Response To The Gospel
RESPONSE TO THE GOSPEL
MARK 1:16-20
Jesus calls his first disciples.
It is no accident that the summary of the gospel message is followed by the story of the call of the first disciples of Jesus. It is thereby made crystal clear that to repent and believe in the gospel is nothing other than to follow Jesus. It is through Jesus that the gospel comes to men, and the witness of the whole New Testament is that the gospel cannot be separated from him. If he is the preacher of the gospel, he is equally the content of the gospel, and one cannot believe in the gospel in any other way than by making a personal commitment of oneself to him.
It is Jesus himself who calls men to be disciples. Plainly this does not rule out previous contact with or knowledge of him. We know from John 1 that some of these men had already met him. If we are told nothing about this here and almost gain the impression that Jesus’ call came “out of the blue,” it is because the story has been so abbreviated and sharpened as to bring out the one essential lesson that Jesus calls men to respond to the gospel by following him. The fishermen are thus brought into the story without any detailed introduction, and we learn nothing of the circumstances which enabled them to down tools and follow Jesus on the spur of the moment; 1:29ff. (cf. 5:18f.) show that a radical break with home and its associations was not involved.
The call of Jesus was to follow, ie accompany him, and to share his task. He was the first fisher of men. The metaphor was obviously suggested by the daily occupation of the new disciples, and those scholars who argue that Jesus could not have used the metaphor in a good sense because elsewhere it is used in a bad sense (Jeremiah 16:16; Ezekiel 47:10) prove nothing beyond the wrong-headedness of their scholarship.
To follow Jesus as a disciple did not always require literal walking in his footsteps through Palestine, but it did demand that a man should own Jesus as his Master and work out his whole life afresh in the light of that relationship (8:34f.). There is nothing intrinsically wrong in fishing as an occupation—Jesus himself joined in fishing on occasion (Luke 5:1-11)—but following Jesus may mean saying “No” even to what is normally legitimate when he has a task for us to do. The big question is: does he call all his disciples to be fishers of men, or was this simply a special call to the apostles?