I originally planned for this post to be about John, son of Zebedee.
I had finished Peter, and John seemed like the natural place to go next. So I began reading what the other Gospels had to say about him before moving more deeply into John’s Gospel.
But I kept running into Peter and James.
Then Andrew.
And somewhere along the way, John stopped being the only person I was studying.
At first, I thought I was looking at the three.
Peter, James, and John.
They are there when Jairus’s daughter is raised. They are there at the Transfiguration. They are the ones Jesus brings farther with Him at Gethsemane.
It is always those three.
So naturally, I started asking questions.
Why them?
What did that say about them?
What did that say about Jesus?
And, because this pilgrimage through the apostles keeps turning the questions back toward me, what could I infer for my own life?
I wondered whether Peter, James, and John were somehow more ready than the other apostles. Maybe Jesus knew their hearts. Maybe He knew they could handle what He was going to ask of them later.
God never does anything without a purpose.
So there had to be a purpose.
At least that is where I started.
The picture is changing
I thought I was heading toward John next. I had already written about Peter, Andrew, and even the Sea of Galilee itself, so John seemed like the natural place to go.
But the moment I began reading again, the apostles kept stepping into the path – Peter first, then James, and then Andrew. Andrew had been there from the beginning, following John the Baptist and spending time with Jesus before bringing Simon to Him. I had discovered that earlier when I was writing about Andrew and Peter.
Simon had already received a new name. Their lives were already intertwined. And the more I separated the Gospel accounts – Matthew and Mark’s calling, Luke’s miraculous catch – the more I realized I could not look at John by himself yet.
I could not look at any of them by themselves. They were fishermen whose lives were already connected long before their missions began to take them in different directions.
Grab the dang rope
I began thinking about what kind of men these were. Fishermen are not standing around trying to make everything sound pretty.
If you are on a boat and something needs to happen, you do not say, “Would you please grab that lovely light-brown rope over there with the little rough pieces along the side?”
You say, “Grab the dang rope.”
I can hear them say “Ouch!” and then mutter some nonsense under their breath — not cursing, just that Bugs-Bunny jumble men make when something stings. They’d stick their finger in their mouth for a second, shake their hand out, and say, “That sucker hurt. Dang it. I’ll never do that again.”
There is work to do.
You have weather to watch. Nets to mend. Boats to maintain. Fish that may or may not cooperate. Long nights when you can work until exhaustion and still come home with nothing. This is the life of a fisherman.
Because of your environment, you need patience, and to move quickly when something changes. You need other people. You work as a team.
Gifts too large for one person
Realizing that fishermen had little time for eloquent prose, I began imagining the moment when Jesus asked Peter to put the nets out again after a long grueling night where they had caught NOTHING. But, he did.
And suddenly there are so many fish that the nets begin to break.
Peter cannot handle the gift alone. He has to call the other boat – the one that James and John were on to come to help.
In my notes I had written beside that scene that perhaps those fish were gifts. And if they are gifts, then the gifts that God gives us are too large for one person to carry.
That’s when I viewed the expression “fishers of men” differently.
Was Jesus already showing them something about their future mission before they even understood it? Was He showing me or you about our mission? Would the work He was giving them also be too large for one person? What about us?
Would John, James, Andrew and/or Peter sometimes work together and sometimes be sent in entirely different directions?
But I kept coming back to the three
I still could not let go of Peter, James, and John. Why were they present at those particular moments?
At first, I thought maybe Jesus was preparing them for their deaths. But that was wrong because Peter would eventually be martyred according to ancient Christian tradition. James would be killed by the sword under Herod Agrippa. John, however, would follow a very different path and, according to early tradition, live into old age.
So no. That did not fit. He was not preparing all three for the same death. I wondered whether their missions were going to be equally demanding, or whether Jesus was preparing them for different kinds of burdens.
They were all missionaries. All of the apostles. Every apostle had their mission. Andrew certainly did. And suddenly I realized I had created a problem that Scripture had not necessarily created.
Maybe the three were never actually “the three” in the way I had been thinking about them. Maybe it was something entirely different.
Maybe I was circling the wrong thing
The Bible does not record every moment Jesus had with every apostle. It doesn’t tell us every conversation He had with Andrew, or Philip, or Bartholomew, or even Thomas.
We do not know every time Jesus sat down beside one of them, corrected him, encouraged him, explained something privately, prayed with him, or simply walked beside him.
We know the moments that were preserved for us.
That is when I began to think maybe I had been circling the wrong thing. I had been circling the men when I should have been circling the events.
Why did it matter that Peter, James, and John were at Jairus’s house?
Why were they at the Transfiguration?
Why were they taken farther into Gethsemane?
Perhaps the question is not, “Why were these men more special?”
Perhaps the question is, “What was Jesus showing them and preparing them for in that moment?”
At Jairus’s house they witnessed life where everyone else believed death had won. At the Transfiguration they saw Christ’s glory — something many do not see. At Gethsemane they saw something entirely different: suffering and anguish.
A Jesus who told them to stay awake and pray. And they fell asleep. More than once. This made me realize that we can witness extraordinary things and still fail at something as ordinary as staying awake.
They could see Jesus transfigured and still misunderstand Him.
James and John could walk closely with Jesus and still want to call fire down upon a Samaritan village.
They could ask for places beside Him in His glory without really understanding what they were asking.
I used to look at that request as though it must have been pure ambition.
I am not so sure now.
Maybe it was naive.
Maybe they felt close enough to Jesus to ask.
Maybe they truly believed they could follow wherever He went without yet understanding what that would cost.
Haven’t I done that with God?
“Yes, Lord. I’ll follow you.”
And then discovered later what following actually meant.
Andrew changed the picture again
Then there is Mark 13, where Andrew reappears, but he appears with Peter, James, and John. Together they approach Jesus privately. All four of them. And that was when I could not say that the neat little circle was Jesus’ inner circle – His closest friends.
That nice, neat circle that I was trying to draw around Peter, James, and John was breaking apart. At that point, I realized that maybe I was looking at the picture completely wrong. Maybe Andrew had not been excluded. Nor any of the other apostles. Maybe they were on their own pilgrimages, each with their own course.
Maybe Jesus did not need to rotate apostles through every experience to prove that He loved them equally. Maybe different people needed different things at different moments because they were being prepared for different missions.
That is very different from favoritism.
It is formation.
What each of them showed me
Each apostle exhibits different qualities. When I see Peter, I think about trust. And then Andrew, who caused me to wonder whether I have mistaken visibility for importance. You see, God doesn’t see through our eyes. What we view as visibility may be just a different pilgrimage.
Then there are James and John, whom I am only beginning to see. I see the Samaritans, who have been having an ongoing feud with the Jews. Each side reminds me of the Hatfields and the McCoys, each thinking they are right and carrying their grudges through history. Which makes me wonder what grudges I carry.
Sometimes we fail to see the good another person is doing because our eyes are covered with a film. Or we can’t see that if we work together we can achieve more. What happens when that film comes off? Would I see the person differently?
Would I see Jesus?
And then there is Gethsemane for James, John and Peter. Jesus returns and finds them asleep. Each time He goes away and returns only to find them asleep again.
Every time I sin, I see His graces returning too.
Another day.
Another opportunity.
Another call to stay awake.
Our roads will not all look alike
I think this is where the fishermen have brought me. God calls each of us. But He does not call us all to exactly the same road.
Peter had Peter’s mission. Andrew had his. And James & John theirs.
Sometimes their pilgrimages overlapped. They fished together. They worked together. They learned beside one another. They witnessed things together.
And eventually their roads went in different directions.
There will be people who walk beside us and others will be people who stand with us in a single important moment and then follow a different road while we are on our pilgrimage. Sometimes God calls one person into something He does not ask of another.
That does not mean one is more loved. Or one pilgrimage is more important than another. It means God knows where He is leading each of us.
I originally set out looking for John. Instead, I found the fishermen.
And somewhere among the boats, the nets, the questions, the arguments, the miracles, the failures, and the roads that eventually separated, I began wondering about my own pilgrimage.
I began thinking about the other apostles and the pilgrimages each of them walked. Where is He leading me next?
What has He already asked me to leave behind? What nets am I still holding?
Leave a Reply