Early in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus walks along the Sea of Galilee and sees two brothers casting a net. His words to them are short:
“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” (Matthew 4:19, NIV)
We usually picture what happens next as a clean break. Simon and Andrew drop the nets, walk away from the boats and never look back. Sermons on this passage often ask what we are willing to leave behind, and it is a fair question. Some people really are called to sell up, pack a barrel and go.
But read on a little, into Mark’s account of the same days, and something quieter appears. After teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, Jesus goes “into the house of Simon and Andrew” (Mark 1:29). Simon’s mother-in-law is lying in bed with a fever. Jesus takes her by the hand and lifts her up, and she begins to serve them. By evening, Mark says, the whole city was gathered together at the door.
The nets were left. The house was not. It became something else.
A fisherman’s house with the door propped open
It is worth imagining that house for a moment. A working family’s home near the water. Probably crowded: two brothers, a wife, a mother-in-law, perhaps children. The smell of fish and smoke. Tools by the wall. Nothing about it was designed for ministry. It was simply where Simon lived.
Yet this ordinary address became the place where a sick woman was raised up, where a town brought its sick and troubled to be healed, where Jesus seems to have stayed when he was in Capernaum. The call to fish for people did not only send Simon outward. It also turned his home inside out.
For many of us, that is the more realistic picture of discipleship. We will not all board a plane. Most of us will go on paying the same mortgage or rent, living on the same road, sitting at the same kitchen table for years. The question is whether that table, that verandah, that front gate can become part of how we follow Jesus rather than a private space we retreat to after following him elsewhere.
What a “fishing” home might look like
It does not require a big house or a spotless one. Simon’s certainly was not. Think instead of small, concrete things:
- A widow down the road who comes for Sunday dinner once a month and stays until the dishes are done.
- The teenager whose own home is tense, who knows your gate is one he can knock on to do homework in peace.
- A newly arrived family in the flats, or a student from overseas, invited in before they have made a single friend.
- A living room that hosts a small Bible study where neighbours who would never walk into a church feel able to ask questions.
- A spare corner, a folding bed, a plate kept warm.
Consider a couple who spent years apologising for their small house. They never had people over because there was nowhere to sit. Eventually they bought six plastic chairs, strung a light along the verandah and began inviting the people they saw at the bus stop every morning. The house did not grow. What happened on it did.
Not instead of the nations, but alongside
None of this shrinks the scale of Jesus’ call. He did send his followers to the ends of the earth, and some are still being sent. Homes that are open locally are often the same homes that pray for, give to and send out people who go far away. A family that learns to welcome the stranger at its own gate will find it easier to care about strangers on the other side of the world.
And those of us from the Caribbean and its diaspora already know something about this. Our families are spread across Kingston and Brooklyn, Toronto and Birmingham. The house in the country and the flat abroad are linked by phone calls, barrels and prayers. Each one can be a Capernaum house: a place where Jesus is welcome and where people are brought to him.
Leaving the nets, keeping the key
What Simon truly left behind was not his house but his control of it. From that day it was no longer only his. It belonged to whatever Jesus wanted to do there, including interruptions, crowds at the door at sunset and a guest who might stay for weeks.
That may be the harder surrender for homeowners. We have worked so long for our own four walls that it can feel risky to let anyone else’s needs in. Yet the house that is held with an open hand is often the one that ends up fullest.
For reflection
- Who lives within walking distance of your home that you have never invited in?
- What is one small change that would make your home easier to open to others: a few chairs, a regular meal, a spare key for a neighbour?
A prayer
Lord Jesus, you called Simon from his nets and then walked into his house. Walk into ours. Take whatever we have, small or large, tidy or not, and use it to bring people to you. Give us courage to open the door, and patience with the interruptions that follow. Amen.
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