Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

But the narrative shows us still more, namely, the importance of the nonprofessional. Elisha probably never would have considered, by himself, that he might become a prophet. He had quite different things in view: his parents’ farming operation, commerce, family. Probably he was called for that very reason. God does not just need ordained ministers; God also needs religious nonprofessionals experienced in their trades. God needs people who are able to plow with twelve span of oxen or to handle angle irons and levels and plumblines—and who then apply the level and the plumbline also to the condition of the people of God. That is the way it is supposed to be with many others as well, including Jesus and the fisherfolk he called to be his disciples, in the course of salvation history.

This text from the Elijah-Elisha narrative cycle in the books of Kings brings us closest to the content of Jesus’ call to discipleship. There is much in favor of the idea that here, as in other cases,⁹ Jesus made direct reference to his Bible. He must have had a very personal access to Torah and the prophets. That does not mean that there could not also have been other elements from the history of the tradition in play. But it is significant that the story of the calling of Elisha plays virtually no role in the rabbinic tradition.¹⁰

The Meaning of Discipleship

This chapter has been an attempt to work out the contours of discipleship of Jesus in contrast to the rabbinic teacher-student relationship and the Jewish revolutionary movements. Of course, in the process we have already seen some hints at why Jesus called disciples in the first place. But now, at the end of the chapter, we need to ask the question again, and bluntly.

Obviously Jesus did not gather disciples around him because he needed a kind of “court.” It would also be perverse to suppose that he only gathered disciples at the point when resistance began to stiffen against him. The notion here would be that in such a situation he withdrew to a protected circle of likeminded people in order to be able to communicate his idea of the reign of God at least to them.

Anyone who wants to construct the scene this way has the whole breadth of the gospels to contend with. The calling of disciples who would leave everything behind and follow Jesus was not an emergency measure, a retreat, a substitute for action. For Jesus it was, from the very beginning, part of the proclamation of the reign of God.

This is clear from the mission of the disciples mentioned above. There can be no doubt of that historically. It is true that the oral material that is part of the story of the disciples’ mission played an important role for the early Christian itinerant missionaries after Easter. It has been handed down and updated in terms of their mission—for example, in the prohibition of transferring from one house to another (Luke 10:7). But the existence of the later itinerant missionaries in itself confirms that Jesus had already sent out disciples.

And why did he send them? His mission discourse says it as clearly as possible: the disciples are to proclaim the reign of God, heal, and expel demons.¹¹ That is, they are to do exactly what Jesus does. They share his fate, his duties, his joys and sorrows. They have been taken into service; they are laborers for the reign of God. This is shown very clearly in a saying placed at the beginning of the mission discourse in the Sayings Source: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt 9:37-38; Luke 10:2). In biblical language the harvest, when used as an image, almost always means the judgment at the end of time.¹² The metaphor “harvest” is thus eschatologically colored throughout the Bible. The same is true of the saying about the plentiful harvest just quoted. It means to say that the “last times” are now here. The reign of God is dawning and the gathering of Israel for the reign of God is beginning. “The fields are ripe for harvesting,” the Gospel of John would later say (John 4:35).