MARY M. MCGLONE

Follow Me

As Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Peter and Andrew and said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They left their nets. A little further down the way he saw James and John and called them. They, too, left their boat and their father and followed him. What was happening on that seashore? How can anybody explain the fact that four grown men simply left behind everything they had worked for to follow Jesus. What did their wives say?

Many will read the story of the fishermen as a pious tale, an exaggeration that doesn’t reflect the details of any real event. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazis, would tell us that’s heresy, an example of cheap grace, a degradation of the Gospel. Bonhoeffer, with strong backup from Matthew and Mark, insists that when Jesus said “Follow me,” the disciples did just that. He says in The Cost of Discipleship: “Until that day … they could remain in obscurity, pursuing their work …observing the law and waiting for the coming of the Messiah.” But, he says, with Jesus’ call they had to get up and go. They could have stayed as they were, and Jesus could have been their friend, even their consoler, but he would not have been their Lord.