Leaving Our Nets

Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him. (Mark 1:16-20)

There’s not much, if anything, that contemporary American culture values more than freedom of choice: an individual’s inviolable right to do whatever s/he wants, so long as it doesn’t infringe on another individual’s right to do the same. Freedom, as we have come to define it, means liberation from any claim on my life that is external to my sovereign will. The self has become our fundamental unit of account, and all things are measured against its needs and desires. How things came to be this way involves a complex cluster of issues, and more nuance is needed than what I’m giving here. But if you’ll allow it, for now let’s say for the sake of argument that the cultural tide is and has been for quite some time moving in this direction. Let’s say that (post-)modern American life keeps most of us tightly netted in a self-centered worldview, and that there are few competing perspectives left out there capable of disentangling us. Even for those of us who identify with a religious tradition, it’s very difficult to order our lives in a way that ultimately serves something other than the self.

But our intense devotion to freedom of choice has not liberated us in the ways we would like. It has not freed us from the anxiety inherent in decision-making. It seems, in fact, as if the opposite has happened. The shadow-side of our obsession with choice is our deep and abiding anxiety over making the wrong choice. Even as we seek to guard our inalienable right to do with our lives whatever we choose, our souls are under assault from the constant terror we feel about not knowing what to choose. Even as we are encouraged to make up our own lives, we are loathe to make the decisions necessary to that task.

The cultural devotion to choice and the anxiety that such devotion generates each undermine Christian discipleship. One of the basic affirmations of Christian faith is that from the beginning we did not choose God—God chose us. Under our own volition we are enemies of the divine, actively hostile to the world’s redemption. Thus the absurdity and power of what Paul voices in Romans 5:6, that “at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” In stark opposition to our high valuation of choice stands the Christian conviction that the defining reality of our lives is forgiveness.

Christian discipleship demands that I learn to see my life not as a self-generated unity, but as a divinely-gifted reality that I did not make and did not earn. Holding my life together, therefore, is not the primary concern. I will make the wrong decisions. I will fail. That much is assured. But that much is also forgiven, and in that forgiveness there is real freedom from anxiety over making the wrong choice.

Which of course all sounds really nice, but the reality—as I see it—is that most of us in this country have been formed far less by the hard path of Christian discipleship and far more by the American cult of self-worship. This cult casts wide its nets, and they’ve got us wrapped up tight.

Simon and Andrew did not choose to be called by Jesus. They were not looking for him. Jesus saw them. They were not searching for the right job or the right partner or the right house or apartment that would make their life complete—“they were fishermen.” They were secure in their nets. Yet they were willing to trade this security for something else. They were willing to forsake the safety of their known trade, their livelihood, their families. It’s difficult for those of us who are deafened from familiarity with these stories to hear the strangeness of it. “Immediately” they followed him. What? Ridiculous. How could they have known what would be next? How could they have known what their lives would become outside of their nets?

If we are to be freed from obsessive devotion to self, and from the concomitant anxiety, I think we will need to recover a sense of what Bonhoeffer called “costly grace”: a reality clearly expressed in Jesus’ call to discipleship, but largely forgotten or rejected by those of us who’ve been taken under by cultural tides. Discipleship costs us. Grace goes before, but we must follow. We must, and we may. And there’s the good news: as tightly as we find ourselves bound, we may yet leave our nets.