be at peace. It may be that here we see a picture in which the animals recognized, before the human race did, their friend and their king.
(2) The angels were helping him. There are always the divine reinforcements in the hour of trial. When Elisha and his servant were shut up in Dothan with their enemies pressing in upon them and no apparent way of escape, Elisha opened the young man’s eyes, and all around he saw the horses and the chariots of fire which belonged to God (2 Kings 6:17). Jesus was not left to fight his battle alone – and neither are we.
THE MESSAGE OF THE GOOD NEWS
Mark 1:14–15
After John had been committed to prison, Jesus came into Galilee, announcing the good news about God, and saying, ‘The time that was appointed has come; and the kingdom of God is here. Repent and believe the good news.’
THERE are in this summary of the message of Jesus three great, dominant words of the Christian faith.
(1) There is the good news. It was pre-eminently good news that Jesus came to bring to all. If we follow the word evangelion, good news, gospel through the New Testament, we can see at least something of its content.
(a) It is good news of truth (Galatians 2:5; Colossians 1:5). Until Jesus came, it was possible only to guess and grope after God. ‘O that I knew where I might find him,’ cried Job (Job 23:3). Marcus Aurelius said that the soul can see but dimly, and the word he uses is the Greek word for seeing things through water. But with the coming of Jesus we see clearly what God is like. No longer do we need to guess and grope; we know.
(b) It is good news of hope (Colossians 1:23). The ancient world was a pessimistic world. Seneca talked of ‘our helplessness in necessary things’. In the struggle for goodness, humanity was defeated. The coming of Jesus brings hope to the hopeless heart.
(c) It is good news of peace (Ephesians 6:15). The penalty of being human is to have a split personality. In human nature, the beast and the angel are strangely intermingled. It is told that once Schopenhauer, the gloomy philosopher, was found wandering. He was asked, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I wish you could tell me,’ he answered. Robert Burns said of himself, ‘My life reminded me of a ruined temple. What strength, what proportion in some parts! What unsightly gaps, what prostrate ruins in others!’ The human predicament has always been that we are haunted both by sin and by goodness. The coming of Jesus unifies that disintegrated personality into one. We find victory over our warring selves by being conquered by Jesus Christ.
(d) It is good news of God’s promise (Ephesians 3:6). It is true that the tendency has been to think of a God of threats rather than a God of promises. Non-Christian religions think of a demanding God; only Christianity tells of a God who is more ready to give than we are to ask.
(e) It is good news of immortality (2 Timothy 1:10). To the pagan, life was the road to death; but Jesus came with the good news that we are on the way to life rather than death.
(f) It is good news of salvation (Ephesians 1:13). That salvation is not merely a negative thing; it is also positive. It is not simply liberation from penalty and escape from past sin; it is the power to live life victoriously and to conquer sin. The message of Jesus is good news indeed.
(2) There is the word repent. Now repentance is not so easy as sometimes we think. The Greek word metanoia literally means a change of mind. We are very apt to confuse two things – sorrow for the consequences of sin and sorrow for sin. Many people become desperately sorry because of the mess that sin has got them into, but they know very well that, if they could be reasonably sure that they could escape the consequences, they would do the same thing again. It is not the sin that they hate; it is its consequences.
Real repentance means coming not only to be sorry for the consequences of sin but to hate sin itself. Long ago, that wise old writer, Montaigne, wrote in his autobiography, ‘Children should be taught to hate vice for its own texture, so that they will not only avoid it in action, but abominate it in their hearts – that the very thought of it may disgust them whatever form it takes.’ Repentance means that anyone who was in love with sin comes to hate sin because of its exceeding sinfulness.
(3) There is the word believe. ‘Believe’, says Jesus, ‘in the good news.’ To believe in the good news simply means to take Jesus at his word, to believe that God is the kind of God that Jesus has told us about, to believe that God so loves the world that he will make any sacrifice to bring us back to himself, to believe that what sounds too good to be true is really true.
JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS
Mark 1:16–20
While he was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, Simon’s brother, casting their nets into the sea, for they were fishermen. So Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me! and I will make you fishers of men.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed him. He went a little farther and he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, who were in their boat, mending their nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat, with the hired servants, and went away after him.
NO sooner had Jesus taken his decision and decided his method than he proceeded to build up his staff. Those who seek to lead must begin somewhere. They must gather together kindred souls to whom they can unburden their own hearts and on whose hearts they may write their message. So Mark here shows us Jesus literally laying the foundations of his kingdom and calling his first followers.
There were many fishermen in Galilee. Josephus, who, for a time, was governor of Galilee, and who is the great historian of the Jews, tells us that in his day 330 fishing boats sailed the waters of the lake. Ordinary people in Palestine seldom ate meat, probably not more than once a week. Fish was their staple diet (Luke 11:11; Matthew 7:10; Mark 6:30–44; Luke 24:42). Usually the fish was salt because there was no means of transporting fresh fish. Fresh fish was one of the greatest of all delicacies in the great cities like Rome. The very names of the towns on the lakeside show how important the fishing business was. Bethsaida means House of Fish; Tarichaea means The Place of Salt-fish, and it was there that the fish were preserved for export to Jerusalem and even to Rome itself. The salt-fish industry was big business in Galilee.
The fishermen used two kinds of nets, both of which are mentioned or implied in the gospels. They used the net called the sagēnē. This was a kind of seine- or trawl-net. It was let out from the end of the boat and was so weighted that it stood, as it were, upright in the water. The boat then moved forward, and, as it moved, the four corners of the net were drawn together, so that the net became like a great bag moving through the water and enclosing the fish. The other kind of net, which Peter and Andrew were using here, was called the amphiblēstron. It was a much smaller net. It was skilfully cast into the water by hand and was shaped rather like an umbrella.
It is naturally of the greatest interest to study the men whom Jesus picked out as his first followers.
(1) We must notice what they were. They were simple folk. They did not come from the schools and colleges; they were not drawn from the religious elite or the aristocracy; they were neither learned nor wealthy. They were fishermen. That is to say, they were ordinary people. No one ever believed in ordinary men and women as Jesus did. Once George Bernard Shaw said, ‘I have never had any feeling for the working classes, except a desire to abolish them, and replace them by sensible people.’ In The Patrician, the novelist and playwright John Galsworthy makes Miltoun, one of the characters, say, ‘The mob! How I loathe it! I hate its mean stupidity, I hate the sound of its voice, and the look on its face – it’s so ugly, so little!’ Once, in a fit of temper, Thomas Carlyle declared that there were 27,000,000 people in England – mostly fools! Jesus did not feel like that. Abraham Lincoln said, ‘God must love the common people – he made so many of them.’ It was as if Jesus said, ‘Give me twelve ordinary men and with them, if they will give themselves to me, I will change the world.’ We should never think so