This week we hear Mark’s version of the story of Jesus calling his first disciples (Mk 1:14-20). This includes the familiar line “I will make you fishers of men”. But it has the same sense of immediacy as we got from John last week. The picture of the fishermen just dropping everything and running after Jesus is, if anything, even more vivid.
Of course I doubt it was exactly like that in practice, but that’s not the point. What the evangelists are conveying is the sense of urgency that that the early church felt in responding to Jesus’ call. We get the same feeling in Paul’s letters, particularly the early ones. Mark puts the words in Jesus’s mouth: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
Two thousand years on it’s hard for us to share this feeling. It feels like this has all been a long time in the making, and it’s going to be going on for a good while yet. Today, tomorrow, next week, next year – it’s not going to make much difference.
But is that true?
Our first reading tells of Jonah and his, somewhat delayed, trip to Nineveh (Jon 3:1-5, 10). You may recall how Jonah was a very reluctant prophet, who headed off in exactly the opposite direction when told by God that he needed to go and sort out Nineveh, only to get redirected by being thrown in the ocean and fortuitously picked up by a passing whale. So Jonah is clearly late getting to Nineveh, and the people have been going bad for quite a while. Thus it’s quite a surprise that they respond so quickly to the call to conversion – Jonah has barely started his trip across the city before they fall in line.
Again, the point of this is not the realism of the missionary experience, it’s a reflection of our personal experience. We need to feel the urgency of moving ahead in our relationship with God. It’s not that God will get bored waiting, or there’s a cut off date for the RSVP. It’s more like the situation where you’ve met the love of your life – you don’t then say: “oh this is wonderful, but there’s no rush, let me finish up all this stuff I’m dealing with, I’ll get back to you, maybe tomorrow, or next week, or next year…”
Imagine the scene with Jesus at the lakeside not as a recruitment exercise for the marines, but more like something from a romantic drama, where the two strangers meet, and in one glance the rest of their lives is set out before them. You might not be a fan of the genre but the deeper point is that this a God who is in love with us. Of course he will wait for us, for as long as it takes. But why should he? More importantly, why would we?