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.

• 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.