gospel. In the Old Testament, whenever God or God’s messenger is said to be “fishing” for people, the context is never that God is looking for friends or disciples.1 It’s always the message of Jonah: that if you’re taking advantage of the weak and vulnerable, God is going to come and give you what you deserve, unless you change your ways.
So for example the prophet Amos says, “Woe to you who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, the Lord God has promised that the day will come when they take you away with fishhooks” (Amos 4:1-2). Or the prophet Jeremiah, who says “God sees what the pagan idol-worshippers are doing to oppress and rob God’s people, God will send fishermen to scoop them up and hunters to track them down, and God will make them pay for what they have done” (Jeremiah 16:16-18).
So I’m guessing that when Simon Peter and Andrew heard that John the Baptist had been arrested – John the Baptist who called people to change their ways and get ready because the One Who Is Coming is almost here – and then Jesus the carpenter from the neighboring village of Nazareth shows up, after having gone to the desert to be baptized by John, saying “The time is now! The kingdom of God is at hand! You, come follow me and I’ll make you fish for people.” – I’m guessing that these fishermen were thinking they were going to go catch them some Big Fish. And unlike Jonah who was so hesitant when called to announce God’s judgment on the wicked, Simon and Andrew and James and John are enthusiastic about being God’s fishermen.
But then they start following Jesus, and it turns out that’s not quite what Jesus had in mind. One of the great themes of Mark’s gospel that we will see as we read through it during the coming year is that the disciples of Jesus spend most of their time quite baffled at what Jesus is doing. These fishermen, in particular, never seem to get what Jesus is about. Simon Peter will try to talk Jesus out of the cross, James and John are angling for the top jobs as the chief lieutenants of Jesus when the kingdom arrives. These are the same three who we will see befuddled on the mount of transfiguration, asleep in the garden of Gethsemane, at the end abandoning and even denying Jesus.
Being a disciple of Jesus, Mark wants to show us, is not easy, and we often get it wrong for a long time before we start getting it right. It’s about loving the way God loves, which means following Jesus and taking up the cross and letting ourselves be transformed into being disciples of Jesus. And if, in the process, we are called to make some specific contribution along the way, know that what God wants to do through us, God will first do in us. Even if, like Jonah, like Peter and Andrew and James and John, we don’t get it right at first – that’s OK. Just as long as we keeping trusting the good news and are willing to change our lives, God will see to the rest.
1) For the Old Testament passages that use the image of God fishing for people, I am indebted to Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (1988).