Be Fishers Of Souls

It helps me to remember what kind of place the Sea of Galilee actually was. Not a beauty spot but a working freshwater lake, ringed with small towns whose trade ran on fish. Peter and Andrew were not hobbyists. They were tradesmen in a busy industry, and fishing of this kind was hard, physical work, often done at night and into the cold early hours.

Matthew sets the call right at the start of Jesus’ public ministry, just after his baptism and his time in the wilderness (Matthew 3 and 4). Jesus has begun preaching that the kingdom of heaven has come near, and the first thing the Gospel shows him doing is gathering people. Not crowds first, but a handful of named men by the water’s edge. Matthew is usually understood to have written for readers who knew the Hebrew Scriptures well, and he wants us to see early on that this teacher does not wait for the qualified or the obviously religious. He walks straight in among ordinary working people and speaks. The setting is not incidental. The kingdom arrives where people are already at work.

The wording rewards a slow read. “Come after me” was the language of discipleship in that world. A pupil would attach himself to a teacher and quite literally follow behind, learning by nearness as much as by lecture. What strikes me is the direction of it. Usually a keen student would seek out a rabbi and ask to follow. Here it is reversed. Jesus does the choosing and the asking. He comes to them.

Then there is “I will make you.” The promise is not “if you try hard enough, you will become” but “I will make.” The making is his work, not theirs. They bring the willingness to come; he supplies the becoming.

And notice that he does not scrub away their old life. He takes the actual shape of it, fishing, and turns it outward towards people. The word behind “fishers for men” is the ordinary word for human beings, so the reach is everyone, not only the men. The picture is generous and a little startling: the same patience, early starts and persistence that catch fish are exactly what he means to use. He redeems the instinct rather than replacing it.

This little scene rhymes with a much later one, and I find the echo moving. In John 21, after the resurrection, the disciples have gone back to the lake, fished all night and caught nothing, and Jesus meets them on the shore again. The call that began over nets is renewed over nets. The man first told “come after me” is recommissioned there (John 21:19), this time after he has failed badly. Jesus does not pick a fresh, untested team. He comes back to the same people, in the same trade, by the same water.

There is an older current under this too, though it runs the other way from what you might expect. In the Hebrew prophets, nets and fishing tend to be images of judgement and capture, of people hauled off against their will. Jesus takes that picture and turns it inside out, towards rescue and homecoming. The whole movement of Scripture is God seeking out and gathering the scattered, and here that gathering gets faces and names. What Jesus begins at one lakeside ends, in Matthew, with these same ordinary men sent to all nations (Matthew 28:19). The small beginning was never small.

The order matters, and it is easy to get backwards. We can treat following Jesus as a job description we have to live up to, and end up worn out and quietly ashamed that we are not catching anyone. But the first word was never “perform.” It was “come.”

I think of the friend I keep meaning to talk to about faith, the conversation I rehearse and never have, the low hum of guilt that I am not doing enough. What steadies me is remembering that the disciples spent a long stretch simply being near Jesus, watching how he spoke to a tired woman or a frightened father, before they were sent anywhere. Their usefulness grew out of that nearness, not out of technique.

So on the days I feel useless, I have learned not to throw myself harder at the doing. I go back to the coming. A few unhurried minutes with him, an honest prayer, sitting under his words again. He said he would do the making. My part, most days, is just to stay close enough for that making to happen.

The very next line is almost abrupt. Straight away they left their nets and followed him (Matthew 4:20). No haggling over terms, no week to think it over. The nets were not just equipment; they were the livelihood, the family trade, the security that fed everyone at home. A couple of verses on, James and John walk away from their father Zebedee sitting in the boat (Matthew 4:22), and you can feel what that cost.

What stops me is how little they knew when they went. They had no map of where this would lead, no sense of crosses or upper rooms or an empty tomb. They had a face and a word, and they decided that was enough to move on. I notice how unlike me that is. I want the whole route printed out before I take a step, every risk priced. They stepped out on a person rather than a plan. Following Jesus has always asked for that: not that we understand it all, but that we trust the One who calls enough to leave the boat.

It would be easy to file this away as a story about four first-century men and their boats. But the shape of it keeps repeating. For Peter and Andrew the nets were the calling, the very place Jesus met them and sent them from. Most of us are not asked to abandon the day job; we are asked to let him walk straight into it.

So I think about where my own ordinary days are spent. The desk, the school run, the ward, the till, the kitchen. These are not waiting rooms until the real spiritual life begins somewhere holier. They are the shoreline he walks past, the place the call actually comes. The teacher who notices the lonely child, the nurse who is gentle when no one is watching, the neighbour who keeps showing up. He takes the work you already do, and the people it puts in front of you, and makes them part of how he reaches the world. You do not have to leave your life to be of use to him. You have to let him in among it.

I have sat in enough outreach planning meetings to know what happens to this verse under pressure. Someone puts it on a slide, and within the hour it has become a target sheet: this many doors, this many leaflets, this many gospel conversations before half term. “Fishers for men” turns into a scoreboard, and whoever has not personally led anyone to a decision drives home feeling like a bad fisherman.

The misuse I catch more often is quieter. We save this verse for ordinations and commissioning services, as though it named a calling for the ones who go off to train for it. He said it to two brothers standing in the shallows with wet hands. If the only Sunday your church hears Matthew 4:19 is the Sunday a curate is licensed, you have handed it to a handful of people and quietly taken it back off everyone else.

For years I preached this and did not realise I was preaching Luke. Ask most people how Jesus called Peter and they will describe nets breaking under the weight of the catch and Peter down at his knees, saying “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord” (Luke 5:8). Marvellous scene. It is not this one. Matthew gives you a man walking along the shore, one sentence, and two brothers gone (Matthew 4:18 to 20). No miracle. No demonstration. Nothing offered to persuade them.

I resisted that for a long time, because Luke is easier to preach. Luke hands you a reason, evidence you can point at, a moment where anyone would have followed. Matthew withholds all of it, and the bareness is not an omission to be patched from another Gospel. Nobody here is argued into anything. Mark leaves it just as spare (Mark 1:16 to 18): two of the three Gospels that tell this call refuse to give you the reason.

So if you are teaching it, my honest advice is to preach Matthew for what Matthew actually says, and if you want the breaking nets, take Luke 5 another week and tell the room plainly that you have moved.

I reach for this at a commissioning: someone stepping into leadership, a mission team being sent off, a baptism where a person is saying out loud that following him now shapes their working week. It sits well at the start of a ministry year, read over the people about to run the toddler group or lead a house group.

I would not touch it at a funeral. It says nothing about death or grief, and forcing it into that slot because it is well known helps nobody.

The use that worries me most is the thin church meeting, numbers down, someone hunting for a rallying verse. Quoted there it curdles. Tired volunteers hear it as an accusation, as though being worn out were a spiritual failure rather than exhaustion. And I would never aim it at someone whose obedience has never involved a dramatic public leaving. Most people’s yes looks nothing like walking off a boat and never going back, and Peter is not a standard the rest of the room is failing to meet.

Matthew will not let this scene float free of its map. Two verses before Jesus reaches the water, we are told he heard that John had been arrested, and that he withdrew into Galilee and made his home in Capernaum, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali (Matthew 4:12 to 13). Then Matthew reaches for Isaiah: light dawning on people sitting in darkness, in the region and shadow of death (Matthew 4:14 to 16). That is not scenery. Long before, an Assyrian king had carried off the land of Naphtali (2 Kings 15:29), and the prophet’s line pairs Zebulun with it. This was old bruised ground, a northern province a long way in every sense from the temple in Jerusalem. Not where anyone was standing about watching for the promised light.

What gets me is the direction of travel. The Baptist has just been taken. The sensible reading of that news is that saying these things out loud has become a way of getting arrested, and that this would be an excellent year to keep quiet. Jesus hears it, goes north into the province, and the first thing he does there is start recruiting. He is not collecting these four in a lull before the danger begins. The danger has already begun; that is the news of the week. Peter is standing there with wet hands, John’s arrest presumably the talk of every quayside on the lake, and he is being asked to attach himself to a man who has just been handed a plain warning and read it as a starting gun. That is what I keep having to learn again about this verse. The call is not issued from somewhere safe. It never was.

I grew up assuming these four were poor men. Hard-working, salt of the earth, but poor. It is a comforting picture and scripture does not actually hand it to us. Mark says that when James and John went, they left their father Zebedee in the boat “with the hired servants” (Mark 1:20). Paid staff. Luke adds that the brothers were partners with Simon (Luke 5:10), so there is a working arrangement running across more than one boat. I cannot tell you what a business like that earned, and I would be wary of anyone who says they can. What the text gives is modest and firm enough: a family trade with employees, boats, and someone else’s wages to find on a Friday.

None of that makes them comfortable, and the work itself was punishing. But “ordinary working men” is not the same claim as “men with nothing to lose”, and I had quietly let the two blur into one. What Peter walked away from was a going concern.

There is a small mercy hidden in those hired servants, too, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it. Zebedee is not left ruined on the shingle. The boat goes out tomorrow, because there are men on the payroll to crew it. So what his sons walked away from was not their father’s survival. It was their own inheritance: the share of a working business that would have been theirs, the future everyone in that town had already pencilled in for them. Nobody was rescued from poverty on that beach. Two men handed back a life that was, by the standards of the lake, going rather well.

Thirteen chapters later Matthew hands you a parable that complicates this call rather than confirming it. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like a net thrown into the sea that gathers fish of every kind, and only once it is full and dragged up the beach do people sit down and sort the good from the bad (Matthew 13:47 to 48). Set that beside “I will make you fishers for men” and a shadow falls across the triumphant version. A net does not ask what it is catching. It hauls in everything within reach, and the sorting happens later, on the shore, by someone who is not the net.

I find that steadying rather than troubling. It means the fishers were never the sorters. Peter’s job at the water’s edge was not to pre-judge who was worth gathering and who was not, because the parable puts that decision at the end, in hands that are not his. Anyone who has ever hesitated over a person they wanted to bring towards Jesus, on the grounds that they do not look, on the surface, like promising material, has quietly taken up a job they were never given. Gather. The sorting is not yours.

We know, almost in passing, that Peter had a mother-in-law, because Jesus later heals her of a fever in Peter’s own house (Matthew 8:14 to 15). Which means Peter had a wife. Years further on, Paul is arguing about the rights of apostles and reaches for Cephas taking a believing wife along as something his readers already know and will not dispute (1 Corinthians 9:5), which at least tells us she was not a woman Peter abandoned for good. But at the actual moment on the shore, when Jesus says “come after me” and Peter goes, she is not in the scene at all. Not named, not consulted, not given a word. What that morning did to the household books, or to whatever she had planned for that week, we are simply not told, and I think it is dishonest to read past a silence like that as though it cost nothing.

This is where I stop being able to make the verse land neatly. I have heard this call preached as pure adventure, four men saying yes to Jesus with only their own future on the table. But someone’s future changed that morning who never got asked, never got named, and never got the chance to say yes or no herself. I do not think that ruins the verse. I think it means the verse is not only about the exhilaration of being chosen. Anyone whose life has been rearranged by someone else’s calling, a spouse posted somewhere she never chose, a family who followed a decision they did not make, knows this discomfort from the inside. The Gospel does not resolve it for us here. It simply does not pretend the ledger only has one column.

I think about how many other men must have been out on that lake the same grey morning, mending the same kind of nets, and never getting a mention. Matthew names four. He does not tell us there were only four fishermen on the water that day, and I doubt there were. The rest went on fishing, and scripture says nothing for or against them, nothing about why they were not the ones spoken to. That silence matters to me, because I have sat with people, and been that person myself, who read a verse like this and ache with a quiet grief: where is my moment at the shoreline? Why did he apparently single out those four, publicly, unmistakably, while I have prayed for years for anything resembling clarity and been handed an ordinary Tuesday, again.

And here is the thing I did not expect to find when I went looking, which has done more for that ache than any reassurance I have been offered. Watch what happens to the men who did get the moment. Andrew is named here, spoken to directly, one of the first two on the beach, and then he all but vanishes. He fetches his brother, he points out a boy with some loaves (John 6:8), and that is close to the lot; Peter takes every remaining scene. Go further down the list of the Twelve and several of them never say one word in any Gospel. Not a line. They were called out loud, by name, unmistakably, and the record still has almost nothing to report about them.

So the shoreline moment I have envied guaranteed nobody a story worth telling. It did not spare Andrew the silence. I cannot promise you a moment like Peter’s is coming, and I have stopped pretending I know why those four and not the others mending nets that morning; Matthew does not say, and the guesses I have heard preached are guesses. What I can say is that the thing I was grieving turns out not to be the thing I thought it was. Being called loudly and being remembered loudly are not the same gift, and it seems he hands out the second far more sparingly than we imagine, even to the men standing right in front of him.

• Where am I already at work, in my actual job and ordinary days, that Jesus might be walking past and calling me right where I am?
• Am I trying to “catch” people by my own effort, or am I letting him do the making while I stay close to him?
• Whose face comes to mind when I read “fishers for men”: who is the lonely or struggling person already within my reach?
• What would it look like this week to put the “come” before the “go”, and simply spend unhurried time with him first?

If you would like to keep going, you could sit with more of the Gospel of Matthew, or look up verses gathered by how you feel.