The saying looks to the future. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the ancestors of Israel, have risen from the dead. Obviously they are only named as important representatives of the people of God. With them all the righteous of Israel have risen. The reign of God is coming to its fulfillment, portrayed in the image of the eschatological meal taken from Isaiah 25:6-8. The meal is here an image of fullness, of festival, of a fulfilled life that will never again be brought to an end. In this situation, then, the “many” come from the rising and the setting, that is, from the east and from the west.
The “many” in the saying are contrasted with Jesus’ Jewish audience. So he is speaking of the Gentiles. “Many” is a Semitic formulation and means a great, incalculable number. An unimaginable number of Gentiles are participating in the banquet of fulfillment. But the Israel that rejects Jesus will not be present, of all things, at this eternal banquet for whom everyone hopes. The unbelieving part of Israel will be thrown out into the uttermost darkness.
We can scarcely imagine a greater provocation. But that very provocation shows that Jesus was concerned first and foremost about the eschatological gathering of Israel. Matthew 8:11-12 is a last attempt by Jesus, carried to the limits, to shake up his audience and achieve their repentance after all.
So the word of warning is directed at Israel. Its real theme is not the fate of the Gentiles, but it makes clear, indirectly, how Jesus thought: He knows the vision of the pilgrimage of the nations; he expects the coming of the Gentiles to Zion. Indeed, he presumes salvation for the Gentiles as a matter of course.
Chapter 5
The Call to Discipleship
How do the gospels picture the beginning of Jesus’ work? Often the beginning discloses everything that will come after. Is the first thing a sermon that summarizes what Jesus wanted? Or a healing story? Or a symbolic action like that in the temple? Many things would be possible.
In the Gospel of Mark the first concrete narrative in Jesus’ public appearance describes how he calls Simon Peter, his brother Andrew, and the sons of Zebedee, James and John, to follow him (Mark 1:16-20). The Gospel of Matthew’s arrangement corresponds (Matt 4:18-22). But even the Gospel of John begins Jesus’ work with the calling of disciples: here it is Andrew, Simon Peter, Philip, and Nathanael (John 1:35-51). However, the first callings are told differently in the Fourth Gospel from what we read in Mark and Matthew.
This placement at the beginning of Jesus’ work need not mean much for the historical question. The fact that three evangelists begin Jesus’ activity in just this way could simply be a question of compositional technique. After all, Luke did it differently. In his account Jesus begins his public appearance by serving as lector and preacher in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30). One could also argue that the disciples are almost always thought of as present in the gospel narratives. Quite often they even appear as actors. So they have to be introduced at the very beginning of the narrative sequence.
All that is worth considering. But it may be that Mark, Matthew, and John did hang on to something crucial. Maybe they wanted to say that there was no activity of Jesus in Israel without a call to discipleship. In fact, discipleship is something fundamental. Without it there would be no Gospel, no gathering of Israel, and no church. It is as elementary as the proclamation of the reign of God, Jesus’ preaching, and his healing miracles. The gospels show that as clearly as possible. But what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? That is the subject of this chapter.1
Discipleship Is Concrete
Here again we begin with a philological fact: “follow” (following, etc.) appears in the gospels some eighty times, mainly in a theological sense, but never as a noun, “followership” or “discipleship” (akolouthēsis). It is always in verb form (akolouthein). That is: there is no such thing in the gospels as abstract discipleship. It is not an idea or a purely inward disposition; it exists only as a concrete, visible, tangible event.
Accordingly, we must imagine Jesus’ followers’ “discipleship” quite concretely, as “walking behind.” If you visit the Near East you can still see it: an Arab woman walks behind her husband, not alongside him. The son follows the father. The bride follows her bridegroom, the employee walks behind his employer, the student behind her teacher. And so it was, of course, in Jesus’ time also. A series of texts from the later rabbinic tradition shows that the students of the teachers of the Law walked behind their teacher, their rabbi, keeping a respectful distance. They followed him. That was simply a matter of proper deportment.
Given all that, we could suppose that the historical model for the disciples’ following was the rabbinic relationship of teacher and student—especially since the word “disciple” is based on the Greek word mathetēs, and mathetēs means nothing but student. The German word “Jünger” [disciple] rests on late Latin junior, which at the time, differently from today, also meant “student” or “pupil” or “learner.”2
The Rabbis and Their Students
Thus—according to the gospels—Jesus called “students” to follow him. Were the students he gathered around him, then, comparable to the rabbis’ students of the Law? As likely as this conclusion seems, it is inaccurate for three reasons:
First: the proper term for a rabbinic student’s entry into the Jewish house of study was not “following this or that rabbi,” but “studying (or learning) Torah.” So it is said of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa (first c. CE) that he went to ’Arab (in upper Galilee) “to study Torah with Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai.”3 This is a stereotypical formula in rabbinic texts, and that in itself is remarkable. Mark says of Peter and Andrew not that “they came to Nazareth to study Torah with Jesus,” but “As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Mark 1:16-18).
So Simon and the others do not follow Jesus in order to learn Torah but to become fishers of people with Jesus. Discipleship, following Jesus, is not their idea, their plan, their project; they are called, against their accustomed way of life, against their life-project, probably even against their idea of what a devout life should be. This was not their own will but that of a stranger—and yet they recognized, in that stranger’s will, the will of God.
Jesus calls to discipleship. There is not a single story in the rabbinic traditions in which a rabbi called a student to follow him. The reason is very simple: a rabbinic student seeks his or her own teacher. We have a lovely saying by the scribe Yehoshua ben Perachia (first c. BCE): “Make for yourself a rabbi, acquire for yourself a friend; and judge every person in their favor.”4 Occasionally it is even recommended that the talmid, the scribal student, should change teachers in order to get to know other interpretations of Torah. This was quite consistent with the rabbinic system of teaching and thought. It is the principle of the Talmud that different opinions or traditions be set alongside one another. Such a thing is foreign to the New Testament. And change teachers? That would have been unthinkable where Jesus was concerned.
A second difference: It was repeatedly emphasized to rabbinic students that they were to “serve” their teacher. The rabbinic tradition lists forty-eight things through which knowledge of Torah is to be acquired. Besides study, careful listening, intelligence, fear of God, joy, and purity of heart, the list also includes “serving the wise.” This “serving” means that the student performs for the teacher all the services that would otherwise be done by a servant or a slave. Thus he washes the rabbi’s feet, serves at and clears the table, cleans the house and the courtyard, goes to the market and purchases necessities. Serving the teacher is an essential part of studying Torah. But with Jesus things were different, in a way that was unheard of in his time. The evangelist Mark repeats these words of his: “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). In its Lukan variant the saying is: “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).