What Jesus Meant by “Fish for People”

I've been reading an advanced copy of Diana Butler Bass' upcoming book, A Beautiful Year (accompanying podcast episode coming soon!). In it, she offers an insight into first-century fishing that I hadn't heard before.

In ancient Rome, you didn’t work for yourself. You didn’t scroll through LinkedIn profiles or dream about your “career path.” You worked for Caesar. Your entire family was locked into a system of obligations that engulfed your parents, your kids, your neighbors, even your friends. Everyone was bound up in a massive economic hierarchy that took the work of your hands and handed it to the wealthy elite. You got just enough back to survive, but not enough to thrive.

So when we meet Simon and Andrew casting their nets in Galilee, we shouldn’t picture rugged entrepreneurs running a quaint family business. They weren’t middle-class. They weren’t even what we think of as working class. Most likely, they were peasants barely surviving at the bottom rung of an abusive system. And they knew it. They swam in a sea of injustice, resenting Rome’s stranglehold on their land, their waters, and their very lives, which is why Jesus’ invitation to them is so subversive.

“Follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people!” (Mark 1:17, NLT)

And immediately they drop their nets and follow.

We tend to read this as Jesus asking them to give up their cozy lifestyle to suffer for God. Instead, He was inviting them out of misery into a whole new way of living. He was offering them their truest vocation: to stop fishing for Caesar and start fishing for God.

When we hear “fish for people,” many of us imagine evangelism campaigns, altar calls, passing out tracts to a crowd, or forced conversations of untold awkwardness ("Let's talk about if you died tonight..."). But that wasn’t the framework for Simon and Andrew. In fact, Jesus’ phrase echoed the prophets who used fishing as a metaphor of judgment, not conversion.

• Amos warned the rich oppressors: “The time will come when you will be led away with hooks in your noses. Every last one of you will be dragged away like a fish on a hook!” (Amos 4:2)
• Ezekiel thundered against Egypt’s elite: “I will put hooks in your jaws and drag you out on the land with fish sticking to your scales.” (Ezekiel 29:4)
• Ezekiel also says of Pharaoh himself: "Therefore, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will send many people to catch you in my net and haul you out of the water." (Ezekiel 32:3)
• Jeremiah uses the fishing image simultaneously with a hunting metaphor: "'But now I am sending for many fishermen who will catch them,' says the Lord. 'I am sending for hunters who will hunt them down in the mountains, hills, and caves.'" (Jeremiah 16:16)

That's a very different kind of fishing than we tend to think about, and it certainly isn't the peaceful fishing I grew up around. This feels more like Ahab raging against his white whale: "...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." But where Ahab’s lines were fueled by vengeance, Jesus’ were fueled by justice.

Diana Butler Bass summarizes it like this:

Fishing was not about converting people to bring them to church. It was not about evangelizing the "heathen." For the prophets, fishing was a radical snaring of the wicked to set the world aright. Jesus invited the peasant fishermen to fish for people-to "hook" Caesar's elite and beach the empire. He called them to participate in this prophetic work in the world. Jesus bid them to angle for justice.

I don't know about you, but it sure seems like we could use some radical snaring of the wicked right about now. So when Jesus tells Simon and Andrew, “I’ll make you fish for people,” he’s inviting them to join a prophetic conspiracy. It’s not a slogan for Sunday school. It’s a rallying cry for justice.

These fishermen had been entangled in Roman fishing lines their whole lives. Their labor, their dignity, and their waters were all stolen for Caesar’s empire. So when Jesus called them, it wasn’t a hard choice. Dropping Caesar’s nets to pick up the hooks of God was probably the easiest decision they had ever made.

They were no longer pawns in an exploitative system. They were participants in an alternative community.

That’s the good news for anyone interested in following Jesus. You don’t have to be part of Caesar’s empire anymore. You can join God in building something new. As theologian Walter Brueggemann noted, "It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order."

If you're interested in bringing new realities to expression, I'd suggest we start with the question: Who benefits?

Who benefits from our work, or from how we use our voice (or how we stay silent), or from what we buy, or from the company we keep? If the exploitative system is benefiting in each area, then we are likely missing out on numerous opportunities right in front of us. Instead, we can start building something new by focusing on how to include a wider net of people in benefiting from our lives.

The empires of our day operate with the same logic as Rome: extract everything from the many to enrich the few. They normalize violence, disguise exploitation as “freedom,” and tell us there’s no alternative.

But Jesus still walks along the shoreline. Still calling and still inviting us to fish for justice. Because following Jesus has never been about escaping this world. It’s about joining God’s revolution to set it right.

Our goal isn't to recruit for religion but to recover our shared humanity.

Photo by Jakub Kapusnak on Unsplash

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