Leaving the Nets Where They Lay

Mark opens this stretch with five words that carry more than their size: after the arrest of John. He does not stop to explain them. He will come back much later and tell the whole ugly story, but here it is one clause dropped in passing. The man who prepared the way has been taken, and that is the moment Jesus begins.

What Jesus says first is his message with nothing else attached to it: the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is near, turn around and believe the good news. Fulfilled is an odd word to use about time. It means something has been counting down and has now run out, not that a promising opportunity has come along. Whatever the prophets had been leaning toward, Jesus announces that it has arrived, and he announces it in a small province to people mending equipment on a beach.

Then he walks along the water and starts collecting people. Simon and Andrew are casting a net into the sea, which is to say they are not resting and not repairing; they are in the middle of a working day.

“Come, follow Me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”

They leave the net where it falls. A little farther along, James and John are in a boat with their father, mending gear, and when he calls them they climb out and go.

Mark keeps a detail in that second scene which is easy to skim past: they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men. Hired men. Zebedee's family had a business with employees in it, so what we are looking at is not four desperate men grabbing at any way out of a hard life. They walked away from something that was working.

What Mark refuses to give us is the reason. There is no speech that persuaded them, no earlier meeting sketched in behind the scene, no account of what would make four working men drop a trade. Jesus called, they went, and the gap stays exactly where Mark left it. Whatever it was about him, it was not an argument.