January 25, 2015: The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jonah 3:1-5, 10: [Jonah] had gone but a single day’s walk announcing, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed,” when the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.
Psalm 25: Teach me your ways, O Lord.
1 Corinthians 7:29-31: I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out.
Mark 1:14: As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea; they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Then they abandoned their nets and followed him.
January is the Month of the Holy Name.
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
Diane’s Reflection For JANUARY 25, 2015
FISHERS OF MEN: Following Jesus
“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
oday’s Gospel makes it all sound simple and inevitable, but I suspect it was more mysterious than that. Once upon a time, you see, there were these two fishermen brothers. Pretty much every day, you could see them out there on the Sea of Galilee, talking and laughing and ribbing each other; the sunlight gleaming on their sun-bronzed, wind-burnt skin. These guys have been fishermen all their lives, just like their father before them. And they’re good at it, too; it’s not an easy way to make a living, but they’ve come to love the sky and the water and the tired peace they feel at the end of the day, when the nets are filled. This is all they’ve ever wanted, they would tell you if you asked them, and they would be sincere, even if there have been times, at the end of the day, when they watched the sun going down over the waters, and each of them felt a kind of ache in his heart, a longing for something more that could never be expressed.
And so here they are, on this hot bright morning, when a man comes walking by. I don’t suppose he looked all that different from any other Jewish man of his time: dark-haired and bearded, with strong quiet hands and a brown body toughened by years of physical labor. There was no particular reason to notice him, and yet some-how you couldn’t help it: There was something about him that drew your gaze and made you want to stop whatever you were doing. Perhaps it was his eyes, because they were extraordinary, with a depth of warmth and compassion in them even deeper than the Sea of Galilee. Peter and Andrew stood still and stared. Around them the morning had fallen silent, as if the whole world held its breath. They couldn’t have told you what made their hearts beat faster, why they suddenly noticed the weirdest things: the way the air seemed to shimmer and dance around the man, as if he were the sun and the sky was the glittering water of the Sea of Galilee. They’d heard about him; in a small town, news travels fast, and this wandering healer and preacher was already beginning to make a name for himself. He paused in front of them, for just a second, but the universe seemed to pause with him, and watch, and wait. It was as if everything that had ever happened had led up to this moment – as if Eternity itself was crammed into this one honey-gold fragment of time. And he looked at Peter and Andrew – looked at the nets now hanging limply in their hands, and then looked into their eyes. And this is what he said: “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And then he walked on.
Fishers of men? What on earth did that mean? Peter and Andrew must have stood there frozen for a moment. But Matthew and Mark agree that they did not stay frozen long. At once they left their nets and followed him. They exchanged one look, and then dropped their nets: We won’t be needing these anymore. If you’d asked him years later why they just walked away that morning, Peter would simply have smiled and shrugged. There was nothing else I could have done, he might have said. You didn’t see his eyes, but when I looked into them I felt the emptiness deep at the bottom of my heart fill up, like a pool of living light. I didn’t know I was so empty, to be so full. I had no idea what was going to happen next, and when I thought about the future I was scared, but it didn’t matter. All I knew was that I wanted to be with Jesus more than anything. All I knew is that he said, “Follow me.”
Nowadays, we’re a more skeptical, practical lot, and it’s hard for us to imagine anyone dropping everything to follow anybody for any reason – unless maybe a lot of money is involved. We like to think that the Bible is exaggerating here. Surely the disciples took the time the time to make arrangements, to swing by home to pick up fresh socks, to visit the ATM and change the message on the answering machine. But the Gospel writer is oddly insistent on this point, as if he wants us to see it all as vividly – and as simply – as he does: And his story is that Jesus called, and the disciples answered; no questions asked, just like that. They put down their nets and went after Jesus. Just like that.
What would I have done, if I’d been there? What am I doing now? is more to the point. Because Jesus is always walking beside us, there along the shore of our lives -- always looking into our eyes, and saying, “Come follow me.”
“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it,” as Mark Twain famously may (or may not have) said. Everybody talks about Jesus, too, but nobody does much about it. We talk about Jesus all the time; we’re always rattling on about how much we love and adore him, et cetera, et cetera. But I’m not sure that it shows in the way that we live. Jesus never asked us to worship him, after all; he asked us to follow him. Behind and above and before all the other things is the One Thing Necessary.
I want to follow Jesus – I even try to do so, to some extant – but I’m never quite willing to really go all the way. I want to give my life to God, but I also want to keep a nice large chunk of it for myself. And Jesus is not, by our standards, reasonable. Jesus wants it all. Living a Christian life is a whole lot more complicated than shouting out, “Hallelujah, I’ve been saved, and you haven’t!”
We hear the Gospel stories so often that we rarely notice how strange they are. I don’t really know what happened, that long-ago day on the Sea of Galilee – but I have a sneaking suspicion that those guys really did drop everything they had in order to follow Jesus. They acted, in other words, like crazy people. They left everything for his sake. Everything.
That doesn’t mean that you and I can’t serve God in a less dramatic way – that we’re not perhaps called by God just to live an ordinary life. (If there is such a thing. Besides, ordinary life is hard enough. If you try to do it right, anyhow.)
Still, sooner or later, Jesus will appear to us and say, Come follow me – and we will know, this time, that he means every single word of it. If nothing else, it will happen when we die. Will we be ready, when the moment comes, to drop everything and go with him? Only with the help and the grace of God. In Jesus’ name. --- Diane Sylvain
“I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
― Anne Lamott
Scripture Notes from the Sourcebook:
THE FIRST READING: This is the only Sunday in all three years of the Lectionary cycle of readings that we hear a passage from the book of Jonah proclaimed. God’s mercy abounds! This is the message of the reading which recounts Jonah’s journey to Nineveh with the prophetic message of repentance and change. The people of Nineveh heard the possibility of destruction and turned away from evil. God, in turn, responded choosing life over destruction.
RESPONSORIAL PSALM 25: The antiphon for today’s psalm would be a good mantra to begin each day: “Teach me your ways, O Lord.” As the psalmist recognizes, learning the Lord’s ways ins something we cannot do on our own. Rather, working in concert with the Lord, God will guide us and direct us with compassion even when we err.
SECOND READING: Paul and the early Christians believed that Christ’s second coming at the Parousia was imminent. Thus, Paul’s main concern in this brief passage is that the Corinthians not be overly attached to the world. The present is passing away; what is good in it can lead us to Christ, but he allure of its evil we must not allow to deceive us. We must always be prepared for Christ’s glorious coming.
THE GOSPEL: Leave your job and family. Follow Jesus, not alone, but with others. Repent. Accept and live the message that the kingdom of God is at hand. These are summary statements of the call to discipleship found in Mark. We, like the first disciples, come after Jesus, believing that in him God’s kingdom is present. This is the kingdom we proclaim to the world by virtue of our Baptism and our repentance.
--Sourcebook for Sundays, Seasons & Weekends (2015 edition.)
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is. – Albert Schweitzer
(Jesus) has other ways for others to follow Him; all do not go by the same path.
It is for each of us to learn the path by which He requires us to follow Him,
and to follow Him in that path. - St. Katharine Drexel
The late Sam Shoemaker, an Episcopalian bishop, summed up the situation this way: “In the Great Commission, the Lord has called us to be -- like Peter -- fishers of men. We’ve turned the commission around so that we have become merely keepers of the aquarium.” – Em Griffin, quoted on sermoncentral.com (also attributed to other people, but this source seems to be the most solid)
WHY FISHERMEN?
….I wonder why Jesus has such a preference for fishermen?
From what we can tell a third of the disciples he called, four out of the twelve, were from that profession. There may have been more because not all the professions of the disciples are mentioned.
Was there something in the skill set of fishermen that made for good disciples?
The patience?
The need to observe the depths? Being able to be in tune with the elements? …
Fishermen need to be able to face disappointment. Far more than hunters, they can come home day after day with nothing.
I will never know what it was that Jesus saw in fishermen, but John tells us that the metaphor of fishing became a metaphor Jesus used to describe the vocation of disciples, “I will teach you to fish for people”
Those of us who grew up in Evangelical churches will have had the song,
“I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.
I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men. If you follow me…”
drummed into us from our Sunday School days.
When I think of how I as a child saw this fishing for people practiced I am not sure that the church really understood what the metaphor intended.
Most of the evangelistic fishing for people I witnessed growing up, seemed more like throwing a stick of dynamite into the lake and collecting the fish that were killed in the blast and floated to the surface.
The visiting evangelist, the tent meeting, the revival meetings were like whalers or trawlers that intended to haul in as many souls as possible. …I don’t think Jesus had this in mind. …
I never saw the patience, the contemplation, the consideration that really good fishermen and fisherwomen apply to their craft. ….
How ready are we to encounter people, share our truth and then instead of manipulating, cajoling and trapping them, allow them the freedom to re-enter the waters of life and make up their own minds about the truth we have shared?
Something about fishermen appealed to Jesus. I would like to think those early disciples were stoics as well as strategists, patient and not merely plunderers.
I wonder if we can discover the insight Jesus had to examine their craft closely and come to understand why he wanted us to become “fishers of people” with them? – Peter Woods, from http://thelisteninghermit.com
VOCATION: It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a person is called to by God.
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met require (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed 9a0, but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place calls you to is the place where you deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. – Frederick Buechner
BLESSING THE NETS (FOLLOW ME)
I marvel at how quickly they leave their nets, these fisherfolk who meet Jesus as they labor by the Sea of Galilee. What do Simon and Andrew hear in Jesus’ voice as he calls; what do James and John see as Christ beckons them to cast aside all they have known?
Perhaps, listening to Jesus, they remember the story of Jonah. Perhaps they think of the first time God called that reluctant prophet, and what happens when we run in the opposite direction of God’s call; how we are likely to wind up in a place that is dark and dank and lonely. A place that presses clarity upon us and inspires us to respond differently—as Jonah does—when the invitation comes again.
Get up, go
God says to Jonah.
So Jonah set out
and went….
In the days, weeks, years to come, these four—and the eight soon to join them—will live into that initial burst of letting go. They will learn, and learn again, what it takes to follow Christ: how they will have to continually practice the art of leaving. And in their leaving, in their letting go, they will find their sustenance and their true home. …
Follow me
Jesus says to Simon—
whom he will name Peter,
the Rock,
infused with God’s own being.
Follow me
he says to Andrew,
to James and to John.
Follow me…
-- Jan Richardson – see more (including her wonderful artwork) at janrichardson.com
_____________________________________________________________________
Unfurl the sails, and let God steer us where He will.
- St. Bede
T