Jesus said to them: "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they left their nets and followed him. (Mark 1:17-18)
Have you ever played the 'present game' at Christmas? We have, for years.
The rules are simple: everyone in the extended family brings several wrapped presents and piles them up on the floor in the middle of the room. You take it in turn to throw a dice, and if you get a six, you can pick out any gift and put it in front of you. No sixes – no gifts!
After a few minutes, all the presents have been taken. But they remain wrapped and you carry on playing. If anyone throws a six from that point onwards, they can take a gift from someone else's pile and add it to their own – something which generates all sorts of tensions! At the end of a previously-agreed time span, a whistle is blown, and everyone keeps (and opens) whatever presents (however many or few) they have in front of them.
It's pure luck, and not especially fair, of course – two facts which usually foster some fairly frantic excitement. And over the years the "gifts" have evolved into a mix of the wacky, the tacky, and the small and worthless disguised in deceptively large packaging.
Our family members do give one another "proper" presents as well! But there's something about the Present Game which captures – in a fun way – the frenetic, ever-hopeful and acquisitive spirit of our age.
When we stop and think about it, of course, we know that this consumerist zeitgeist is a dangerous deception. A man inquiring about the will of a deceased relative once asked a fellow mourner at a funeral, "How much did he leave?" The sobering response came back: "He left everything." Touché.
And it's here that Jesus' invitation to follow him is so counter-cultural, especially in the run up to Christmas. We want to accumulate things – but Christ asks us to leave them behind. We look for the perfect present, whereas Jesus offers us the perfect presence – himself.
When Jesus invites Simon and Andrew to follow him in Mark 1 he is not inviting them out for a quick coffee, or to graciously consider spirituality as a lifestyle add-on extra. Rather, he is inviting them to walk out on a family business developed over generations. It's a big ask! Yet he is such a compelling figure they have no hesitation in dropping everything there and then. "Immediately they left their nets and followed him," Mark tells us (v18). And just in case we miss it, Mark makes a similar point two sentences later when recounting the call of James and John.
Jesus call to put everything else second to following him is an invitation to liberation. It frees us from the banality of much that passes for aspiration in western society today. As the great devotional writer Dallas Willard put it in Renovation of the Heart, "we will, as St Francis of Assisi said, 'wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there lightly".
It is also a call to pass the message on by being disciple-making disciples. Jesus, picking up imagery from Jeremiah 16, wants his followers to "fish for people" – in other words, to be those who call others away from following worthless idols (even electronic "i-dols") to serve the living God.
Finally, it's a deeply transformational call. As one commentator on these verses says: "The gospel demands radical discipleship... Half-heartedness has no place in a church built on the broken body of Christ. Jim Elliot, the martyred missionary to Ecuador, once wrote in his journal, 'Make me thy fuel, flame of God'. Do you need a wake-up call?"
The Rough Guide to Discipleship is a fortnightly devotional series. David Baker is a former daily newspaper journalist now working as an Anglican minister in Sussex.
