A group of fish, whether of one or several species, that stay together for social reasons are known as a shoal, while a group swimming in the same direction in a coordinated manner is a school. In common usage, these terms are used quite loosely.

In Damien Hirst’s Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (Left), fish of different species are swimming in a coordinated fashion ‘for the purpose of understanding’. They are thus, technically, ‘a school’.

Hirst uses repetition frequently in his works, often to indicate various sorts of conformity. The kind of understanding found through conformity is often that of a shared identity and sense of belonging, but the limits of such understanding can exclude what is novel, other, different, or imaginative.

At the point before they are called, the brothers encountered by Jesus in these passages (Matthew 4:12–22 and Mark 1:14–20) somewhat resemble the shoals or schools of fish that they were seeking to catch. As siblings working with their fathers, they are in groups where they, and those they know, have all done the same thing—fishing—for generations. As such, they are ‘all swimming in the same direction’.

The call of Jesus is a call to move in a different direction altogether, and in the pursuit of a new sort of understanding—although Jesus does helpfully make a connection for his hearers between his radical challenge to change and the life that these fishermen have lived up to that point. Jesus’s call involves leaving fathers, families, locality, boats, and nets in order to fish for people, not fish.

It is a call to a different sort of ‘school’; a different sort of pupillage—that of a disciple. How ready would we be to make such a change? How enmeshed are we in the established patterns of our lives? The speed with which Simon, Andrew, James, and John decide to follow Jesus suggests a readiness for a call beyond the conventional and familiar; from the known to the unknown.