Mark 1:14-20

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

16 Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. 17 And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” 18 And immediately they left their nets and followed him. 19 And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. 20 And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.”

I want to begin by asking you to imagine something. Imagine that you have worked all your life at just one job. You’ve done it since you were very little. It could be driving trains. It could be fixing boilers. It could be making scarves. It could be anything. But that’s all you’ve ever done and all you know how to do. You get money from doing it and that money helps you to buy food and to live. If you didn’t do this then you would not know how to earn money and you would not know what you would do to live.

Now imagine that, one day, a man comes along and says to you, “Follow me”. And what he wants you to do is to stop doing that thing that you’ve always done and is the only thing you know how to do and to do something else. And that something else that he wants you to do is to walk around with him, to learn how he lives, and to do the kinds of things he does.

Something like this is what happened to the people we just heard about in our Gospel reading: Simon, Andrew, James, and John. They were all fishermen. All they had ever been was fishermen. All they knew how to do was to be fisherman. And yet, one day, Jesus came along and said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers ofmen”. How very odd.

And yet the story tells us that that is exactly what they did. They left their boats and their nets, and they literally walked with Jesus and became what we call his disciples, telling other people to follow him too.

These days when we talk about “following” somebody or something, we don’t really mean the same thing that it meant in these days. I follow a football team (Tottenham Hotspur if you want to know), but I don’t literally walk around next to the players and go to the training ground whilst they practice. I hardly even go to any games. But what it meant to follow someone in those days was to literally follow them around, to watch them, to see how they lived, to listen to what they said and to try and put it into practice. And that is what those early disciples did with Jesus: they followedhim and they tried to be like him as much as they possibly could.

In the simplest form, this is what it means to be a Christian, even today. It means to be a disciple of the same man, Jesus, who called Simon, Andrew, and all those other folk to follow him. It’s true that we often forget this, but this is really what it means.

The Kingdom of God

Before he told those fishermen to follow him, Jesus said an interesting thing: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). And Jesus would always talk about this so-called “kingdom of God”. In fact, it was probably the main thing he talked about to people when he was around. But he didn’t just talk about it; he also showed us what it meant through the things that he did.

We might say that the kingdom of God is exactly what it sounds like: it’s the place where God is in charge. It’s the place where people do things the way that God wants them to be done. It’s the place where people love God and are interested first and foremost in what he says. Jesus showed everybody what this meant.

On a day like today, we think about people who fought in wars. If I’m honest with you, because I am a disciple of Christ, I am not sure that I could fight in a war. It is a very difficult question for those who seek to follow Jesus and his ways. This is because Jesus did not ever act in a violent way towards another person. In fact, he told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44). He even prayed for the people who put him on the cross to kill him that God would forgive them for what they were doing (Luke 23:34). Just before he was arrested to be taken to the cross, one of his disciples, Peter, took a sharp sword and cut off the ear of one the men who was coming to take him away. Jesus told Peter to stop what he was doing and, not only that, but he touched the man and healed his ear (Luke 22:49-51). All of this makes me think that I should not be violent towards other people, even when they are being violent towards me.

And yet there is another side to this. Jesus also tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves (Matthew 22:39). That basically means that we should love other people as much as we love ourselves. And, sometimes, there are people who need to be protected. There are people who are weak and vulnerable, people who are being hurt, or even killed, by others who are much more powerful than they are. And, when this happens, it seems like it could be right for a disciple of Jesus to act violently, or even to kill.

Blessed are the Peacemakers

In his most famous sermon, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9). So, one of the things that we can be sure about is that the Kingdom of God is a kingdom of peace, a place where there is no warfare or violence or killing. If we can bring peace to this world - even in a small way - we will bringing something of God’s kingdom into it. That might involve simply being kind to each other. It might mean trying to make up with someone you’ve had an argument with. It might mean forgiving someone who has hurt you. It might even mean, in some circumstances, fighting to protect somebody who is vulnerable. But the person who really wants to follow Jesus should never forget this: that we should always try and be peacemakers, forgiving our enemies, blessing those who persecute us, praying for those who hurt us, and hoping that we too will be called sons of God.

Amen.