Jesus

by James Martin

  In addition to the commitment to a job, there is the obligation to family as well: Peter is married; James and John are leaving behind their father. (That Peter leaves his wife—unless he is a widower and caring for his mother-in-law—inserts an element of confusion into the story. What happens to her? The Gospels are silent.12) And who is to say that Zebedee hadn’t pinned his hopes on his sons taking over the family business? Duty to their father would have been paramount—not simply as a professional obligation, but as a reflection of the filial piety so prized in those days. In their book Let the Little Children Come to Me, a study of childhood and children in antiquity, the authors note that there was an expectation that sons would continue their father’s work, and that such continuation was seen as a sign of true obedience.13

  Finally there are ties of habit and security. Most likely their families had lived and fished on the shores of Galilee for generations. The historian Henri Daniel-Rops notes that not only had fishing on the Sea of Galilee existed since “beyond the memory of men,” but that even the names of the towns along the shore highlighted the importance of the industry.14 Bethsaida means “the fishery” or “fishing town,” and the Greek name for Magdala was Tarichaea, or “dried fish.”15 Fishing was the raison d’être of these towns.

  Galilean fishermen often worked together in groups—most likely family groups—pooling their resources not only physically, for the fishing voyages, which required a great deal of human labor, but also financially, to purchase the boats and equipment needed for their trade. There were two methods of fishing. The first was the use of a seine, or dragnet, weighted down and drawn behind a boat. Jesus would use this kind of net as an image of the kingdom in which the dragnet catches all sorts of fish, which God will sort out.16 The second method made use of a smaller casting net, of the type George and I saw, which could be deployed from the shore or from a boat, flung out by hand into the sea. Notice that there is no mention of a boat in Peter and Andrew’s case; James and John are in their father’s boat.

  This may indicate that the second pair was slightly more well-off; larger dragnets were the more profitable way of fishing.17 But that does not mean that they were wealthy. Reed suggests that the father of James and John “probably owned a modest house, a boat, and some nets, and occasionally hired a few day laborers who were worse off. But in general fishermen were a motley crew.”18 The ruins of the houses on the shores of the Sea of Galilee attest to the fact that the fishing industry was no “financial bonanza.”19

  Overall, Peter and Andrew, James and John were accustomed to this way of life, and they were accustomed to this way of life together. Luke says that James and John were business partners with Peter.20 The four, then, knew one another well. Perhaps that’s why Jesus called them together—intuiting that it would be easier for them to come with their brothers and friends.

  And while it is true that Jesus doesn’t call them as an undifferentiated mob, he does call people to work together with him as a group, an early indication of the communal element of his ministry. Jesus could have worked alone, or he could have selected a single person—say, Peter or Andrew or Mary Magdalene—as his assistant, but instead he calls many people to labor with him. Inviting people to work together is a constitutive part of Jesus’s ministry, and it reflects his keen understanding of human nature—and perhaps his own need for a group of friends around him. Later we will see that when Christ rises from the dead he will appear to the disciples individually, but more often to a group. The New Testament scholar John R. Donahue, SJ, calls his activity “radically social.”21

  Still, even with their common call, it must have been hard for the fishermen to leave behind their ways of life. In that way, these Galilean fishermen were like many of us. It’s difficult to let go—even harder to let go based on a few words from a stranger. Each of these men was enmeshed in a variety of very real commitments. The nets they were holding are a marvelous image of the intricate ties that bound them to their old lives—their entanglements.

  What accounts for the immediate conversions of these four fishermen? How were they able literally to drop their “nets”—all that entangled them—and follow Jesus?

  FIRST, they may have been waiting for the Messiah. As practicing Jews, the Galilean fishermen would have probably known passages in the Old Testament that spoke of the coming Messiah, from “the region of Zebulun and Naphtali,” where Capernaum is located.22 These men lived during a time when, and in a place where, the Messiah was expected.

  Second, they may have heard of Jesus before he set foot in their town. During my time working with the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Africa, I met many young Sudanese refugees who had fled their country after a brutal civil war. In the face of great peril, they had walked many miles from the deserts of Sudan to northern Kenya, where they stayed in refugee camps; from there they found their way to Nairobi. There, they sought out a Catholic sister named Luise, who ran a scholarship program for refugee children. They all knew her name. “All I knew when I left Sudan,” a young boy told me, “was that I needed to be finding Sister Luise.” Her name had traveled many miles.

  Perhaps Jesus’s name had traveled too, from nearby towns to Capernaum. On one retreat, I imagined the fishermen aboard their boat avidly discussing Jesus, just as he was approaching them. Perhaps overhearing them speculate, he decided that it was the right time to issue an invitation to those curious men: “Follow me.”

  Third, the fishermen may have been interested in Jesus, but were awaiting an invitation. In Luke’s version of this story (when Jesus calls Peter following a miraculous catch of fish), Jesus has just healed Peter’s mother-in-law. That miracle would have made Peter more open to Jesus’s message; it would also have made Jesus more compelling. The fishermen may also have witnessed other miracles as well, ones that went unrecorded.

  Still, the fishermen may have wanted to join Jesus, but did not feel worthy of the task. They may have been attracted to Jesus’s message, but unsure if he would accept them as followers. Perhaps each felt that someone who was “just a fisherman” wouldn’t be welcome. Jesus gave them the chance with his personal invitation.

  Fourth, they may have already met Jesus. An even simpler explanation may be one found outside the Synoptics. The Gospel of John lists Andrew as a disciple of John the Baptist, who hears the Baptist refer to Jesus as the “Lamb of God.” Andrew then introduces his brother to the man he names as the Messiah: “He brought Simon to Jesus.”23 Conceivably, Jesus met the two fishermen near the Jordan River, traveled to Capernaum to call them decisively, and then called James and John.24

  Fifth, perhaps Jesus had resided in Capernaum longer than the Gospels indicate. In the Gospel of Luke, after the rejection at Nazareth, Jesus “went down” to Capernaum, where he may have already spent some time. Mark’s account has Jesus moving directly from his Baptism to the Temptation to the Calling of the First Disciples at the Sea of Galilee. After this, he settles in Capernaum, which seems to have become his home base.25

  The timing here is confusing, but Jesus might have dwelled in their village for a few weeks or months. So the disciples could have been talking about their mysterious new neighbor as they plied their trade on the bright waters or as they mended their nets.

  Sixth, his personality was probably so magnetic that it swept away doubt or fear. Think of holy people you have heard, seen, or met. Think of people like Mother Teresa, Pope Francis, or the Dalai Lama, whose charisma is unmistakable. Even those who are not religious may feel an attraction to them. Holiness calls to a deep part of us, a part we may not understand, because we are naturally attracted to holiness. And if people are attracted to those men and women, imagine the irresistible charisma of the Son of God. The fishermen may have been responding to his magnetic personal holiness.

  Seventh, Jesus’s invitation is powerful and direct. This is a particular characteristic of his call. Again, many sources note that in Jesus’s time it was unusual for a rabbi to seek out disciples. John Donahue to
ld me, “In the rabbinic tradition, a student approaches a rabbi and asks to become a disciple. In the Greco-Roman world also potential students sought out a teacher.” But here the teacher does the inviting. And it is much more than a call; it is close to a command, brooking no dissent. Jesus doesn’t say, “Would you like to follow me?” but “Follow me.”26 And he offers them a tantalizing and mysterious promise—to “fish for people.”

  That still doesn’t entirely explain the wholehearted response of the fishermen. No matter what the time sequence, or when they first met him or heard of him, at some point Jesus of Nazareth said to them, “Follow me.”

  The question remains: Why did they say yes?

  Perhaps because they were ready.

  Jesus of Nazareth may have come at a time when each was ready for something new. Peter, Andrew, James, and John may all have known that it was the right time to begin a new chapter in their lives. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos, the tick-tock chronological time that we are more familiar with; and kairos, the right or opportune moment. We also know what these kairos moments are like: tired and dissatisfied with our lives, we’re waiting for someone to say that it is okay to change. For the fishermen on the shore, this was their kairos moment.

  AS I WAS WRITING this chapter, a young man came to see me. Dave, as I’ll call him, was working in a successful financial business, but felt an ardent desire to work with the poor. A few months earlier he had taken advantage of an unexpected opportunity to volunteer at an orphanage in the developing world, and he had found the experience transformative. In a long conversation Dave shared how much he loved working with the children, and more generally how he was powerfully drawn to work with those in need. After his stint overseas he returned to his work in finance. His current job, he said, was dull, but when he talked about his time at the orphanage, his face lit up. Now he was looking for a change. He was waiting, expectant, ready. If someone had walked in the door that day with an invitation to leave it all behind, with a promise for something new, he would have dropped everything. It would have been the kairos moment for him. Dave was ready.

  There are many ways of being “called.” Many people think that being called means hearing voices. Or they feel that since they have never had a knocked-me-off-my-feet spiritual experience that they have not been called. But often being called, as my friend from the financial-services industry discovered, can be more subtle, manifesting itself as a strong desire, a fierce attraction, or even an impulse to leave something behind.

  When I was working for General Electric, after having graduated from the Wharton School of Business, I gradually found myself growing more dissatisfied with my work. One night after a long day, I saw a television documentary about the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Something in that documentary—especially the look of contentment on Merton’s face—spoke to a deep part of me, a part that had never been spoken to. Though I wouldn’t have described it in these terms at the time (for I didn’t speak in that language), it called to me, and promised me something new.

  But the call isn’t the province simply of priests or members of religious orders. All sorts of people feel powerfully drawn to vocations of all kinds: education, medicine, art, and business, for example.

  God calls us in another way: to be the people we were meant to be. God creates us as unique individuals with our own gifts. And so we are already the people God made us to be. At the same time, God continually invites us to greater and greater freedom, asking us to drop the nets that entangle us in our old ways of doing things, ways that no longer are healthy for us, ways that keep us from being more loving.

  In such times we can hear the voice of God. Perhaps we are stuck in a relationship characterized by mutual recrimination and hatred. It has ensnared us. Or we are tangled up in the uncharitable way we treat others, trapped in the net of unkind words and selfish motives that we have woven. Or maybe we’re just lazy, and our nets are the familiar ties that keep us living the same way we always have. Or we feel that we can never undo the wrong things that need to be undone, like a fisherman cursing over his tangled net.

  Then we experience something that seems to promise something new. For me it was, of all things, a television documentary. For Dave, my friend in the financial-services industry, it was the experience of working in an orphanage. For someone else it might be something heard in a conversation, something read in a book, something seen in a movie. This is just as much of a call as the one Jesus issued at the Sea of Galilee. But, as I mentioned earlier, Jesus’s invitation to the fishermen was open-ended. It’s usually unclear what the future will bring. All that is clear is the call.

  We need to listen carefully for those calls and not grow so entangled in our daily lives that we miss them. An open and attentive stance will help us hear better and make it less likely that we block out God’s voice. What if Peter and Andrew and James and John had been closed-minded or too busy to listen to Jesus?

  At the beginning of the book I pointed out the two main ways of looking at Jesus—the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It’s important to know all that we can about the historical person who called Peter, Andrew, James, and John. But it’s also important to be open to the ways Jesus calls us today. It is not enough simply to know what Jesus said by the Sea of Galilee. We must also be ready to hear his voice in our own lives.

  We must be receptive to the ways that God calls us—today, tomorrow, or ten years from now—so when we hear God say, “Follow me,” we will be ready to drop our nets. And follow.

  * * *

  THE CALL OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

  Mark 1:16–20

  (See also Matthew 4:18–22)

  * * *

  As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  Immediately

  “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

  THE MORNING AFTER WE arrived in Galilee, I rose early to pray in the garden of the Mount of Beatitudes. On a simple wooden bench I leaned against a tall eucalyptus tree and imagined Jesus walking on these very grounds. I had a sore back, but the grooves in the eucalyptus tree fit my back as if it had been placed there by some divine massage therapist. After breakfast, George and I decided that first we would visit Capernaum, which was within sight of our Franciscan hostel.

  During our pilgrimage we visited Capernaum twice.1 But I could have spent days there. (My journal for our first day there uses the word “amazing” three times on one page.) Excavations in Capernaum have revealed the foundations of houses from the time of Jesus, and one site has been venerated as the home of St. Peter from as early as the fourth century. In The Holy Land Murphy-O’Connor suggests that the town had little to recommend it to Jesus other than it was Peter’s home. (Capernaum is only a few feet from the shore, not a bad place for fishermen and their families to settle.) At the time, the little town stretched for about three hundred meters along the sea. When we visited it was an oppressively hot day, and the sea sparkled under the bright sun.2

  Bargil Pixner, a Benedictine monk, scholar, and longtime resident of Israel, estimates that Capernaum had roughly one thousand to fifteen hundred inhabitants when Jesus ministered there. It was a “frontier town” guarded by a large Roman garrison under the direction of a centurion. The garrison also provided support for the tax collectors whose job it was to collect tariffs from those who caught fish in the lake. The custom house of Matthew, the tax collector, was probably in the area. Murphy-O’Connor notes that since Luke records the synagogue as having been built by the Roman centurion, the tow
nspeople may have been too poor to afford to construct a synagogue.3

  Today in Capernaum you can visit a newer synagogue, probably from Byzantine times, which is said to have been built over the first-century synagogue in which Jesus preached. You can stand on that site, look out at the Sea of Galilee, and wonder about the story that happened there two thousand years ago.

  For me, Capernaum was like a dream. Here was the view of the sea that Jesus must have seen every day. Here was the sky under which he lived. Here were the birdsongs he must have heard. I was filled with a sense of the reality of Jesus.

  It also raised a multitude of questions. Why did he move from Nazareth to Capernaum? Or, more broadly, why to the Sea of Galilee? After being booted out of Nazareth, why not move, say, to Jericho, Jerusalem, or Bethlehem? The most convincing answer came from Father Doan, over dinner one night at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. The Sea of Galilee was a trading crossroads, with people coming and going from all over the region, crisscrossing the lake, buying and selling fish, a place of great traffic. Here, perhaps Jesus thought, he could reach many different kinds of people. And perhaps as a crossroads the area might be more open to new ideas.

  Or perhaps he just found the sea, as I did, beautiful. Both George and I spent a lot of time in prayer, looking out at the sea. I could have stayed in Capernaum forever.