Without a Net
Scripture Reading: Mark 1:14-20
Today marks the start of our journey through the Gospel of Mark, which we’ll read on and off throughout the year. One of the distinguishing features of Mark, as you’ll soon see, is the fast pace at which he tells the story. At times Mark appears to be in a rush to tell the story as quickly as possible. For example, he doesn’t say a word about the birth of Jesus. There is no manger, no wise men, and no shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. Instead Mark jumps right into the middle of the story. When Jesus first appears in Mark, he’s already a grown man ready to begin his ministry.
Another way Mark quickens the pace is by telling us that something happened “immediately.” We find that twice in today’s reading. When Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, Mark tells us that “immediately they left their nets and followed him. When he sees James and John on the boat mending their nets, “immediately he called them.”
In keeping with Mark’s fast-paced style, I’m going to dispense with a sermon illustration and immediately dive into the passage. As Jesus appears on the scene here in Mark, John the Baptist has already been arrested. In Mark’s typical fashion, he doesn’t say a word about why John was arrested or by whom. He’ll address that later. Suffice it to say that John angered some powerful people, namely King Herod and his wife Herodias, and it would cost him his life. It’s a stark reminder that not everyone welcomes the word of God as good news.
The good news of God is precisely what Jesus has come to proclaim. “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says, “the kingdom of God has come near.” The time is fulfilled. In other words, now is the time. Now is the time that God has determined to proclaim the coming of God’s kingdom.
Jesus began his public ministry around the year 30. That was about 16 years into the reign of Tiberius, only the second emperor of Rome. Under Tiberius Rome experienced a time of relative peace and prosperity. Rather than engaging in wars of conquest to expand the empire’s borders, Tiberius focused on strengthening the empire as it was, which was enormous. The empire covered the entire Mediterranean region, from Portugal in the west to Israel in the east, and from southern Germany in the north to the entire coast of North Africa in the south. Rome had never been larger or stronger.
And then here comes Jesus, this wandering Jewish teacher from Galilee, a Podunk region of the empire. The Roman Empire stretches across much of the known world, but here comes Jesus proclaiming and preaching about another kingdom, the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God bears little resemblance to the empire of Rome. There are no legions of soldiers stationed throughout the kingdom, lethally armed and equipped. There are no borders to expand or defend because the kingdom of God erases borders—borders between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. Rather than coinage bearing the emperor’s head, the currency of the kingdom of God is forgiveness for sinners, and it just so happens that God is a big spender.
“The kingdom of God has come near,” Jesus says. “Repent and believe the good news.” Let’s note the order: The kingdom of God draws near and the response it elicits is repentance. Forgiveness comes first and repentance follows. Oftentimes the church gets that order backwards. If you repent, the thinking goes, then God will forgive. Forgiveness is then conditioned upon our repenting. No repentance, no forgiveness. It’s as if God is saying, “Look, my hands are tied. I can’t forgive you unless you first tell me that you’re sorry and that you’ll change your ways. Once you come to me, then I will turn to you.” All the power, all the responsibility lies with us. God can’t do anything until we act.
” Let’s note the order: The kingdom of God draws near and the response it elicits is repentance. Forgiveness comes first and repentance follows.
Where is the good news in that? I don’t want forgiveness conditioned upon my willingness to repent. I can find all sorts of rationalizations for the sins I commit, as I’m sure you can as well. It’s not a big deal. Everybody does it. I had no choice. Others have done much worse. He had it coming to him. If I didn’t do it, someone else would have. It’s not my problem. I can’t help everyone.
We have a boundless capacity to justify our sins—sins of commission and sins of omission. The human heart is a rationalization factory with three shifts working around the clock. All the more reason for us to be grateful that the good news is not, “If you repent, then God will forgive,” for why would we repent of something that we can rationalize away? The good news is better expressed as, “Because you are forgiven, therefore repent.” The gospel is not if/then but rather because/therefore. Because God has forgiven us, we are therefore free to live as God intends.
Repentance, then, is not something that we anxiously offer to appease an angry god into forgiving us. Repentance follows forgiveness. Repentance is an act of gratitude for the love that God has shown us by forgiving us before we even acknowledge that we’ve done anything wrong.
God has taken the initiative. God has made the first move. In Jesus Christ God has already forgiven all our sins. Paul says it succinctly in his Letter to the Romans: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Done! Finished! Mission accomplished!
If God were to wait for us to repent, God would be waiting a very long time indeed. Fortunately for us, God doesn’t wait, and that’s because God wants to be known. God wants to be known! This is why Jesus shows up on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and introduces himself to Simon and Andrew. I say “introduces,” which makes it sound like he’s shaking hands with them at a cocktail party. Really, it’s more a case of Jesus standing on the shore and calling to the brothers while they’re in their boat casting their net into the sea.
None of the Gospel writers say much at all about Jesus’s personality, but Mark’s utter lack of any detail whatsoever in describing this first encounter between Jesus and his first disciples actually does suggest what a powerful presence Jesus must have had. In movies Jesus has sometimes been depicted as solemn and otherworldly, but just look at how he commands the room (or the shoreline) here. Standing on the shore, he (presumably) shouts to Simon and Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” And without so much as a word, at least per Mark’s telling, they leave their boats and follow him.
To become a disciple of Jesus is to leave behind one world and enter another.
Jesus then walks a ways further along the shore and encounters another pair of fishermen brothers, James and John, who are also in their boat mending their nets. He calls to them, and they too step out of their boat and follow him. They walk away from all that they know—their family, their livelihood, their identity as fishermen.
Imagine walking away from all the things that give you your identity—your hometown, your occupation, your politics—and then taking up after a total stranger! That is what the disciples do. They leave everything. In fact, later on, when Peter grows frustrated at the lack of a payoff for all that he has sacrificed, he complains to Jesus, “Look! We have left everything and followed you! What then will we have?” (Matt. 19:27).
What Peter did not fully realize when he left everything to follow Jesus was that not only was he stepping out of a boat, he was also stepping into a new way of life, a life of discipleship. To become a disciple of Jesus is to leave behind one world and enter another. It’s to leave a world where we are defined by our successes. There’s a reason that so much of social media looks like one achievement, one celebration, one picturesque vacation after another. There’s a real pressure out there to succeed or at least to be seen as successful.
To become a disciple of Jesus is also to leave a world where we are defined by our failures. In the kingdom of God we are not haunted by the sins of the past. The broken relationships, the painful memories, the wounds that we suffered and that we inflicted…God has already redeemed all of it. As we say each week in the assurance of pardon, “In Jesus Christ we are forgiven, loved, and set free.” We are set free from all the guilt and the shame and are thereby freed for God’s good purposes.
Which leads me to my final point, which is that when Jesus calls us to follow him, he gives us a new identity. This identity is not grounded in anything that we do, for good or for ill. Our new identity is grounded solely in Jesus himself.
This can be a frightening prospect because we have a natural tendency to want to be in control. We direct the boat where we want it to go. And as long as we’re in the boat, we’re in command.
But to answer Jesus’s invitation to discipleship is to leave the safety of the boat altogether. It’s to step out in faith…without a safety net. It’s to let go of all the things that we cling to in order to give us our identity. But have no fear, because in Jesus Christ we have been given a new identity: forgiven sinner, child of God, fisher of people.