I Will Make You Fishers of Men - Not Your Mother's Sunday School Chorus

I will make you fishers of men,
fishers of men,
fishers of men,
I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.
If you follow me,
if you follow me.
I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.

Can I tell you something?  I hate children’s Sunday school songs.   I hate them.  I hate them all.  Even when I was a kid I hated them (but I couldn’t not sing them; my mother was the Sunday school teacher!)

This one I hated especially.  1) because we always had to do a cute little fishing motion with it – casting out our line from an imaginary rod and reel when, even then, I knew that 2) the disciples Jesus was calling in that story were fishing with large round nets.  And I hated it because 3) I don’t really like fishing.  I can appreciate it a bit more now, but as a boy I didn’t like it at all.  So, I had no real interest in being a “fisher of men.”

And the worst part about this cutesy Sunday school song is that totally misrepresents the meaning of Jesus’ call in Mark 1:14 - 20 “Come after me, and I shall make you become fishers of men.” 

Like every other Sunday school lesson for children – from Noah and the ark to Daniel and the Lion’s Den – this portion of the gospel account is horribly mutated from a startling and powerful story into a cute and neat and tidy story appropriate for tow-headed children drinking Kool-aid and eating cookies in the nursery.  We teach the kids that these stories are cute and safe and then we wonder why they reject these stories when they grow up and discover that they have no relevance to the world around them.

The image of fishing for humans doesn’t occur very often in the bible.  But in every instance where it does appear it is in the context of God’s judgment.  Consider these verses from the Old Testament:

Jeremiah 16:16 (NIV)
¹⁶ "But now I will send for many fishermen," declares the LORD, "and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks.

Ezekiel 12:13 (NIV)
¹³ I will spread my net for him, and he will be caught in my snare; I will bring him to Babylonia, the land of the Chaldeans, but he will not see it, and there he will die.

Ezekiel 29:4 (NIV)
⁴ But I will put hooks in your jaws and make the fish of your streams stick to your scales. I will pull you out from among your streams, with all the fish sticking to your scales.

Amos 4:2 (NIV)
² The Sovereign LORD has sworn by his holiness: "The time will surely come when you will be taken away with hooks, the last of you with fishhooks.

Habakkuk 1:14-17 (NIV)
¹⁴ You have made men like fish in the sea, like sea creatures that have no ruler.
¹⁵ The wicked foe pulls all of them up with hooks, he catches them in his net, he gathers them up in his dragnet; and so he rejoices and is glad.
¹⁶ Therefore he sacrifices to his net and burns incense to his dragnet, for by his net he lives in luxury and enjoys the choicest food.
¹⁷ Is he to keep on emptying his net, destroying nations without mercy?

And it’s the same in the New Testament.  Look at the parable of the dragnet:

Matthew 13:47-50 (NIV)
⁴⁷ "Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish.
⁴⁸ When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away.
⁴⁹ This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous
⁵⁰ and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

If we look at other writings from that era we find the same equation of fishers of men with the judgment of God. In the Dead Sea Scrolls we read “And thou has set me in a place of exile among many fishers that stretch out a net upon the face of the waters and [among] hunters [sent] against the sons of perversity.”  1QH 5:7 – 8

And if we cast our nets even further and look at the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas we find another parable:

“And he said ‘The Man is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish.  Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish.  He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without regret.” Gospel of Thomas, Logion 8

This call to be “fishers of men” was no cutesy kids’ chorus.  This was a call for the disciples of Jesus to become bearers of an urgent eschatological warning.  The Kingdom of God was breaking into the world and his followers were to confront people with its proclamation.  Repentance and belief would bring salvation, rejection and unbelief would bring judgment.  The people of God were being rescued - fished out - from the waters - which all through the scriptures are equated with the enemy of God, the underworld, sin and death.  

This is not what my mother taught us in Sunday school, but it probably should have been.