EPIPHANY 3

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: EPIPHANY 3
PROPER: A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: January 27,2002

TEXT: Matthew 4:12-23 – “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

ISSUE: There is an urgent call to be attentive to God in the lessons for the day, and be focused on the Cross of Christ. The Christian community is called upon to change its direction, walking with and following Jesus Christ, proclaiming Good News, curing every disease and every sickness among the people. The lesson from Matthew implies urgency in proclaiming the Good News with Jesus Christ.
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The Epiphany Season continues, the season of the proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord to the world. Matthew’s Gospel account indicates that John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus is now in prison and the ministry of Jesus Christ begins. Note too, that Matthew, addressing a largely Jewish community, always draws upon the Hebrew Scriptures to make many of his points. Jesus leaves Nazareth where he grew up. His ministry according to Matthew begins in Capernaum, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali. “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,” as proclaimed by the prophet Isaiah. Light and hope is beginning to dawn. The Epiphany or manifestation of Jesus is being realized.
According to Matthew, Jesus’ ministry begins taking up pretty much where John the Baptist had left off. Jesus is calling people to repentance. Again, repentance is change or making a reverse direction. So much of what Jesus taught was for all intents and purposes a reversal of the way people in his culture believed. He is very accepting of women, and eventually Gentiles. Some of his parables astonish the folk of the time, because he reverses what people believed. His teachings are taking a new direction. You forgive the prodigal Son, and appreciate the unqualified love of the Father as opposed to an angry God. The last come first in the teachings of Jesus. The workers in the vineyard whether coming early or late receive the same measure of the immeasurable gracious giving of God. Thus, you can see why Jesus calls his followers to repentance, turn-about, change. He is a remarkable enlightenment of the people of this period, especially those doomed to dark despair of an oppressive and unchanging world. Jesus offers hope.
Now in this passage, Jesus walks along the seaside and calls Peter and his brother Andrew, fishermen casting their nets to come immediately and follow him. “Follow me,” he says, “And I will make you fish for people.” We are told that Peter and Andrew immediately drop their nets and begin to follow him. James and John are also fishermen mending their nets, and they too are called, and they immediately follow. They join Jesus in a ministry of proclaiming Good Newss in the synagogues, and healing the sick and diseased.
The passage here implies immediacy. They go within on the spot. It is hard for us to believe that such an immediate dropping of everything was so likely; it appears that there was hardly a time to build any trust. I would suggest that the selected disciples probably had some prior knowledge of Jesus and his mission and teaching. If Jesus’ ministry began to take shape early on in the dry season of the year, which was highly likely, it is possible that Peter and Andrew, James and John, may well have dropped the nets and go with Jesus at that time of the year. It was the time of the year that people were out and about, to be seen and heard. While Peter, Andrew, James, and John were not rich, the were part of an established family business, and big business at that. You had to be licensed by the Romans and purchase the rights to do the fishing. This was net fishing, not recreational fishing with a hook.
It was not unusual, as we might think, for a group of men to go off following Jesus. In this period if a man had a specific grievance in his community, he would gather followers who would go with him around to surrounding villages to announce their grievance. Naturally, if you had a following of sympathizers, you were more likely to be taken seriously and to be heard. It is not at all unlikely that if the selected disciples knew Jesus’ grievance and agreed with him, they may well have dropped everything, followed him; and left other family members to run the business.
According to Matthew, Jesus and his disciples go to the synagogues and begin teaching, and or calling people to hear their grievances. Now synagogues were community meeting centers where teaching, debate, argument went on among the men of various villages concerning their faith. Thus, here you have Jesus and the disciples calling men to be aware of a culture that alienated and oppressed people, created guilt, especially the poor and the disenfranchised, the sick and lame. Jesus begins along with Andrew, Peter, James, and John who were apart of an occupation that oppressed and confiscated enormous sums of their profits for taxes. They begin proclaiming a God of Love, and forgiveness. The begin to accept and embrace the guilty and the dispossessed, and give them a renewed sense that the first shall be last and the last shall be first in the eyes of God. You have the beginnings of the great turn-around, the great repentance, the great change, The Great Reversal. The disciples with Jesus are calling others into a great co-operative movement, like fishing was a cooperative business, to change the world. They are not “hooking” people but netting or networking them into the redeeming community of God.
Why fishermen? Why not a selection of carpenters? Why does Jesus begin selecting fishermen? Fishermen knew that out on the sea was a wealth of fish to be claimed. You couldn’t see them, but they knew the fish were there. They had that trust and confidence. Fishermen dealt with a great deal of uncertainty. Storms came up on Lake Galilee without a moments notice. They had to be strong, trusting, confidant, and determined individuals that could work easily in a focused community together, to get the job done. Why not fishermen they were the most likely to face a very difficult situation and ministry.
Jesus selection of disciples was not just fishermen. There were others with different backgrounds. But in the passage from Matthew you get the point of what Jesus was after. He employed the strong and the determined to join in the proclamation, and people who could work as a group and stay focused on the leader and the leader’s important message. The early church had a little trouble with this focus, as does much of the church today. St. Paul’s letter to the I Corinthians 1:10-17, takes on the fact that the church often got splintered into the followers Apollos, or Paul, or Cephas, all different parties or divisions of the church. Paul calls them back to their focus on Jesus Christ as crucified Lord. Jesus himself picked up on the importance of the immediacy of the Gospel, like you read in the Amos 3:1-8 passage. The handwriting is on the wall. When the lion roars, he’s got his dinner. When an alarm is sounded, you need to make an immediate response. When you see a world in need, you get on the bandwagon with Jesus Christ.
I’ve gone to great length to spell all of this passage and its implications from Matthew, because it speaks of what the early church was about. As we emerge from the concept of Christendom in our age, the church has become far removed from what was intended at the beginning. For many people today the church is a place of getting our needs met. We get baptized to assure us of our religious comfort. We see our part in the church as a kind of peaceful membership in what is a socially acceptable religious institution. The need for a deeper appreciation of the understanding of what Jesus Christ was about as leader, and the study and unity of Jesus Christ himself in many churches today is replaced by fund raising and getting people to come to church to help support the budget of the institution.
The ministry of Jesus was to call strong characters into a focused ministry that dealt with issues of justice and cultural change the brought the community into resonance with God and God’s will. Do you find that the church of today has an immediate concern, and immediate passion for justice? There are so many things out there in the world that needs to looked at, and so many things that demand our immediate attention and focus. There are many lonely people in nursing homes and hospitals, in our own communities. There are unfair practices that we do not stand up to and reveal them, in terms of wages for women as opposed to men, and wages different for whites over blacks. When I was a youngster working on a construction sight, black men with families, who knew the job better than I, and worked just as hard, if not harder received twenty-five cents less per hour than I did.
We Americans are of course very angry and depressed about the loss of thousands of people in New York on September 11th, as well we should be. But are we as angry about and depressed about the tens of thousands of men, women, and children injured and killed in Afghanistan? We have called for war upon terrorism that has effected the whole nation and called thousands of our military to foreign places to avenge the attacks for Sept. 11th. However, the war on drugs that has taken so many lives on our own city and country streets, cities and villages has had hardly the impact? Don’t you wonder about that? Are we as concerned about the orphaned street urchins who live in Russian train stations, and run away children in our own land? Our family life is a serious concern in our culture. The predicament of so many of our public schools is an issue. The overall secularization, and minimal attention given to spiritual matter in our culture must be a concern to all of us as members of Christ’s church.
Jesus was passionate and deliberate in his mission. He called those disciples that would join him in his passionate grievance and mission, and they responded. Their feeble human was at times expressed, yet the demand of Jesus was not defused. Jesus said to Peter, “Do you love me?” “Yes, of course, you know I do,” Peter indignantly replied. “Then feed my sheep.” Jesus said to him, and he says no less to us today.