Mark 1:16-20

The Kingdom Symbolised

Mark constructed his scenario carefully. He presented a Jesus who did not work alone. Right from the start Jesus was surrounded by a core group of disciples. This was obviously important to Mark.

Mark 1:16-20  Jesus Calls the First Disciples

Mark placed the call of the disciples right at the beginning of Jesus’ public life because, as Christian communities such as his own began to brace themselves for the “long haul” across history, it was important that there were disciples who were exposed right from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry to the totality of his preaching and activity, who had a deep sense of what Jesus saw as significant, who were in turn creative enough to see the implications of Jesus’ vision and message for the changing situations faced by communities such as Mark’s, and who had the ability and authority to hand on their spirit and insights to the growing Churches.

Perhaps of equal importance in Mark’s mind, the disciples together constituted a “parable in action”. They were a small community. Jesus’ view of the Kingdom of God was essentially one of people in relationships of mutual respect and interdependence. The essential expression of Jesus’ vision for the world was one of selfless love and service. These attitudes could not be developed and lived in a vacuum. Only in community could people discover, release and build on their own particular giftedness. The continuing narrative would show that the disciples struggled in this task.

The first four persons chosen as disciples were fishermen. 

The Sea of Galilee

Fishing was one of the stable industries of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee, a big inland fresh-water lake about twelve kilometers across at its widest and about twenty kilometers long, was a dominant feature of the Galilean landscape. It was fed by the Jordan River that entered at its northern end and flowed outwards from the south. The territory of Galilee surrounded it on three sides.

The eastern side was largely pagan territory, the land of the Decapolis, a loose grouping of ten cities populated by non-Jews of Hellenistic (Greek) culture and language.

The proliferation of fish and the relative fertility of the Galilean soil supported nine cities around the fifty or so kilometers of its shoreline, each of more than fifteen thousand people. The largest of these was the Hellenistic city of Tiberias on the southwestern shore, constructed during Jesus’ lifetime and the administrative centre of Herod’s Kingdom.

Jesus said that the disciples would fish for people – an unusual turn of phrase. It may simply have been a catechetical technique on the part of Jesus, to use the language of their lived experience to give them some insight into their as yet unknown ministry.

It was also possible that Mark carefully chose the phrase to put on the lips of Jesus, because the expression did in fact echo the language of the prophets, unfamiliar to most modern readers but probably familiar to Mark’s contemporaries. 

In the prophetic context the term had somewhat ominous undertones. It was used in reference to the fate of the idle rich of Israel who oppressed and exploited the poor of their time. Already Mark could have been flagging the notion that Jesus’ message would confront positions of privilege and that the disciples would continue that mission in their time.

“Fishing for People”

The prophet Amos back in the eighth century used the image of fishhooks when speaking of the fate of the rich matrons of the Northern Kingdom of Israel soon to be conquered by Assyria:

Writing a century later of the violent Babylonian enemies of the Southern Kingdom of Judah not long before the actual invasion of Jerusalem, the Prophet Habakkuk had associated their violence with the imagery of fishing:

All four disciples responded to their call promptly and decisively. They left their nets, and their father, and followed him.

That their response was so total and so immediate, before Mark had outlined anything more than Jesus’ initial manifesto, may indicate that Mark’s placement of the incident reflected his own narrative purpose rather than the historical order of events. Mark was carefully constructing his setting for the sake of his readers.

Given the prompt response, it seems more likely that the four men called had already had some previous exposure to Jesus and to his teaching. The totality of their response was also remarkable. Did the disciples leave their families – not just their fathers but their wives and children? (The reader would soon see that Peter had been married.) And if they abandoned their livelihoods, it would seem that they must have found other means to support themselves - unless they were surprisingly wealthy and could live on their savings. Both issues were irrelevant to Mark’s purpose so he was not interested in giving explanations.

Next >> Mark 1:21-28