Sayings of Jesus: ‘Fishers of People’

Matthew 4 and Mark 1 have the story of Jesus calling his first disciples. It’s a short account, basically the same in both Gospels (this is Matthew):

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’ At once they left their nets and followed him.

Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

With due deference to Jesus, I’m not sure that I like the analogy that much at first reading: ‘I will send you out to fish for people.’ Doesn’t that sound rather impersonal and transactional? More concerning, perhaps, it suggests ‘catching’ people, like a fisherman catches fish. Are we supposed to think of ourselves following in Jesus’ footsteps and also doing that—also ‘catching’ people?

Perhaps this is one of the downsides of taking catchphrases from the Bible, ignoring their original context (who said it, to whom, when, and why) and appropriating them in our own contexts without transposing them culturally, as if they are somehow invested with something called ‘biblical’. The idea of a fellow Christian from church saying to me, “Shall we go out this afternoon and ‘catch’ some people for Jesus?” fills me with no enthusiasm whatsoever. It reminds me of a professional healing ‘evangelist’ who said he used to take his son with him every week to, as he put it, ‘stalk the disabled parking lot at the mall’ to find people to pray for. I was appalled at the story; clearly he saw nothing wrong in it.   

As a friend said to me the other day, in another context, in all sincerity, “Maybe you should try not to overthink things, Steve.” Perhaps he’s right: Jesus said it, and he must have had a reason. Does it really matter? Why not just move on? And yet …

Interestingly, the NIV, NRSV, and NLT change what was originally a noun (‘fishers’—i.e., people who fish) for a verb (‘to fish’). The ESV and NASB, which are more ‘word-for-word’ translations, retain the noun, per the old KJV (you may recall its rendering as ‘fishers of men’—the Greek word is actually ‘men’, but many translations now update that to ‘people’). Does the noun rather than the verb make a difference? I think it may do a bit.

Let’s start by placing the context centre stage. Jesus is walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee (aka, Lake Gennesaret, Tiberias, or Kinneret—why does it need four names, when that just confuses everyone? No idea …). Did Jesus just approach these four random fishermen he’d never met before—maybe because the Holy Spirit prompted him to do so? Maybe. But it sounds a tad unlikely—and all the more so, that they all straight away said ‘yes’.

This was no small decision (“Oh, OK then”). The clear implication (‘At once they left their nets’ … ‘immediately they left the boat and their father’) is that they were leaving their jobs—and even more so, abandoning the family business (quite a shocking thing to do)—to wander the country as followers of this rabbi whom the text appears to suggest they’d only just met. It wasn’t even much of a conversation. One sentence from Jesus and no questions from them.

Could it have happened like that? I guess so. Does it sound likely? Probably not. More likely is that the conversation as Matthew and Mark relate it is truncated. Although they may not have known Jesus well at this point, you would think that they’d certainly have come across him. Jesus was living in Capernaum, which was a lakeside town (v.13), and he had begun his ministry (v.17). We don’t know Capernaum’s exact size, but it would have been less than 15 acres, with a population of between 1,000-2,000 people. Really not that many. A high proportion of its inhabitants would have been fishermen, and we know there was a synagogue there. The likelihood of these soon-to-be disciples being at least familiar with Jesus is very high. Who knows how many conversations they may have had with him in the town square, or even over meals (we know that Jesus liked to come to people’s homes to have meals with them!). Who knows how many times they might have heard him speak, and how intrigued they may have been, as they reflected on and talked later about the fascinating things he’d had to say. It would make much more sense if that stunted conversation reported by Matthew and Mark was simply a summary. If they were at a point where a simple invitation from Jesus—“How about joining me in what I’m going to be doing?”—might well have triggered a “Yes, please—we’d love to” response.        

But none of that gets us over the hurdle of that rather harsh-sounding ‘fishing for people’ idea. If we lay it to one side as a timeless Christian catchphrase for a moment, how might that have come across in its context at the time? Might it not have had those overtones that I’m hearing in it today?

Let’s go back to that context: all four of these first disciples are fishermen. They come from a fishing town. So … Jesus uses a fishing analogy when he speaks to them—why wouldn’t he? He’d hardly use a painter + decorator analogy. Jesus regularly used analogies and parables with characters and settings with which his audience would have been familiar from everyday life, and he is doing so here. That doesn’t mean that we should be turning his words here into a timeless way of framing mission. 

How might we say something like that today? I suppose if we were in a small fishing town where lots of the population we were wanting to reach were involved in the fishing industry, we might. But equally, we might not. The critical thing for any analogy is its relevance for those to whom it is addressed: “Ah, I get that. That makes sense …”

Let me offer two final thoughts.

The first is that we shouldn’t overwork Jesus’ analogy—overstating comparisons of how fishers do ‘fishing’ to how we as evangelists should do ‘soul winning’—offering correlations that really aren’t there. If our deep and meaningful idea starts with, “And in the same way …” then it may well be guilty of that!

The second thought is to suggest that the sense of what Jesus said to them in contemporary language might be something along the lines, “You have been in the fishing business—and you’re very good at it. But come and join me in something greater: the people business. Work with me to become really good at that, as well!”