The Calling of the 12

I am currently reading through the gospel of Luke, and studying Hebrews. As I was reading the sixth chapter of Luke, I noticed something that caught my attention. In my ESV bible Luke 6:12-16 has a heading that reads "The Twelve Apostles." The intersting part comes in verse 13. "And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles."

Two thoughts stem from this:
What was this like for the disciples?
How long had the disciples known Jesus before he called them?

1. I wonder if it was like at recess when everyone would line up, and the captains of the team would pick their players. No one wanted to be the last one picked. I wonder if the disciples were standing in line with their heads down afraid to make eye contact with their master out of fear that he would not pick them. I highly doubt it, but this funny picture came to my head when I first read this. I am sure he did it more personally than that. This passage does not allude to how he did it, this passage just says that he did do it. One would have to interpret the words "called" and "chose" to get a better understanding of how Jesus did this.

2. It seems that the disciples were with Jesus for some time before he "promoted" them to apostles. Another interesting thing is that Jesus had more than 12 disciples. I wonder how many he had. I know that later in Luke he sends out 72 to preach the kingdom of God. This causes me to think that Jesus had more disciples than these 72 even because he sends out the 72 later in his ministry. Then in John 6 many of Jesus' "disciples" leave after his teaching on the Bread of Life. It is hard to say how many disciples Jesus had because some of the gospels are chronological while others are building up to a certain conclusion. It would take a deeper study than I am giving here.

Anyway, I have always heard that Jesus came up to fisherman and asked them to follow him and they immediately follow without any questions asked. As if they just knew that Jesus was the Christ, maybe they did (John 1:41). I have always heard this and assumed that the fisherman had never met Jesus before. They just followed when a teacher would say follow because they were previously rejected and would be desperate to follow anyone who asked. While this may be along the lines of the truth, I believe it is blown a little out of proportion. Reading the gospels and comparing them leads me to believe that Jesus was teaching and preaching before he called his disciples (Matthew 4:12-17, Mark 4:14-15, Luke 4:14-44) They had a chance to evaluate His ministry and see that He was doing and saying great things. I would even speculate and say that they had met and maybe even talked with Jesus before he came to them when they were in their boat. I am not sure though.

I am not sure of my point on this, but it was an interesting speculation to me. I do believe that it took a while for the disciples to know who the Messiah really was, perhaps even after Jesus died did they finally understand. It is one thing to know that Jesus is the Messiah and another to know what that implies (they believed that the Messiah would stop the oppression of the Romans and become a prominent leader on earth, WRONG!) Maybe God doesn't expect us to follow blindly, but rather He wants us to trust and obey who He is and the more we know about who God is, the more responsibility we have to respond to this knowledge. I am pretty sure that is in the Bible somewhere :)

One Love