The World Jesus Called “Follow Me” Into
Throughout Part 2 of this series, we explored the feedback loop that influences our personal desire. Now, we start exploring how our social environments shape desire. How many of these sayings and phrases have you heard or perhaps used yourself:
- Birds of a feather flock together.
- You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
- Peer pressure.
- Keeping up with the Joneses.
- One bad apple spoils the bunch.
- It’s catching.
- Guilt by association.
- The company you keep.
- Mob mentality.
Choosing Contagion
For the next article, and carrying into Part 3 of this project, I here introduce the word “contagion” because it’s a powerful word that implies infection or catching something from someone else. When it comes to values, behaviours and attitudes; especially for kids, we often say they’re “caught, not taught.” Similarly we might say, “faith is caught, not taught.” I’m sure there are times you’ve said, “actions speak louder than words.”
Ultimately, all this illustrates that while information and knowledge obviously play a fundamental role in shaping us, social influences also have an incredible impact in fashioning faith and our lives in general. That’s the emphasis we explore in part 3 of The Story of Desire series. Your desire is caught, but it’s also taught in the sense that your social environments play a profound role in shaping desire; learning what feels safe, secure, stable, familiar, predictable and helps you make sense of the world around you.
400 Years of Shape Shifting
Next, I point us back to a little under 2000 years ago when Jesus called his first disciples. He spoke to a generation already shaped by powerful social contagions – ways of seeing the world that felt like common sense because they were shared, rehearsed, and reinforced by everyday life patterns. About 10 generations passed between Malachi to Matthew without a single sound of the prophetic voice. However, prophetic silence wasn’t social silence!
Instead, the pressures of imperial rule, and the survival instincts of an oppressed people quietly caught and taught them what felt reasonable, desirable, and necessary. When Jesus announces the nearness of God’s kingdom, He isn’t offering new information; He’s pressing back against deeply socialized patterns of desire. Let’s describe three.
Economic Contagion – Scarcity and Security
First, the economy. Contrary to what many may think, the fishermen Jesus calls, aren’t the poorest of the poor. They’re small-scale entrepreneurs operating within a Roman-controlled fishing economy, dependent on permits, taxes, and distribution networks. Their world: shaped by extraction and insecurity. Daily bread required compliance with systems that quietly trained people to equate security with economic survival. Scarcity wasn’t merely material; it was a matter of the mind. It was easy to assume that God’s faithfulness must look better than the conditions under which the people lived. Surely God wants His people to prosper. Yet, Jesus’ invitation to leave nets and follow him didn’t just confront making a living, but to step away from a socially shared story about where provision and safety are found.
Political Contagion – Pressure and the Longing for Force
Secondly, this generation lived in a pressure cooker of imperial domination. Roman occupation didn’t just impose laws; it shaped desire. Some learned accommodation. Others rehearsed dreams of revolt. The presence of Zealot movements reveals how deeply the desire for decisive, forceful deliverance had taken root. Even when people rejected violent means, imagining rescue was often still political in shape – a Messiah would confront Rome on Rome’s terms. However, Jesus refused to fit this profile of saviour. This wasn’t only a theological challenge; it was a social disruption of what deliverance had come to feel like.
Educational Contagion – Formed by the Law but Narrowed in Imagination
Thirdly, the disciples weren’t scholars of the law. They carried faith fashioned in ordinary synagogue service – deeply shaped by Scripture, yet mediated through layers of legal interpretation that thickened throughout centuries of silence. For many, the law was a survival framework; a way to preserve identity under pressure. I won’t say this faith fashioning is wrong, but it does make it narrower. Jesus didn’t call those well versed in religious expertise. Rather, he calls those whose imagination is still flexible enough to be unsettled by a different way of being faithful. His teaching didn’t abolish the law. Instead, it reoriented the desire that had grown around it.
Why This Matters
These three examples of contagions – economic, political, and educational – don’t simply shape opinions. They shape what feels reasonable to hope for, what kind of saviour makes sense to want, and what kind of future seems imaginable. When Jesus says, “Follow me,” he invites people not only into new beliefs, but into a different social field or “environment” of desire. His call presses against the environments that quietly teach living souls (nephesh) what rescue ought to look like.
In this light, as it is today, the difficulty in receiving Christ isn’t simply stubborn unbelief. It’s a predictable friction that arises when a deeply socialized desire encounters a Kingdom that refuses to mirror the stories that formed it. For the first time, God, through Christ, speaks into the skewed story of His own people. It’s there, where we turn toward in our next article, “Desire as a Social Contagion.”