“From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” (Matthew 4:17-20)
We’re at the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, and, as in the other Gospels, no sooner has Jesus proclaimed His message than He starts a recruitment program, beginning with Simon (Peter) and his brother, Andrew.
This appears to be the first time Peter and Andrew have met Jesus, yet as soon as He calls them, they ‘leave their nets and follow Him.” And they don’t just follow Him to the other end of the beach. These are their first steps on a long and arduous journey that (according to legend) will lead to both of them to painful and ignominious deaths! The obvious question is, why did they do it?
Of course, neither of them knew that they were stepping out on a path towards crucifixion, but they did know they were walking out on their jobs and their families, so why? The answer is (if I might use Robert Pape’s riff on James Carville’s famous slogan of 1992), “It’s the Occupation, stupid!”
Living as a Jew in first-century Judea was remarkably similar to living as a Palestinian in the same area today. First-century Jews had to deal with the Roman Occupation of Israel in the same way Palestinian people today have to deal with the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. In both cases we’re dealing with a brutal military occupation where the subject people are taxed, abused, and killed with impunity.
Just as every Palestinian growing up in Occupied Palestine today prays for the end of the occupation and yearns for independence, so the Jews of the first century dreamt of a world where there was no Rome – no soldiers on the streets, no tax officials taking their money, and no Empire murdering and abusing their people!
If we were living in Gaza today, and we’d seen so many friends and family killed by the foreign occupying forces, and a young charismatic preacher came up to us and said, “Things are about to change. God is about to act. “Follow me!” I reckon a lot of us would also drop whatever we were doing and say, “Why not?”
They dropped their nets and followed Jesus because they thought they were joining the rebellion. Whenever you’re reading the Gospels, keep the Occupation in mind as an interpretative key for understanding first-century Judea. “It’s the Occupation, stupid.” The point is not that any of us are really stupid, but that a lot of the New Testament doesn’t make sense until we factor in the Roman Occupation as the basic preoccupation of every character in the Gospel drama.
Jesus has proclaimed, “The Kingdom of Heaven has come near” or “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” and whatever else that means, what the people of first-century Judea heard was the end of the Roman Occupation.
“Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” (Matthew 4:17-20) because they thought they were joining the rebellion, and this is confirmed, I think, by the only other recorded words Jesus spoke to those men, apart from “follow me” – namely, “I will make you fishers of people.” (Matthew 4:20)
When I was a kid at Sunday School, we’d sing a song about this verse, and it had actions. We’d sing “I will make you fishers of men” repeatedly, and we’d be symbolically casting a fishing line and reeling it in.
I think our understanding was that we were going to hook in more members for Sunday School. Our hearts were in the right place, but the problem with the fishing analogy is that when you pull in a fish, you don’t normally make friends with it. You kill it and eat it. Moreover, if Jesus was drawing on imagery from the Torah (as He always did), the metaphor of ‘fishing’ in the Hebrew Scriptures was always an image of judgement:
- In Jeremiah 16:16, God sends “many fishermen” to catch Israel as part of a programme of divine judgement.
- In Ezekiel 29:4, Pharaoh is hooked like a fish and hauled in for destruction.
- In Amos 4:2: the prophet warns that the wealthy women of Samaria will be dragged away with fishhooks
The fishing metaphor is generally one implying the conquest and humiliation of your enemies, and I have little doubt that, whatever Jesus might have meant by the metaphor, this is what the boys in the boat would have heard.
Peter and Andrew followed Jesus because they thought they were joining the resistance, and yet they stuck with Jesus to the bitter end! Moreover, I suspect the other ten disciples all signed up for the same reason, and all but one of them stuck it out to the bitter end too (though Judas, of course, had his own bitter end).
Now, I appreciate that the reason you stay in a relationship isn’t necessarily the same as the reason you get into it in the first place. Indeed, any of us who have been in a long-term relationship know that the rationale of the relationship changes over time. Even so, if the disciples joined up to become freedom fighters, why did all but one of them stick with Jesus even after He was humiliated, tortured, and killed?
They thought they were joining a rebellion, and I think they stuck it out because they realised over time that they had joined the rebellion. They just hadn’t realised that Jesus’ rebellion reached far beyond Rome and that it confronted every empire, every domination system, and every power that grinds human beings into the dust.
They didn’t realise when they set out that their revolution would be fought with the weapons of forgiveness and compassion, and that victory would come, not through killing, but through a cross. This is still the rebellion Jesus calls us into today— a resistance that topples empires by transforming hearts, that breaks the cycle of hatred by absorbing it, and that builds a new world with the only weapons strong enough to really change things: truth, mercy, courage, and love.
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter—January 23rd, 2026
