Author’s Note
This isn’t a normal post for me. It’s not part of my Mark for the Margins project either. But it is about Mark.
On Sunday afternoons the last few weeks, people have been gathering in my front yard. I’m no longer a pastor, but some asked if we could still sit together and read Scripture—because, they said, I help them experience God. So I said yes. We chose Mark. It’s my favorite gospel, and this gathering gives me the nudge I need to start the commentary I’ve always wanted to write.
Mark is the earliest gospel, the shortest, and maybe the most neglected. Yet his brilliance shouldn’t be missed. He is a master of concise storytelling—Hemingway would be proud. And like Hemingway, Mark’s words need to be chewed slowly, even when the meal looks small.
As I’ve stepped away from the church, I’ve grown fond of telling people: Forget everything you think you know. Forget the theology and the preaching and the creeds and confessions. Read the text as it was meant to be heard—stripped of varnish, startling in its simplicity and force.
That’s what I’m trying here. These are my notes on the fourth Sunday in the front yard. I won’t read them verbatim, and I may not use half of them. But I figured I’d share them, because Mark is brilliant—and these four verses about Jesus calling the first disciples contain far more beauty than we usually allow ourselves to see.
This isn’t a sermon. It’s not even an exegetical essay. It’s just me—scribbling thoughts on a passage that everyone in church thinks they already know, but which, if we come to it fresh, still shimmers with wonder.
I’d love to hear what you think.
—Garrett
“Passing By the Sea”: Mark 1:16–20 as the Gospel in Miniature
Mark stages the revolution on a shoreline.
Not in a marble hall, not at a lectern, but where hands are wet and calloused, where night-shift work ends and mending begins. “As he was passing by the Sea of Galilee…” (1:16). That little phrase is Mark’s tempo: Jesus is already in motion. The kingdom doesn’t wait behind a pulpit; it brushes your sleeve while you’re on the clock, then dares you to step behind it.
The scene is spare: two pairs of brothers, two verbs of work, two summonses. Simon and Andrew are casting; James and John are mending. Casting is production. Mending is repair. Mark lets both live inside the call, because the gospel is never only “catching” nor only “fixing”—it gathers and it heals. (Elsewhere this mending verb, katartizō, means restore, set right, make whole—Gal 6:1; 1 Thess 3:10; 1 Pet 5:10.) The first disciples are taken right out of production and repair and told that their craft won’t be discarded; it will be repurposed.
And listen carefully to the line that rings like a tuning fork through the Gospel: “Follow me”—literally, “come behind me” (deute opisō mou)—“and I will make you become fishers of people” (1:17). Mark alone keeps that small extra pulse, genesthai—become. Discipleship in Mark is not an instant costume change; it’s formation, a long obedience under a torn sky.
Torn sky, torn curtain… and hands that mend
We’ve already seen it: when Jesus comes up from the water “he saw the heavens torn open” (1:10). Mark’s verb is violent and vivid (schizō). At the end, the temple curtain will be torn with the same verb (15:38). Between those rips—cosmic and cultic—Mark plants this shoreline where people are quietly mending. It is not accidental poetry. From the moment heaven is ripped, the world cannot go back to normal. The only faithful response is to repair the tear in human life so that what God pours through the breach won’t spill out of holes in our nets.
So when Jesus speaks, “Immediately”—Mark’s word—they left. But Mark’s vocabulary is charged here too: “they left (aphentes) the nets… they left their father.” The same root will name forgiveness (aphesis). In Mark, the first embodied act of discipleship is an act of release—a forgiving loosening of what once held identity and obligation. This isn’t contempt for families or work; it’s the mercy of putting every tie in its new place under the reign of God. (Mark will return to this reordering with bracing clarity—3:31–35; 10:28–31.)
Why fishermen?
Because Galilee’s shoreline sits inside the machinery of a petty empire. Fishing in Herod Antipas’ world was part of a leased-and-taxed economy: boats, nets, tolls, buyers, salting and shipping hubs. Notice Mark’s detail: Zebedee has hired hands (misthōtoi). This is not a romantic shack by a lake; it’s a small firm inside an extractive system. When Jesus calls, he is not pulling hobbyists from a dock; he is reclaiming skilled labor from an economy that treats bodies like throughput. Their competence is kept; their allegiance changes.
Because Israel’s prophets already played with this image. “I am sending for many fishers” (Jer 16:16): exposure, judgment, gathering. Amos pictures hooks in a day of reckoning (4:2). Habakkuk laments empires that net nations like fish (1:14–17). And then Ezekiel imagines fishers standing where the river of life heals the world (47:10). Set that whole chord ringing and “fishers of people” becomes the work of exposing what devours, rescuing what’s drowning, and standing where life returns. (Luke once makes it explicit: “you will catch alive,” zōgreō.) Mark’s shore is a prophetic workshop.
Because the Sea in Mark is not backdrop but actor. Mark deliberately calls a lake a sea (thalassa), letting Israel’s ancient chaos-mythos seep into the narrative. This sea will roil, swallow, fall silent at a word, cough up a legion of demons, and become a border to cross again and again. “Let us go across to the other side” (4:35) will send Jesus into Gentile tombs and pig fields (ch. 5), then back to feed multitudes on both shores (ch. 6–8). To call fishers first is to draft people who know the sea’s temper, who work on thresholds, who can read the wind on water and the tug on a line. They will be asked to cross with him.
The call’s grammar: posture, process, kairos
“Come behind me.” Discipleship is positional before it is propositional. To be “behind” Jesus is to move in his wake, to let his path set your path. Watch how Mark reuses the phrase later: when Peter tries to steer the movement away from the cross, Jesus snaps, “Get behind me, Satan!” (8:33). The place of a disciple is behind, not in front. And then Mark opens the summons to all: “If any want to come behind me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me” (8:34). The shoreline call was not an elite invitation; it was a template for a crowd.
“I will make you become.” That extra verb is the truth about every chapter that follows. The Twelve misunderstand, argue about status, scatter. They are being made. Even at the end, the “young man in white” does not scold; he sends: “Tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him” (16:7). Peter’s collapse is not the last word because Jesus is still making them become. Mark ends with an open door (16:8). The making continues on the shore where it began.
“Immediately.” You’ve been watching this word. Don’t confuse it with hurry. In Mark it signals kairos—the fitness of the moment under a torn sky. The time is fulfilled; the reign of God has come near (1:15); the act that answers that reality is simple: release and move.
“Passing by”: the quiet theophany
Mark is subtle with divinity. He avoids long didactic speeches and lets actions and echoes do the work. “As he was passing by” (paragōn) when he calls at the shore (1:16), passing by when he calls Levi at the toll booth (2:14), and—most startling—“he intended to pass by them” on the water in the night (6:48). That last phrase is not indifference; it’s a theophany. In Scripture, God “passes by” Moses in glory (Exod 33–34) and Job feels the Holy One “pass by” (Job 9:11). Mark whispers: the One who called you in the daylight of work is the same One who strides atop chaos at night. The call at the shore is already a brush with the unsayable.
A new kinship, a new economy
“They left their father Zebedee with the hired hands.” Mark’s compassion is tucked in the syntax: the old household still has support; the new household is being born. Soon Jesus will stare at a room where his mother and brothers wait outside and say, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my sister and brother and mother” (3:34–35). Kinship expands. And to those who gasp at the cost, he promises a hundredfold of houses and relatives and fields—with persecutions—and life of the age (10:29–31). The church that tries to catch without learning to mend will rip people apart and call it zeal. The church that learns to mend will find nets strong enough to hold enemies as future kin.
Why did they rise so readily?
Because the torn sky hadn’t resealed. Because the voice over the Jordan—“Beloved”—echoed into their ordinary and unhooked them. Because leaving and forgiving are kin, and the first grace they received was the permission to loosen what the empire told them was non-negotiable. Because some summonses aren’t persuasive; they are true, and the body knows it. Mark will not flatter us with a psychology of their decision. He writes like this on purpose: the call is a rupture—and it happens while you’re mid-task.
No, Mark doesn’t keep the “let me first go and bury my father” excuses (you’re remembering Matthew 8:21–22/Luke 9:59–60). Mark tightens the lens differently: he shows us immediacy by narrating it—Jesus passes by and calls; they go—then he keeps pressing until the cost lands (the rich man, 10:17–31). The point holds: the reign of God does not wait for tidy transitions. It rearranges households, calendars, and payrolls now.
What makes this “good news”?
Because it is release before it is requirement. “Leave” is the grammar of forgiveness. You are loosed from the nets that turn you into a cog, and from the stories that say your worth equals your output. You can set something down.
Because it is repair before it is recruitment. To be a fisher of people in Mark is to stand where waters of death have ruled and to become a person who gathers for life and mends what is torn. Evangelism without repair is just acquisition. The kingdom will not bless that.
Because it is process before it is performance. “I will make you become.” The one who calls keeps working you like a knotted line—loosening, tightening, teaching your hands new movements. Failure is not a dead end here; it’s a place where the Caller says, “and Peter.”
Because it is movement before it is monument. The story begins in Galilee, not Jerusalem; it ends with a promise to meet again in Galilee (16:7). The gospel’s geography is a map of crossings. If your faith never crosses over to the “other side,” you might be worshiping your own shore.
Because it is truth before it is safe. The Sea will rage. Pigs will drown. Demons will name what no one wants named. The “little apocalypse” will strip away religious optimism (ch. 13). But in the swirl, the one who passes by on the water will say, “Take heart; i am; do not fear” (6:50). And then he will climb into the boat.
For the church that forgot how to mend
If we chase “catch” without “mend,” we tear people to shreds and call it mission. If we preach “believe” without release, we swap one net for another. If we do “family values” without reconfigured kinship, we make idols of households and bar the door to those Jesus is already feeding on the other shore. Mark will have none of it. He gives us a Jesus who starts at the threshold where John baptized, is driven into wilderness, announces the fit time, and interrupts working people with a future: walk behind me; i will make you become.
The torn sky is still open. The curtain is still ripped. The Sea still heaves and, by a word, still falls calm. Somewhere a pair of hands is casting, another pair mending. Somewhere Jesus is passing by—by a workbench, a spreadsheet, a kitchen sink, a hospital bed, a toll booth—and saying the same thing he said then, with the same strange authority: come behind me.
And—this is Mark’s final, mischievous mercy—if you drop the net and later panic and deny you ever knew him, there is a sentence waiting on a shoreline sunrise at the end of the world that begins, “Tell his disciples and Peter…” The making is not finished. The crossing is not over. The nets can still be mended. The catch will live.
Also “I am no longer a pastor” … I disagree. You have a beautiful pastor’s heart and so long as you are following Christ you will continue to partner in the shepherding of his flock.
I had no idea how stunning Mark is. Thank you for this insightful overview of his gospel. The sea is not just a backdrop. Wow. Jesus is already in motion and says get behind me. The call to action in our everyday lives is exactly what we need. The “Good news” you laid out is such good news. He frees us from all the ties we have and repurposes our skill set for his kingdom here and now. Our first pancake church or more like theology and tea happened today and we talked about the only thing Jesus actually tells us to do is Follow me. Yes it will be hard, yes we might die for it, yes it could lead us into places we never imagined and cross borders of all kinds. He might lead us nearer or neighbor who has specialized needs. But we just have to follow him. And unlearn all the other things we’ve been taught.