The Zealot movement, as well as other enthusiastic movements like those of Theudas and “the Egyptian,” tried to draw as many people in Israel as possible to follow them. They wanted the people as such to rise up against the Romans, or in other words, all Israel was supposed to follow these new charismatics. The Zealots’ reckless use of violence, not hesitating even at murder, was directed not only at the Roman occupiers but also against all Jews who submitted to Roman rule for the sake of peace.8 Here again something entirely different was evident in Jesus’ movement: he did not regard Israel as a uniform collective but instead respected to a sometimes off-putting degree the freedom and specific calling of every individual.
Jesus calls individuals to discipleship, each of them chosen and approached by him in person. The next chapter will explore this phenomenon in more detail. Here we may say only that for Jesus the Good News of the coming of the reign of God was directed to everyone, and the same was true for the consequences of that message: the call to repentance. But the call to discipleship was not addressed to everyone; it was only for those Jesus chose for himself. He expects of them that they share his unstable itinerant life, that they abandon their property, that they leave their families and live with him together as a community of disciples.
This is a call to a new form of life, a call to a very insecure and hard life—and for that very reason a call that presupposes freedom of decision. No one may be forced to live this way. Here again we see the profound difference between Jesus and the fanaticism of the Zealots.
Elijah and Elisha
The real model for following Jesus is found—and what else would we expect?—in the Bible itself, in the prophet Elijah’s calling of Elisha. The story is told this way in 1 Kings 19:19-21:
So he [Elijah] set out from there, and found Elisha son of Shaphat, who was plowing. There were twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him, and he was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and threw his mantle over him. He left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” Then Elijah said to him, “Go back again; for what have I done to you?” He returned from following him, took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled their flesh, and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out and followed Elijah, and became his servant.
Elisha is portrayed in this text as the son of a well-to-do farmer, for he plows with twelve pairs of oxen at a time. He himself works with the last, the twelfth span, and so he can see how the eleven servants ahead of him draw their furrows.
Elijah calls Elisha by throwing his mantle over him, so Elisha is conscripted for God’s business. He knows immediately what it means for him: leaving his family, breaking with his previous occupation, discipleship. The rest of the story only tells us how this wealthy heir leaves behind his family and his occupation.
First Elisha asks Elijah for permission to take leave of his parents. He knows, then, that he is no longer his own master but the servant of Elijah. Elijah permits him to take his leave; the somewhat difficult text at this point can scarcely be understood in any other way. By saying “what have I done to you?” he allows Elijah full freedom of action. The one who is called can only follow freely. But that very action makes Elisha aware of what has happened to him.
Probably the text means to say that he does not even return to his house, but improvises a farewell dinner for his farmhands in the field. He uses the yoke and equipment of a span of oxen as firewood as a sign that he is giving up his previous occupation and that God’s business cannot wait. Thus this story reveals itself in many ways as a prelude to the later discipleship of those who followed Jesus’ call. For example, it shows us the “immediacy” of discipleship. But it also shows that the new thing God has begun with Israel can only be handed on from person to person. There is no automatic transfer of faith to the next generation. Calling and charism must be handed on face to face. Elisha must, so to speak, feel Elijah’s mantle on his own body.
But the narrative shows us still more, namely, the importance of the nonprofessional. Elisha probably never would have considered, by himself, that he might become a prophet. He had quite different things in view: his parents’ farming operation, commerce, family. Probably he was called for that very reason. God does not just need ordained ministers; God also needs religious nonprofessionals experienced in their trades. God needs people who are able to plow with twelve span of oxen or to handle angle irons and levels and plumblines—and who then apply the level and the plumbline also to the condition of the people of God. That is the way it is supposed to be with many others as well, including Jesus and the fisherfolk he called to be his disciples, in the course of salvation history.
This text from the Elijah-Elisha narrative cycle in the books of Kings brings us closest to the content of Jesus’ call to discipleship. There is much in favor of the idea that here, as in other cases,9 Jesus made direct reference to his Bible. He must have had a very personal access to Torah and the prophets. That does not mean that there could not also have been other elements from the history of the tradition in play. But it is significant that the story of the calling of Elisha plays virtually no role in the rabbinic tradition.10
The Meaning of Discipleship
This chapter has been an attempt to work out the contours of discipleship of Jesus in contrast to the rabbinic teacher-student relationship and the Jewish revolutionary movements. Of course, in the process we have already seen some hints at why Jesus called disciples in the first place. But now, at the end of the chapter, we need to ask the question again, and bluntly.
Obviously Jesus did not gather disciples around him because he needed a kind of “court.” It would also be perverse to suppose that he only gathered disciples at the point when resistance began to stiffen against him. The notion here would be that in such a situation he withdrew to a protected circle of likeminded people in order to be able to communicate his idea of the reign of God at least to them.
Anyone who wants to construct the scene this way has the whole breadth of the gospels to contend with. The calling of disciples who would leave everything behind and follow Jesus was not an emergency measure, a retreat, a substitute for action. For Jesus it was, from the very beginning, part of the proclamation of the reign of God.
This is clear from the mission of the disciples mentioned above. There can be no doubt of that historically. It is true that the oral material that is part of the story of the disciples’ mission played an important role for the early Christian itinerant missionaries after Easter. It has been handed down and updated in terms of their mission—for example, in the prohibition of transferring from one house to another (Luke 10:7). But the existence of the later itinerant missionaries in itself confirms that Jesus had already sent out disciples.
And why did he send them? His mission discourse says it as clearly as possible: the disciples are to proclaim the reign of God, heal, and expel demons.11 That is, they are to do exactly what Jesus does. They share his fate, his duties, his joys and sorrows. They have been taken into service; they are laborers for the reign of God. This is shown very clearly in a saying placed at the beginning of the mission discourse in the Sayings Source: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt 9:37-38; Luke 10:2). In biblical language the harvest, when used as an image, almost always means the judgment at the end of time.12 The metaphor “harvest” is thus eschatologically colored throughout the Bible. The same is true of the saying about the plentiful harvest just quoted. It means to say that the “last times” are now here. The reign of God is dawning and the gathering of Israel for the reign of God is beginning. “The fields are ripe for harvesting,” the Gospel of John would later say (John 4:35).
So the call to discipleship is inseparable from the coming of the reign of God and Jesus’ eschatological gathering of Israel. The great work now at hand requires many laborers. This is
evident also in the scene in Mark in which the first disciples are called. The meaning of the call to discipleship is explicitly formulated there: “Jesus called to him: ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people’” (Mark 1:17). Jesus refers to the “calling” of those he summons. He has no hesitation in speaking of “fishing for people,” even though the expression “fish for people” or “catch people” is used in a negative way throughout the Bible.13 We can see here again that it is part of Jesus’ way of speaking to use expressions that are unusual, exciting, demanding, or even inflammatory or provocative. In any case, the saying about fishing for people makes it clear that the calling of Peter and Andrew and all the other disciples means that they will work with Jesus in gathering people for the reign of God. Obviously, this is about the gathering of Israel.
Chapter 6
The Many Faces of Being Called
Jesus called people from Israel to follow him. He gathered disciples around him. The call to these disciples to follow after him and to place everything, without reserve, in the service of the reign of God must have accompanied his preaching from the very beginning. But does that mean he wanted to call all Israel to discipleship? Was it his goal that gradually everyone in Israel would become a disciple?
A Nation of Disciples?
There are indications in the text of the New Testament that point in just that direction. The Acts of the Apostles often speaks simply of “the disciples.” The series of these references begins in Acts 6:1-2: “Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists [the Greek-speaking Jews in the community] complained against the Hebrews [the Aramaic-speaking Jews] because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples.”
“The disciples” here refers to the whole community. This unique usage, which may go back to the time of the earliest Jerusalem community, appears elsewhere in Acts as well. In that book “disciple” can simply mean “Christian” or “member of the community,” and “the disciples” often means nothing but the community in Jerusalem or in some other place.1
Add to this that the gospels, which refer constantly to Jesus’ disciples, are not only looking back to the past but also making the time of Jesus transparent to the later time of the church. When the evangelists speak of Jesus and his disciples, they are also speaking of their own ecclesial present. Therefore it seems altogether likely that we should see discipleship as a comprehensive and essential characteristic of the church.2 Favoring this is also the command to mission at the end of Matthew’s gospel: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations!” (Matt 28:19).
We could set up an equation: church = discipleship. But is that right? If we read the New Testament more closely, things look different. The language of the gospels and Acts does show unmistakably that without discipleship there can be no New Testament-style church. But that usage remains unique within the New Testament. The epistolary literature avoids the word “disciple.” The usage in Acts and corresponding redactional layers in the gospels may ultimately stem from the breakthrough situation of the young post-Easter church. At that early period distinctions were not yet necessary. Those came later, but the foundations were already laid in the gospel tradition.
For according to the gospels one can only become a disciple by being chosen by Jesus—usually with the cry, “Come, follow me!” or “Follow me!”3 And Jesus does not call everyone to follow him. According to Mark 1:15 the proclamation of the reign of God culminates in the call, “repent and believe in the good news!” but not, “follow me and become my disciple!” There is no text in which Jesus calls all Israel to discipleship or to following him. But above all, he nowhere makes being a disciple a requirement for participation in the reign of God.
So we have to suppose that life toward the reign of God—in sociological terms, participation in the Jesus movement—allowed for some very different ways of life. This chapter is about those various ways of living. It is significant that they did not arise out of the needs of the later great church but are grounded already in the gospels, even in the pre-Easter reign-of-God praxis of Jesus. In what follows I will go through these various ways of life in the order in which they appear in the gospels themselves. But I will rely primarily on the Gospel of Mark.
The Disciples
As we have seen, Jesus used a striking and clearly defined symbolic action in choosing twelve from a larger group of disciples, making them an eloquent sign of the gathering of the eschatological people of the twelve tribes. He “created” them (Mark 3:14). They represent eschatological Israel, which begins with the group of twelve and centers on Jesus and the Twelve.
Alongside the Twelve, however, there were a larger number of disciples. The Twelve live and act in the midst of this larger circle of disciples. Therefore we must say that the Twelve are disciples, but not all disciples are part of the group of the Twelve. That needs to be explicitly emphasized, because in Matthew’s gospel it could seem that the Twelve and the group of disciples were identical. Matthew speaks a number of times very clearly of “the twelve disciples” (10:1; 11:1; 20:17; cf. 28:16). Did he mean to restrict the group of disciples to the Twelve? Possibly, but it is not clear what his intent was.
In contrast, the situation is very obvious in Mark. For him the group of disciples extends beyond the Twelve. Mark 2:13-14 reports how Jesus called the toll collector Levi to be his disciple. Thereupon, Levi made a great banquet in his house and invited his professional colleagues and many of his friends and acquaintances. Mark then remarks in this connection: “And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him” (Mark 2:15).4 This note makes clear how Mark imagined the situation. First: there is a larger group of disciples from among whom later (Mark 3:13-14) the Twelve are drawn. Second: one becomes a disciple by “following” Jesus.
Luke formulates still more clearly. After he has told how Jesus, on the mountain, has called the Twelve out of a larger crowd of disciples (Luke 6:12-13), he introduces the Sermon on the Plain (corresponding to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount) as follows: “He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases” (Luke 6:17-18). The theological scenery resembles the arrangement of the audience of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt 4:23–5:1), but Luke allots space to Jesus’ listeners even more carefully than Matthew does: first, there is the group of the Twelve, just chosen, then around them “the great crowd” of the other disciples, and finally, in a still broader circle, the whole multitude of people. Luke thus thinks there was a large crowd of disciples.
This is clear also from the fact that, besides the mission of the Twelve in 9:1-2, Luke a little later, in 10:1, tells of still another mission of seventy-two disciples.5 This mission could, of course, rest on a misunderstanding on the part of Luke.6 But it may be that with the number seventy-two he was not so far from the actual size of the group of disciples.
Moreover, there is, of course, much to commend the idea that the boundaries of the group of disciples were fluid. The number of the Twelve was fixed, but the number of disciples shifted. The Fourth Gospel tells how one day a large number of disciples took offense at Jesus and left him (John 6:60-71).
We are in the fortunate position of having at least a few names of disciples who were not part of the Twelve but seem to have belonged to the broader group of disciples: Joseph Barsabbas (Acts 1:23); Cleopas (Luke 24:18); Nathanael (John 1:45; 21:2); Mary of Magdala (Mark 15:40-41); Mary, the [daughter?/mother?] of James the Younger (Mark 15:40); Mary, the mother of Joses (Mark 15:40); Salome (Mark 15:40-41); Joanna, the wife of Chuza (Luke 8:1-3); Susanna (Luke 8:1-3); and for a time also Matthias, who then was taken into the group of the Twelve in place of Judas Iscariot (A
cts 1:23, 26). The list shows that Jesus’ group of disciples also included women. That was remarkable in an Eastern context and was anything but ordinary. It appears that here Jesus deliberately violated social standards of behavior.
So much, then, about the existence of a broader circle of disciples around the Twelve! In our context it is important to note that Jesus apparently did not attempt to gain disciples at any cost. Instead, he issued warnings: “As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’” (Luke 9:57-58).
Other observations point in the same direction: Jesus by no means called everyone who met him openly and in faith to be his disciple. He went to the home of the toll collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) as well as that of the toll collector Levi (Mark 2:14-17). But Zacchaeus did not receive an invitation to discipleship as Levi did. Zacchaeus vows to change his life; in the future he will give half of his wealth to the poor of Israel and return wrongfully obtained money fourfold.7 But he will stay in Jericho and continue to practice his usual calling as a toll collector. Apparently there existed alongside the disciples a broad spectrum of people who opened themselves to the Gospel and took Jesus’ call to repentance to heart but who did not enter into his immediate circle of disciples.
Why was the group of disciples so important to Jesus? Obviously his disciples helped him in many ways: they found lodging (Mark 14:13-16; Luke 9:52), took care of meals and other things (Mark 6:37). It is said explicitly that the women who followed Jesus supported him and the whole group of disciples financially (Luke 8:3). But as indispensable as those things were, they were not the main reason. As Mark 3:14 says of the Twelve, the disciples were to be always “with him.”
The coming of the reign of God was not a theory, an abstract dogma, a mere teaching; it was the beginning of a dramatic history. The reign of God requires a dedicated community, a form of life into which it can enter and be made visible. The circle of men and women who followed Jesus, their solidary community, their being-together with one another, was to show that now, in the midst of Israel, a bit of “new society” had begun. In this way above all the disciples are Jesus’ “witnesses” of the reign of God now coming to be. They are, certainly, supposed to witness to the reign of God through their words, but not only in words; they witness also by their believing life together. That is why there are also so many “instructions for disciples” handed on to us in the gospels.
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