People Jesus Met Along the Way: The Disciples
People Jesus Met Along the Way by Rev. L. John Gable
January 29, 2023
We have been talking together recently about people Jesus met along the way. We began with John the Baptist, the one who recognized Him first, whose ministry it was to prepare His way. Last week Terri shared a beautiful message about Mary and Martha, perhaps His very closest friends, along with their brother, Lazarus. And today, we take a look at the disciples. A more motley, rag tag, we might even say, ill-suited, band of brothers one could hardly imagine.
Among the chosen 12 were two sets of brothers, Andrew and Simon, better known as Peter, and James and John, all fishermen, which in and of itself tells us a good deal about them. Being a fisherman in first century Palestine was a very common trade as the villages in which they lived bordered the NW coast of the Sea of Galilee. But being a fisherman suggests they weren’t necessarily the sharpest crayons in the box. The educational system of the day, for little boys mind you, was primarily instruction in the Jewish law which required a lot of memorization. Along the way those who couldn’t keep up with the academic rigor simply dropped out and took up other trades, carpentry, masonry, fishing. Admittedly, this could have been their occupational desire all along, James and John, were the sons of Zebedee who was himself a fisherman, so perhaps they were intent on following in their father’s footsteps. Or perhaps not, they seemed to gladly drop their nets when the itinerant preacher Jesus said, “Come, follow Me!”
It is also safe to say that these guys were rather “rough and tumble” and most likely had the vocabulary of a longshoreman. We get some hint of that when we hear that James and John were nicknamed “sons of thunder.” We see throughout the Gospels that another of the fishermen, Simon Peter, was an impulsive hot head who covered the spectrum representing the heights of faith and the depths of denial; the first in faith and in failure; and in one particular conversation with Jesus he was called both the rock on which the church would be built and Satan!
Matthew was a tax collector which might be shorthand for traitor, collaborator, turn-coat. A tax collector in first century Palestine was despised for being one who was willing to take taxes from their own people in support of the occupying Roman government, and that most likely at an exorbitant profit. And then pair him with Simon the Zealot, a member of a sect of believers who were intent on overthrowing the Roman occupiers by any means necessary. Imagine for a moment the political discussions they had over the dinner table, perhaps liken it to a Marxist guerilla fighter with a member of the John Birch Society!
Add to these one named Judas who in each of the Gospels was given the moniker: the betrayer, and then six more, lesser known characters, each with a story of their own to tell. Who were these guys? And didn’t anyone bother to do a background check on any of them?
I found this apocryphal letter written to Jesus from the Jordan Management Consultant Agency. It reads:
“Dear Sir,
Thank you for submitting the resumes of the twelve men you have picked for management positions in your new organization. All of them have now taken our battery of tests and have been interviewed by our psychologist and vocational aptitude consultant. The profiles of all the tests are included and you will want to study each of them carefully. It is the staff opinion that most of your nominees are lacking in background, education and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise you are undertaking. They do not have a team concept, managerial ability or proven capability.
Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper. Andrew has absolutely no qualities of leadership. The two brothers, James and John, place personal interest above company loyalty. Thomas demonstrates a questioning attitude that would tend to undermine morale. Matthew has been blacklisted by the Greater Jerusalem Better Business Bureau. James, the son of Alpheus, Thaddeus, and Simon definitely each have radical leanings, and have registered a high score on the manic-depressive scale.
One of the candidates however shows great potential. He is a man of ability and resourcefulness, meets people well, has a keen business mind and has contacts in high places. He is highly motivated, ambitious and responsible. We recommend Judas Iscariot as your controller and right-hand man. All the other profiles are self-explanatory. We wish you every success in your new venture.”
Who chose this unlikely band of followers? Jesus did and that should give us some good comfort because that means He can choose the likes of you and me as well. Nadia Bolz-Weber, in her book, Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the Wrong People, writes, “Never once did Jesus scan the room for the best example of holy living and send that person out to tell others about Him. He always sent out stumblers and sinners. I find that comforting.” Bear in mind the despised tax-collector Matthew became the church’s primary evangelist through the Gospel he wrote and these twelve eventually shared the Gospel message which has reached our hearing today.
So why did Jesus choose these guys rather than a more cohesive collective of more like minded, even keeled, well heeled individuals? Apparently He had His reasons, perhaps one of which being, He wanted all voices at the table, to hear His message, to learn His ways, because He knew at the end of it all He was going to need all kinds of different faces and voices and personalities to share His message and carry on His mission. I believe that is as true today as it was then. In short, we don’t all need to agree with one another, but we do need to agree with Jesus.
One of the reasons we are looking at the people Jesus met along the way is so that we can see how He related to them and they to Him, but also so that perhaps we can see ways we might better relate to one another. We have a human tendency today, even in the church, to do exactly the opposite of what Jesus does here when it comes to those with whom we choose to associate ourselves, and I am greatly concerned that it is getting worse not better for us. In our culture today, including our church culture, we have taken on the posture of separating ourselves from those with whom we disagree. We have increasingly adopted an “us/them” mentality, so surround ourselves with those with whom we agree by what we read, in what we listen to, in what we nod our heads in agreement with, and so tend to close ourselves off from those who profess to have different opinions or hold different positions than our own. As a result, we find ourselves only talking with and listening to those like ourselves, with whom we already agree.
There is an inherent problem with that way of thinking and being. As we
parse our positions more and more carefully we suddenly find ourselves like the man who was stranded on a desert island for a decade. When he was finally rescued he showed his rescuers what he had done with his free time. He showed them his hut, his recreation area, then his church. One of them, seeing another unmentioned structure asked about its use. The man said, “Oh that’s the church I used to go to.” He became like the man in Michigan who built a church which seats only one.
Friends, I can guarantee you of this: you are sitting next to or near someone with whom you disagree. Perhaps you are not aware of that, yet; but one day you will be. At that moment you are going to have to figure out what you are going to do about that, and most simply you are given two options: stay or go; accept or reject; isolate or come together. The predominant voice in our culture, and increasingly more in the church culture, is to separate and reorganize ourselves with like-minded others. It is my strongly held belief that that response will eventually lead to our demise. I am not suggesting that we all need to agree with one another because we do not and will not; but I am suggesting that the foundational Presbyterian principle that “persons of good character and principle may differ” is more essential for us to embrace and put in to practice now than perhaps it ever has been before. Candidly, our ability or willingness to live in to and out of this principle is one of the things I love and appreciate most about Tab.
Did those first century disciples have their disagreements? Of course they did. So how did Jesus respond to them? He called them, welcomed them, embraced them, discipled and disciplined them, and eventually sent them out to be His witnesses and ambassadors. In our second Gospel lesson James and John take Jesus aside and had the audacity to ask Him to allow them to be seated at His right and left hand in the coming Kingdom of God, clearly the two highest places of honor. Jesus bluntly tells them they have no idea what they are asking for (which makes me wonder if perhaps I or we don’t often do the same) and, when they caught wind of it, the other disciples are absolutely furious. Why? Perhaps at the brothers’ audacity in asking or perhaps out of frustration because they too were thinking of asking something of the same for themselves. Either way, Jesus took that opportunity to set all of them straight as to the call and the demands of discipleship. They were mistakenly thinking it was the pathway to power and prestige. Not so, said Jesus, that is the way of the world, “but it is not so among you.” Rather, He counters with the values of His upside down Kingdom, saying, “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant and whoever wishes to be great among you must be slave of all. But the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.” Jesus was defining what it means to be one of His disciples, then and now. A disciple is “one who has firmly decided to learn from Jesus how to lead his or her life” (Willard); one who has committed themselves to be a follower, an apprentice of His, learning His way of doing things, quite literally of becoming like Jesus in every way imaginable, including the way we relate to one another. As another put it, “Faithfulness in following Jesus may be defined as progressively closing the gap between who we really are and who Jesus really is” (McDonald). We know all about how to be like us. We need to learn to be more like Jesus.
Why did Jesus gather this ragtag team to be His closest friends and followers? Because He knew that together they represented life as it really is, not in the ideal but in reality. Because He knew that their voices, in all of their diversity and disagreement, would be needed to share His Gospel message with the world. I believe He has called us together for the same reason. Given their different socio-economic backgrounds and political persuasions what held them together? It was not their shared agreement on the pressing issues of the day; it was their common commitment to Jesus. By uniting them to Himself He was uniting them to one another, and I believe the same is true among us today. Rather than each of us or a small group of us picking up and going to our own corners, I believe the Church today must continue to be instructed by the juxtaposition of both the collaborators and the freedom fighters who believe that Jesus is still able, by His Word and presence, to overcome the most seemingly insurmountable social, political, economic, racial and class barriers which seek to tear us apart and bind ourselves together in unified companies of believers called the Church (Bruner). The One who unites us is greater than anything that could ever divide us, unless of course we allow it to. The decision is ours to make…always ours. The Church is not designed to satisfy each of our individual needs, but to unite us together and shape and form us into the image of Christ so that we might carry on His mission and ministry.
There is another apocryphal story about Jesus’ return to heaven after the resurrection. The angels surrounded Him and asked Him about the plans He had put in place to continue His ministry and share the Good News. A mass marketing appeal? A world-wide broadcast? “No”, He said, “I have chosen 12 very common men to go out and tell the world about Me, and one of them has already betrayed Me.” The angels were dumbstruck. They didn’t know what to say so they sat in silence until one of them asked, “Aren’t there any other plans? What if they fail?” Jesus replied, “If they fail, then all will be lost.”
Friends, Jesus chose 12 very common, very different, highly unlikely and ill-suited men to be His closest friends and followers, just as He continues to call the likes of you and me today. He poured Himself in to them, teaching them, training them, receiving and sending them, just as He does us still today by the ministry of His Holy Spirit. Were they perfect? Hardly, most of the time they had no idea what He was doing or why, very much like us much of the time. Yet, despite all of that He entrusted them with the message of salvation in His name and sent them out to share it with others, one by one, each in their own way, until the whole world would hear the Good News, and He does the same with us today. He continues to call us, the very common, the very different, the highly unlikely and ill-suited to the same task today, each of us using our own lives and voices and experiences to point others to Him; not looking for converts to our way of thinking, but to Him and His. And what holds us together despite all of our differences and disagreements? Our common commitment and devotion to Him. By inviting us to Himself Jesus unites us to one another. And for that I give thanks.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN