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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
Picture it. A bunch of Galilean fishermen are working at their trade. Jesus walks up, tells them to follow him, and off they go. This happens twice. The dialogue in Mark is bare bones and the description of details minimal at best. The passage seems to contain a paradigm for discipleship. Discipleship brings an end to daily, conventional life. It is a demanding call. Being a disciple takes priority over everything else. It changes one's relationship to society, including family. The emphasis is clearly on the immediate response of the four disciples. In 1:20 James and John literally "down tools" and walk off immediately and without further ado, leaving their father and all else. Why did the disciples leave immediately when Jesus came? And, why would a gospel writer tell the story in this way? There could be a number of reasons:
One, the author wanted to emphasize Jesus' supra-human powers and attraction. Jesus, thus, could walk up to complete strangers and compel their immediate discipleship. Or, two, these four men already knew Jesus and had indicated their willingness to be his disciples. Jesus was just picking them up. Three, or, they had already heard Jesus preach and were receptive to him. Perhaps they'd even talked about joining up with him. Or, four, there wasn't a real event like this. The story, rather, defines a model for discipleship for Mark's own time and readership. Five, this is a composite of the experience of the earliest church's sense of what it meant for the disciples and for they themselves to follow Jesus. It distills the larger experience of the earliest church. Six, this is a political statement establishing the primacy of these four men among the leaders of the earliest church. Seven, this story affirms the central significance of membership in the Jesus Circle (and, by extension, the earliest church). Jewish society was a familial, patriarchal society, but here the first disciples reject family and father for joining with Jesus and his new community.
And, now, in 2011, I don't see why there couldn't have been a number of reasons for including this story of the sudden entry of Peter, Andrew, James, and John into Jesus' band of disciples. And, there are still other possible reasons for the inclusion of the story esp. at the beginning of Mark. One possible reason is that the author's oral sources themselves emphasized the importance of this event, which marked the earliest beginning of the "Jesus movement" of later years. Another reason could be that in Mark the stories of Jesus' baptism immediately followed by the calling of the first disciples function as "birth narratives," which is to say they introduce the person of Jesus to the reader. Unlike Matthew and Luke whose birth narratives start with the birth of an infant, Mark's birth narrative starts with the birth of a movement. That is, the Gospel of Mark is not about just Jesus but, rather, about Jesus and his disciples. In any event, there could be and probably were several reasons for including this passage as written and where it is located, not just one.
