Leaving Nets Behind

Preaching Notes

Focus texts: Jonah 3:1-5, 10, Mark 1:14-20

Mark is a breathless gospel writer, or maybe he wants us to be breathless gospel readers and hearers. One of his favorite words is “immediately.” This follows that, which is followed by the other thing, but not at a leisurely pace. It’s not a saunter through the Judean countryside. No, this is an Iron Man triathlon. Jesus sets a breakneck pace through the early part of his ministry. John gets arrested, and Jesus says it’s time to go! He runs through the fishing village and points and calls. Immediately, Simon and Andrew left their nets and followed him. Immediately, James and John got out of the boat and followed him. You can just see Zebedee sitting there with his mouth hanging open in the boat that is rocking like the Road Runner had just zipped past, chased by a coyote. “What just happened here?” he wonders, crouched in a boat holding the dripping nets in his work-worn hands. The hired hands just shrug their shoulders and wonder if this means a little more pay in the day’s packet.

It would be possible to imagine the four itching to get out of the fishing business. Maybe they were looking for any call that would come along to rescue them from the fish smell that would never wash off their hands. But that’s putting modern-day career choices onto these first-century family members. Running the family business was standard practice, working with those who raised you and those you grew up with, and hoping one day to pass on to your own offspring. That was how things usually worked in those days. Yet here came this itinerant preacher passing through at a dead run, and they hightailed it after him, following just two words: “Follow me.”

Another case of Jesus being Jesus? Most likely. There is something magnetic about him, it seems. There is something that draws one’s attention, something that makes you want to believe him and want to be with him. There is a certainty inner peace –that passes all understanding, you might say. But there is some indefinable something-- he answers questions you haven’t even thought of yet. There is something that makes a net full of fish seem like small potatoes (to mix a menu of metaphors).

Mark says there was no inner debate; there was no weighing of pros and cons. There was just the following, an immediate following. It comes down to a matter of priorities. What will you willingly leave behind to follow him? What will you set aside to travel at the speed he requires? Remember, baggage is limited for this flight. We try to carry too much, to hold on to too much, and we find ourselves struggling to keep the pace that Jesus sets. We want to cram our prejudices and our habits, our egos and our anxieties in the overhead bins that weren’t made for luggage that size. And we hold up progress so much that we can’t even get in the air. Just ask Jonah.

In case of a water landing, Jonah heard, watch out for fish. Great big fish. But that’s not our text for today. We’re past that. Jonah has been spat up on the beach by a fish with prophetic indigestion. Now he lies there, wondering what could be next and wondering if it could get any worse. And it does. “The Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time” (Jonah 3:1 NRSV). Uh oh. Is that good news or bad news? Well, Jonah seemed to think it was bad news. He spent the first couple of chapters trying to run away from that word. He thought if he got far enough away, if he put an ocean in between, then the word might leave him alone. Never mind that he was a prophet, and this was what he signed up for. You can’t help but wonder if this was the only call he chose to run away from, or if this was a habit for him. Or was this his one and only call, and he was too prejudiced to follow through?

Maybe it was the Ninevah thing. Send him to Jerusalem or even the hill country of Judea; he’d be fine with that. Send him to Samaria; he could maybe handle that one, too. But Ninevah? Can anything good come from Ninevah? Obviously not, he thought. So, he ran rather than face people he couldn’t stand; rather than invite the folks who had no sense of what was holy or what was proper or what was good. “They’ll make a mess on the carpet,” he declared in a trustee’s meeting, while scrolling his phone for the next boat out of town. “They bring down property values. They’re not like us. They’ll eat our pets and graffiti our buildings. Ninevah? Never!” That’s what Jonah said.

And now he lies on a beach covered in piscine gastric fluids, and the word of the Lord comes to Jonah a second time. But despite his personal blind spots (and we aren’t done with those yet, keep reading the story), this is good news in the end. A second time means God doesn’t give up. A second time means God doesn’t give in to our prejudices and our fears. A second time means God knows there are nets we need to leave behind to follow this call on our lives. And God is persistent enough to keep calling.

Maybe Jesus had to call more than once. Maybe the fishermen weren’t as ready to go as Mark depicts them. But it doesn’t really matter in the end. What matters is that they went. Immediately or eventually, they went. Because the call keeps coming. God loves second chances. And third ones, and fourth, and … well, you get the idea.

The disciples stumbled and bumbled along in Jesus’ wake for three years, Mark says. But eventually, they became apostles. From learners to the sent ones, they grew into the role that Jesus had in mind when he saw them with nets in their hands. Jonah, however reluctantly, is probably the most effective preacher in the whole Bible. His eight-word sermon turned the hearts of a whole city of Ninevites--and a bunch of cows to boot. Pretty good, wouldn’t you say? And all it took was the willingness to leave the nets behind and follow the call.