Jesus’ first words announce the profound significance of his ministry and person. God’s promises have ripened into fulfillment. Jesus brings the reign of God near. His message is a call: Repent and believe in the good news.
The word repent in Greek is metanoia, which means conversion. In its Old Testament roots, the word means turn back, turn around, turn toward. In today’s idiom, we might say: get a life, become a new person, change your mind, or change your attitude. But to whom shall we turn? Who shall we become?
Jesus’ call goes beyond John the Baptist’s call to a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins. Jesus’ simple message makes clear he is the one to turn toward. He invites not only repentance but faith in him and his good news. He is the one to follow.
Once Mark establishes the theme of Jesus’ preaching, the narrative sets Jesus in furious motion. He strides the seashore, calls disciples, moves on, heals, casts out demons, preaches.
Mark’s stories are short; he uses the word immediately to shift quickly to the next scene. With Jesus’ every step, God’s dynamic healing, liberating power breaks into the human community.
- What word, phrase, or feeling touches you in hearing this gospel?
Mark includes few details in the spare story of Jesus’ calling four fishermen.
Jesus’ call is direct; their responses, quick and decisive. They do not become full-fledged disciples as fast as this, however.
Mark tells us these four disciples are among the 12 whom Jesus names as missionaries (Mark 3.13-19) and who go out to do what Jesus does — preach repentance, cast out demons, and heal the sick (Mark 6.7-13).
Mark foreshadows the cost of the work to which Jesus calls them. While the disciples are out doing their first ministering, Mark splices into the narrative the beheading of John the Baptist. It forebodes the cost of the ministry Jesus’ disciples are beginning.
The writer of Mark’s gospel cares about how faith matures. Jesus’ disciples leave their old lives behind quickly but their faith journeys twist and turn as they walk with Jesus.
The four fishermen are among those in Mark 4.40 who are afraid and without faith in the storm and still afraid of storms in Mark 6.47-52. Peter is the disciple who recognizes Jesus is the messiah in Mark 8.27. But soon afterward Jesus has to rebuke him for trying to keep him from the danger of suffering and death in Jerusalem.
James and John are the pair who insist they can drink the same cup of suffering Jesus will drink. But they both fall asleep in the garden when Jesus prays that the cup of suffering pass him by.
Mark wrote in A.D. 70 for people who knew that both Peter and James gave their lives for the gospel; both drank the martyrs’ cup of suffering. What these later Christians and we ourselves would not know without Mark’s gospel is the journey of these committed disciples through fear, flight, sleep, denial, failure.
These four fishermen really take up their work of fishing for people only after Jesus’ death and resurrection. In the end they, like John the Baptist and Jesus, give their lives for the gospel.
- What have you learned through persisting in a call?
- What has sustained you past flight and failure as a disciple?
Mark writes the first gospel to call a new generation to faith in Jesus. Until the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70, Jewish Christians prayed with other Jews at the temple, offered sacrifices, and joined pilgrimages for the great feasts.
For the early Christians this fracture in history happens as Jesus’ first-generation, eyewitness disciples are reaching old age or have already died. Peter was martyred in Rome in 66. James was martyred in the 50s. Anyone 30 years old in AD 30 is now 70. The Christian community in Jerusalem fled the city during the rebellion. Mark writes for a hesitant generation that can’t see the future, because the future is in such discontinuity with the past.
Interestingly, in Mark’s gospel when Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, he doesn’t say, “Follow me.” He says, “Come after me.” Succeed me; come after me in time. What Jesus is calling the four fishermen to do tells us what Mark intends the gospel to do for every generation that hears it — to believe in our turn, to continue Jesus’ mission in our time.
Like the generation for whom Mark wrote the first gospel, Catholics today also live our discipleship through a fracture in history. Fifty-nine years have passed since the Second Vatican Council began in 1962. Before the council we were a Church of the Council of Trent, the council that responded to the Reformation and ended in 1565. We were a medieval Church in the modern world.
Today we recognize the Spirit moves in all the baptized. We have obligations to the poor in this world. Catholics engage in ecumenical dialogue and reading the scriptures.
Two generations have grown up since the council. Our teens have grown up in a new electronic global community and not the neighborhood Catholic culture of small towns and neighborhoods of the Pre-Vatican II era. What will the gospel mean to them?
- What is your experience of change in the Church? What has helped you grow as a Christian? What has held you back?
- What in your experience does the gospel mean to youth today?