Mark 1:14-20
Lesson Focus
Jesus calls us to give up trying to rule our kingdoms so that we might find our place in the Kingdom of God.
Lesson Outcomes
Through this lesson, students should:
Be encouraged to begin or remain following Jesus.
Understand that repentance is a radical reorientation of one’s life.
Begin to pray for God’s Kingdom to come here on Earth as it is in heaven.
Catching Up on the Story
Last week we met both John the Baptist and Jesus. John was a hairy fellow who connected God’s salvation for the world in the Old Testament and what God is up to through Jesus. John and Jesus are a continuation of what God was and is doing in our world.
As crucial as John is to the story, he’s only the messenger, the one who prepares the way for the one we’ve all been waiting for, Jesus. As quickly as the adult Jesus appears on the scene, John baptizes him.
When Jesus comes out of the water, the heavens tear open, a dove descends upon Jesus, and a voice proclaims that Jesus is God’s son, his beloved, with whom God is well pleased.
We said that Jesus was baptized not because he needed forgiveness from sins but as commissioning to go out and begin his ministry of salvation and restoration in the world.
But the story isn’t just about Jesus. It’s about us, too, as we’re invited to be baptized, to have God’s spirit rest on us, to hear God’s words about his love for us so that we can be sent out, to be commissioned to work alongside Jesus in our world.
It’s hard, though, to work as Jesus’ workers if we don’t continually allow God’s spirit to rest on us and to live into our status as beloved children of God.
The Kingdom of God - Repent
John fades from view as soon as John arrives on the scene and Jesus is baptized. It should be noted that Mark assumes we know a little of the facts about this story he’s telling. He doesn’t give us detail about why John was arrested. He only mentions it to help us understand that the story’s focus has completely shifted.
John, the one who was the messenger, the one who was to prepare the way, has been faithful, he has done his job, and now the spotlight shifts entirely to Jesus.
We’re now given a brief statement of Mark’s whole message. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news.” Sweet and to the point. The time is right. The time is filled full.
To speak of fulfillment is to talk about a plot. We’ve already said that Mark has taken pains to help us understand that what’s happening with Jesus is intimately connected with all of Israel’s history, all of Israel’s hopes and dreams.
And now Jesus stands up and proclaims that the crucial time is now.
If this were a play or movie, we’d be fully in the rising action of the narrative, moving quickly toward the decisive moment in the story when everything changes.
We’d be moving toward that moment in the romantic comedy where the main characters kiss and finally confess their undying love for each other.
We’re moving toward that decisive moment in every western, the epic showdown between the bad guy and the rough yet righteous good guy.
Or that moment in every made-for-Netflix documentary where the critical evidence is presented that all the foods you will ever eat will give you cancer.
Yes, Jesus brings us to the beginning of that moment in the history of the world.
Time is full. The Kingdom of God is near, it’s here, and it’s now, embodied in the person of Jesus. We’ve arrived at the point where everything changes, and a new order is created. The way the word works begins to change.
This means that if everything is changing and the way things are ordered is changing, then the way we work and live in the world must also change. That is if we’re going to walk in step with Jesus and his kingdom.
In a way, we’ve come full circle back to John. John’s call was for repentance. What is repentance? t’s a turning from one thing to another. It’s a turning around. Say your life, and all you do is marked on a single plane.
Because of the nature of life, you’re always walking, always moving toward something. And as far as we’re concerned, you’re either walking toward God and God’s kingdom, or you are walking toward something else.
The call for repentance from both John and Jesus is a call to turn from walking toward something that isn’t God to walking toward God and God’s kingdom.
It’s an invitation to get in step with the world in its new ordered reality, the kingdom of God - the way things are supposed to be.
Follow Me
There it is, brief and to the point, a synopsis of Mark’s gospel; Jesus is calling us to repent because his kingdom is near, and that’s good news. I don’t know about you, but that leaves me with many questions. If I’m honest, questions that don’t always get wholly and neatly answered. What does God’s kingdom look like? How do I fit into God’s kingdom? What happens to all those who don’t want to participate in God’s kingdom?
But at this point in Mark’s narrative, he isn’t concerned with those questions. And the strange thing is that neither are the disciples he calls in this strange story.
Again, quickly the scene changes. One day Jesus is taking a stroll along the sea of Galilee. It’s not really a sea, it’s more like a large lake, but that doesn’t matter. As Jesus walks along, he sees two brothers waist-deep in water casting their circular nets in hopes of bringing in some fish. These two men are Simon, who we’ll later know as Peter, and his brother Andrew.
Jesus walks up to them; I imagine he gets right up to the edge of the water, but not yet getting his feet wet, and he calls to them, “Come! Walk after me! I will make you into fishers of people.” That’s my own little translation/paraphrase there.
I mean, Jesus doesn’t even introduce himself to these guys. There’s no, “Hey, Um, I’m Jesus, the son of God, the savior of the world. Follow me!” Nothing. Just an open invitation to go on a journey with an undisclosed destination.
And what happens?! Immediately they follow him. Crazy! Strange.
With Simon and Andrew following behind him, Jesus comes upon James and John, the sons of Zebedee.
The brothers are in the boat with their father and his hired workers mending their nets after a night of fishing, and Jesus makes the same call to them.
And they do the same thing! Again, they immediately drop their nets, leave their father and run after Jesus. Can you imagine the look on Zebedee’s face?
Imagine the look on your father’s face if you just up and quit a job the two of you were working on…one in which he was your boss. It would not go well when you got home if you ever had the guts to come home!
This is a strange story, indeed. It’s odd. What exactly is going on here?
If we take a closer look at what’s happening, we’ll better understand the story’s strangeness and what it might mean for us.
First, the four fishermen that Jesus called were just fishermen. They were utterly engrossed in their world, in their own life, and the way they had always done things. They had created a good life for themselves, perhaps. They had made a little kingdom of which they were kings. They weren’t looking for anything. They weren’t on some special spiritual quest. No, Jesus sees them. The initiative to follow is all with Jesus.
In fact, this is entirely the opposite of how traditional rabbi’s worked. If you wanted to follow a Jewish teacher, you went to them. Then, once you have proved yourself, you could genuinely become their follower.
Not so with Jesus. Jesus sees and calls these men for no reason but because they are.
This is how Jesus confronts us, too. We don’t need to go on some special spiritual quest to find God. God is always, always looking for us. The truth is that God sees us amid our mundane, ordinary, everyday lives, and he calls us to follow.
And following isn’t a passive idea like we follow people today. If you’re on social media, you may follow many different folks, but it requires almost nothing.
The same can be said for our favorite sports teams. Besides making a pilgrimage to take in a game or buying some apparel, our following is mainly passive. It requires no real rearranging of your life.
The invitation from Jesus to follow is much more than static or passive. The force of the original language is strong. It’s not even really an invitation; it’s a command.
“Follow me!” Literally, Jesus tells the men to follow after him. Walk in my paths. Walk as I walk. It requires of Simon and Andrew, James and John, a physical as well as spiritual response. It involves reordering how they understand their place in the world and how they will forever navigate their way through it.
The crazy thing is that Jesus doesn’t say where he’s going. It’s not “Follow me to Jerusalem” or even “Follow me while I do some miracles.” No, these men respond to Jesus’ command to follow, only knowing what Jesus intends to transform them into. And I doubt they understand what that means.
“Come! Walk after me! I will make you into fishers of people.” Fishers of people? What in the world? Jesus tells these men that he will remake them into something else.
Put in the way Jesus does, with an obvious connection to their current occupation, Jesus means to change the what and how about these for men’s lives.
No longer will they be defined as fishermen, as men who go out and catch fish, but as men who catch other people.
Here the invitation is to participate in Jesus’ mission in the world. It’s the same thing we’ve been saying for the last few weeks.
By virtue of our baptism, you and I have been called and commissioned to be Jesus’ hands and feet in our world. And part of that job is to bring other people into the fold, to catch and introduce people to the good news about God and salvation.
But we can’t do that, not well, unless we’ve had our lives entirely reoriented.
So What?
And that brings us back to John the baptist and Jesus’ brief message at the beginning of the passage. “The Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
As we’ve already said, repentance is a radical reorientation of our direction in life.
Sadly, some seek to answer the call of Jesus without ever genuinely repenting. Yes, they’re sorry for their sins, but they haven’t radically changed their direction.
The four men who Jesus calls do repent; they completely change their direction so they can literally follow after Jesus. Their jobs, their vocation, and their identity in the world change.
The kingdoms they had created for themselves had to dissolve. These four men gave up their rights to rule and direct their lives. But this doesn’t make them homeless or kingdomless. No, they gave up their meager kingdoms for a bigger, better kingdom, the Kingdom of God.
The Lord’s prayer has been profoundly influential in my life. Praying it is a daily practice for me. There are times when I get stuck on different phrases of this prayer. Sometimes I get stuck on the “give us this day our daily bread” part of the “and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” line.
Daily bread and forgiveness are things I can truly get my mind around. They’re hard, but I understand what it means to do those things. But the challenging thing to pray, the tricky thing to understand, is the “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…” line.
To pray “Thy kingdom come” is not just to pray that the world might be remade, that sadness and sickness and death might be done away with; it is first a prayer for us to give up our kingdoms so that they may be replaced by something else, God’s kingdom.
There’s a deep connection between repentance and the fullness and nearness of God’s kingdom. Repentance means allowing God’s kingdom to replace the ones we desperately try to create for ourselves.
Repentance means letting go. It means giving up on the desire to be the masters of our universe.
Repentance is a confession that you and I cannot rightly order our lives or our world in any truly good or meaningful way.
Repentance is the beginning of a movement toward becoming something that we are not and could never hope to be apart from the call, apart from our remaking at the hands of the king.
If you have not yet begun to leave your kingdom behind, then now is the time to repent.
Or perhaps a long time ago, you decided to follow Jesus, but now, you have begun to rebuild your kingdom without ever realizing it. Now is the time to repent.
Repent because the kingdom of god has come near. Leave your kingdom behind. It won’t last anyway. You, along with Simon, Andrew, James, and John, are cordially invited to join a new movement, a new kingdom, the kingdom of God.
Discussion Questions
Read the text aloud. Then, read the text to yourself quietly. Read it slowly, as if you were very unfamiliar with the story.
In verse 14, what does Jesus mean when he says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near?”
Give a definition for the word repent. What connection might there be between repentance and belief?
Mark gives us no indication that Jesus does anything other than calling Simon and Andrew to follow him. How would you react if you were in Simon and Andrew’s shoes? What would you do?
What does “I will make you fish for people” mean? How might it be similar to fishing for fish? How might it be different? How would you respond if someone said the same thing to you?
With Simon and Andrew in tow, Jesus travels a little further and then calls James and John to join him. The brothers are working in their father’s boat at the time. They respond to Jesus’ call and drop everything, effectively abandoning their father to follow Jesus. How do you think their father responded?
One of the astounding things about this passage is that Jesus doesn’t tell either of the four men where he’s going or what he’s going to do. Jesus issues the same call to us without telling us where exactly that might lead us. Following Jesus is an exciting (sometimes terrifying) adventure. How does that make you feel?
What might God be calling us to do?
Who might God be calling us to become?
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