Gone Fishing

(Scriptures:         Isaiah 9:1-4; I Corinthians 1:10-18;    Matthew 4:12-23)

 

 

 

Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel gives us the second account in two weeks about Jesus calling his disciples – remember, last week, we read the account in John’s Gospel in which Andrew and another unnamed disciple of John the Baptist approach Jesus, ask Jesus where he was staying, and Jesus says, “Come and see”.  In this week’s story, it is Jesus who is coming to see Andrew and his brother Simon, along with two other brothers, James and John.    

 

Today’s Gospel reading begins with an ominous note: “Now when Jesus had heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.”   John the Baptist, the forerunner sent by God to proclaim Jesus, John who went ahead to prepare the way for Jesus, also went ahead of Jesus in being arrested and later executed under Roman authority.  John’s arrest is foreshadowing of what will happen to Jesus when he, too, falls foul of Roman authority.

 

We’re told further that Jesus left his home town of Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum.  Matthew, writing to a predominantly Jewish congregation, is eager to provide links between Jesus’ ministry and the Hebrew scriptures, which we know as the Old Testament, and so in this case Matthew links Jesus’ move to Capernaum to a passage from the writings of the prophet Isaiah.

 

"Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
     on the road by the sea, across the Jordan,
     Galilee of the Gentiles—
  the people who sat in darkness
     have seen a great light,
  and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
     light has dawned."

 

Growing up, hearing this passage, I always wondered why Galilee is named as “the people who sat in darkness” and “the region and shadow of death” – and maybe you have the same question – and so a little history may help us better understand these words.  Centuries before, the kingdom held together by Kings David and Solomon had split up into two kingdoms, the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.  Assyria, a longtime threat to the Jewish peoples, came down from the north and invaded Israel, ultimately conquering Israel, exiling its leaders to Assyria, and settling non-Jews in their place, with the result that much of the northern kingdom of Israel’s religious and cultural identity was lost.  Basically, what Assyria did then, today we would call “ethnic cleansing” – it was an attempt,  for the most part successful,  to destroy a culture.   The southern kingdom of Judah breathed a sigh of relief as they were spared for a time – but they had their own day of reckoning with Babylon a couple centuries later.  The Jews remaining in the Northern kingdom after the exile intermarried with the non-Jews settled there by Assyria, and their offspring would by Jesus’ time become known as Samaritans.  Galilee, in the northern part of the old northern Kingdom, was one of the first places conquered by Assyria, one of the first places to experience Assyria’s version of ethnic cleansing.  Those memories persisted over the centuries, and well might Galilee have been seen as a people sitting in darkness and as a region of death.  And so, for the earliest Christians, and perhaps for us as well, it is striking that the very place that had been the first to experience invasion and destruction from Assyria was also the first place in which Jesus taught and healed and called disciples.

 

So Jesus moved to Capernaum by the sea, and it was by the sea that he called his first disciples.   He meets Andrew and Simon as they cast their nets into the sea, and calls to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”  We’re told, “Immediately they left their nets and followed him.”  Next Jesus meets James and John.  We’re given to understand that James and John may have been a bit more prosperous, as their family owned a boat, while Andrew and Simon were casting their nets from the shore.  Jesus calls to James and John, and they leave the boat and their father to follow Jesus.

 

Conservative politicians like to claim Jesus as a friend of family values and a staunch supporter of the status quo, but in today’s Gospel reading – and indeed, thoughout the Gospels, Jesus is anything but.  If you went so far as to call Jesus a home-wrecker, you wouldn’t be overstating your case all that much.   After James and John left to follow Jesus, what was their poor father Zebedee to do alone in the boat?  What were Simon’s and Andrew’s family to do after the family breadwinners had left their nets to follow, to put it in modern day terms,  some traveling revivalist named Jesus.  From our perspective, the actions of Simon and Andrew and James and John look reckless and irresponsible.   And yet such is the level of commitment expected and received by Jesus that these followers would be with Jesus throughout his earthly ministry, and after his death and resurrection would make the name of Jesus known far and wide.  It can also be said that Jesus didn’t ask of his disciples anything he hadn’t done himself – remember that before calling his disciples, Jesus himself had left his family in Nazareth to move to Capernaum.  And, just as both John the Baptist and Jesus had been executed under Roman authority, Jesus’ disciples would prove to be a threat to Rome and would die as martyrs to the Christian faith. 

In the Gospels, it is the Roman authorities – Herod and Pilate – and the temple religious authorities, Annas and Caiaphas and their cronies, who support the status quo – and well they might, as they benefitted from the religious and political setup.  Jesus’ message from the beginning to the end of his ministry – and Jesus’ message today - is that God, not Caesar, is in charge – and that is always a threat to the powers that be.  And so it was inevitable that those who proclaimed the message of Jesus would meet with a fate similar to Jesus.

 

Before the sermon, we sang the familiar hymn, “Jesus calls us, o’er the tumult of our life’s wild restless sea.  Day by day his sweet voice soundeth saying Christian, follow me.”  Do we hear his call?  Are we willing to follow?  What are we willing to leave behind – Convenience?   Material possessions?  Secure employment?  Family and friends?   Respectability? – to follow the voice of Jesus?  I threw the word “respectability” in there, because like John the Baptist, like Jesus, like Jesus’ first followers, people still get arrested for following the voice of Jesus.  We think of the arrests of Christians as something that happens in far-away countries led by Communists or persons from non-Christian religions, but people in America are arrested for following the voice of Jesus as they hear it.  Christians from a group called the King’s Jubilee have been arrested right downtown in Philadelphia for feeding homeless people in Love Park, near City Hall.   This past Monday, on Martin Luther King Day, about a half-dozen Quakers and supporters were arrested outside the Lockheed Martin defense plant, as they stood their ground, proclaiming the need for an end to war, as they were removed by police and arrested for disorderly conduct. Advocating for peace can be seen as disturbing the peace – as it was in Jesus’ day, when the peace proclaimed by Jesus was a threat to the famed Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, maintained under brutal enforcement.   And of course, these protesters were following the example of Dr. King, who himself was arrested for following his convictions, and whose courageous but unpopular 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, “A Time to Break The Silence”, made him a marked man in many circles.  One of these Quaker protesters, a woman named Annie, had just celebrated her 94^th birthday, and was so frail she looked like a gust of wind would carry her away, and indeed she was barely able in Monday’s whipping wind to remain upright on her feet, but still, with protesters on either side of her bracing her from falling, she stood her ground before a row of police.  Granted, most of these people were arrested and released fairly quickly – from a police standpoint, these weren’t exactly crime of the century events.  But still – if following Jesus means walking, not into a warm sanctuary on a Sunday morning, surrounded by friends, but into a homeless shelter or onto a heating grate to help those who are homeless?  Or onto a picket line?  Or into a police van?  Would we follow? 

 

A quote from Dr. King, a year before his death, in 1967:  You may be 38 years old, as I am [oh, to be young] – and one day some great opportunitiy calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause and you are refuse to do it because you are afraid, you refuse to do it because you want to live longer, you’re afraid that you will lose your job, you’re afraid that you’ll be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you’re afraid that someone will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on to live until you’re 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.  You died when you refused to stand up for the right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.

 

And, from our Gospel reading, quoting Isaiah

"Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,   on the road by the sea, across the Jordan,
     Galilee of the Gentiles—   the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light,  and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned."

 

It was in a region characterized by defeat and despair that Jesus began his ministry.  It is often in our moments of despair, our dark nights of the soul, that we encounter Jesus, as Jesus meets us where we are and calls us to follow.  Following Jesus means following him into places where others, our brothers and sisters and neighbors and friends, have experienced defeat and despair, so that Jesus can use us to bring light into the darkness.  When Jesus calls, may we have ears to hear.  And where Jesus leads, may we at Emanuel Church follow, regardless of the cost.  Amen.