Why Wouldn’t the “Best of the Best” Be Chosen?

Matthew 4:18-22

As Jesus walked alongside the Galilee Sea, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, throwing fishing nets into the sea, because they were fishermen.  “Come, follow me,” he said, “and I’ll show you how to fish for people.”  Right away, they left their nets and followed him.  Continuing on, he saw another set of brothers, James the son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with Zebedee their father repairing their nets. Jesus called them and  immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

Jesus’s public ministry is well underway.  He settles in Capernaum for a little while where he starts preaching repentance “Here comes the kingdom of heaven!” We will return to this theme another day, but today, I want to focus on what Jesus does just as he starting to become well-known.  He recruits disciples and the disciples He chooses are quite surprising.  He chooses fishermen.  This doesn’t sound too radical to us in the twenty-first century Christianity, but I assure you, it is incredibly radical in first-century Judaism.  Rabbis like Jesus chose disciples from the brightest and best scholars among the Jewish community.  Fishermen, by definition, are not those folks. Allow me to explain.

          Every Jewish boy had to spend the first several years of their lives learning the scriptures and traditions of their faith.  This culminated in their bar-mitzvah around the time they became a teen.  For most young men, this was the end of their formal religious training. At this moment, they would “choose” a profession. I say choose, but generally, they were expected to follow in their father’s footsteps and carry on the family business.  But the “best of the best” students were chosen by Rabbis to continue their studies in the faith.  They would do this in hopes of one day, if they worked extremely hard and showed great promise, they just might be chosen by a Rabbi to be a disciple.  Only the best of the best of the best become disciples and only the best of the disciples ever became a Rabbi.  Fishermen are those who didn’t even make the first cut.

          However, Rabbi Jesus chooses fisherman to be his first disciples.  This would have seemed utterly ridiculous.  However, Jesus is not interested in continuing a faith tradition controlled by the academic elite.  He is proclaiming a Kingdom of Heaven that is for all, a kingdom where even dirty fisherman who didn’t make the first cut could be leaders.  That is still the nature of the Kingdom today.  People like me, who have studied the scriptures for decades would do well to remember that.  My “credentials” don’t justify my position of service; Jesus’s choice does.  That’s true of me and it’s true of you.  We are chosen to be Jesus’s disciples.  One of the most effective pastors I know was called by Jesus when he was selling drugs as a young man.  Another leader I know of a very large ministry has no formal education. 

          I believe we are living in a time when we not only need to remember that these are the kinds of people Jesus chose; we need to recover the practice raising up servants from unlikely places.  We need to equip the called, not call those who we deem already equipped.  The Christian church has preached the “priesthood of all believers” for centuries, but quite frankly, it is not practiced in enough places. 

          So where am I going with this?  You are disciple material in Jesus’s eyes. You have a calling from to build the kingdom of heaven that has come near.  So it begs the question. . .

Question:   Have you said yes to God’s call?  How are you contributing to the kingdom’s work?

Prayer:  Jesus, no matter what I have done with my life in the past or what I am doing now, I ask you to make clear what You would have me do from this moment.  I am your disciple.  Teach me. Lead me.  Amen.

Prayer Focus:  Pray for young people you know who are trying to figure out what vocational path they need to take.

Song:  I Will Follow – Chris Tomlin