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Why Is Jeremiah Never Mentioned?

Mark 1:16-20 is a favourite text for uncovering the content of authentic discipleship. The call to be "fishers of men" is seen by many as a key pointer to the requirement for disciples of Jesus to find and make other disciples.

16 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17 'Come, follow me,' Jesus said, 'and I will send you out to fish for people.' 18 At once they left their nets and followed him.

19 When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20 Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.

The Message rather goes to town on verse 17: "Fishing was their regular work. Jesus said to them, "Come with me. I'll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I'll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass." Now I don't know if perch and bass are even native to the Sea of Galilee, but even if they were familiar species to James and John, this paraphrase still seems a little over-done! Or even a bit fishy!

But surely the point is incredibly straightforward: James and John were actual fishermen being called to a new vocation as fishermen of another kind. The analogy wouldn't have been available if the brothers had been bakers or lumberjacks, but they really were fishermen. Perhaps they were only selected by Jesus because they were fisherman... though I don't really believe that!

So all is well until I happen to read Jeremiah 16:16, which contains an expression that is awfully close to "fishers of men":

16 'But now I will send for many fishermen,' declares the Lord, 'and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks.'

The metaphor of fishing was employed by the OT prophets to describe God's wrath and judgement by plucking Israel out of the water of their homeland. Amos 4:2 warns, "The Sovereign Lord has sworn by his holiness: 'The time will surely come when you will be taken away with hooks, the last of you with fishhooks' " And Jeremiah also gives notice to Israel of impending judgement enacted by fishermen of people.

From these texts one would assume a negative meaning to the phrase "fishers of people," so that the disciples would be calling forth judgment on Israel. In that case Peter would be the rock (Mark 3:16) who crushes God's people with words of repentance, and James and John, the sons of thunder (3:17), would call down fire and destruction as they desired to do in Luke 9:54.

Deppe, D.B. (2011) [All Roads Lead to the Text: Eight Methods of Inquiry into the Bible]. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, pp. 176--177.

I believe that the Old Testament sheds light on the New Testament, so why is Jeremiah never mentioned when the spotlight is on Mark 1? I cannot recall him making a guest appearance in any sermon I have ever heard on these verses in Mark. Nor is Jeremiah 16:16 cited in the vast majority of commentaries on Mark.

It could all be a result of a woeful ignorance of the Old Testament. Or perhaps the image of fishing for perch and bass is just too enticing and just too easy to acquire.

Deppe's book is really helpful here. He goes on to say,

The clearest alternative to a background in the OT use of fishing is to posit the Sea of Galilee and the vocation of the disciples as the backdrop for Jesus instilling new meaning into the symbol of fishing. Instead of the undertone of violently snatching fish from their natural environment, Jesus would be employing a missionary connotation of gathering all nations into the net of the kingdom of God (see Matt 13:47). This would fit with a positive use of fish in this saying as well as the employment of bread in the feeding of the five thousand and four thousand, especially if the twelve baskets left over symbolized the feeding of Israel whereas the seven containers (Mark 8:19--21) stood for the Gentile nations of Canaan (see Acts 13:19). The extracanonical book Joseph and Aseneth 21:21 functions as a helpful parallel: "by his beauty he caught me, and by his wisdom he grasped me like a fish on a hook, and by his spirit, as by bait of life, he ensnared me, and by his power he confirmed me, and brought me to the God of the ages and to the chief of the house of the Most High, and gave me to eat bread of life, and to drink a cup of wisdom, and I became his bride for ever and ever." Then the understanding of "fishers of people" would be primarily positive as a call to missionary work.

We don't then have to choose only one of these various interpretations. "Fishers of people" is a multi-dimensional image that, Joel Marcus says, includes the disciples' future missionary preaching, their future teaching, and their future exorcisms - all of which feature in their participation in God's eschatological war against demonic forces.

However, since the context of the fishing metaphor is the calling of disciples along the Sea of Galilee and not a context like that of the OT prophets, it still seems better to go for the missionary meaning. As R. T. France notes, "In the context of 'good news' this [i.e., the negative interpretation] can hardly be Jesus' meaning, nor does it correspond to the task the disciples will be given later in the gospel."

The moral of this post is this. Although an OT background must always be explored in the task of understanding a NT text, sometimes the context will lead us in a different direction.

Do you see yourself as a fisher of men? Is you understanding of Christian discipleship informed at all by the Old Testament?

Monday February 14th, 2022
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