THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP

The call of the disciples as Jesus walked ‘beside the Sea of Galilee’ (v 18) is far from being the romantic, innocuous event it might appear at first glance. It demanded the abandoning of existing occupations and family ties: ‘they left the boat and their father’ (v 22). Capernaum had become an important center for highly profitable fishing businesses, but those who owned boats and actually worked on the lake found themselves increasingly in debt to brokers (described in the Gospel as ‘tax gatherers’).1 Jesus’ call to follow Him and become ‘fishers of men’ (v 19, KJV) was a summons to radical discipleship in the context of a kingdom movement which would challenge the values responsible for the ‘darkness’ existing across Galilee (vs 15,16). The alternative values shaping this new movement were to be spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount.

However, the movement initiated by Jesus is radical in another sense, because not only does He invite the fishermen who suffered the injustice of taxation and extortion to follow Him, but He also calls the very people who benefited from this corrupt system, inviting them to abandon their privileged positions and join the movement too! Thus, Matthew is called to follow Christ while ‘sitting at the tax collector’s booth’!2 In this way the calling of the disciples demonstrates the nature of the kingdom of God; it not only brings justice to the poor and oppressed, but offers liberation and a life freed from the idolatry of wealth and possessions to people at the other end of the social scale. Thus, the barriers separating people are removed and a new community of love and justice begins, slowly and with setbacks, to emerge.

Does your church reflect the kind of community we have just described? How might it become more like the movement Jesus initiated?