“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Jesus sounds a lot like John, the man who baptized him.[1] The reign of God has come near, and its nearness demands a complete reorientation of our lives: Repent. Turn around. Change course. Let this nearness determine your next step, and every step thereafter. John the wilderness prophet has been arrested by Herod, but Herod cannot silence the proclamation of God’s reign on earth, much less stop its invasion of the world.
In Pasolini’s film version of this scene,[2] Jesus is walking at a quick pace down a country road. A group of farmers traveling the opposite direction stop to look, perhaps to exchange a greeting, and as he briskly passes them, he says, almost over his shoulder, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” and just keeps moving. Where is he going? Now he is at the lake, sees two brothers at work, says to them, “Follow me, I will make you fish for people,” and just keeps moving. The two hurry but they can barely keep up. Now he sees another pair of brothers, at work in the boat with their father, and he calls them, and immediately they leave the boat and the old man and follow him. The four hurry but they can barely keep up with him.
What’s the rush? Where is he going? What about Zebedee, the old man? Jesus didn’t call him, did he? Is he too slow for the pace at which God’s reign is invading the towns of Galilee? When I was young, I didn’t think too much about old Zebedee, but now I find it easy to imagine that the two of us might be about the same age. I see Jesus and the four men rushing away from the shore, and the old man alone in the boat, a net in his lap and a puzzled look on his face. “James, John, what do you want me to tell your mother?”
No answer. Matthew has no interest in Zebedee’s feelings, or anyone else’s, for that matter. In this rendering of the gospel, Peter’s wife, Andrew’s children, or Zebedee’s thoughts are simply not in the picture. There’s only Jesus’ movement and the urgency of his call and the immediacy with which these men respond. There’s neither ‘hello’ nor ‘good-bye.’ There’s no brief discussion of what to do about dad, no careful weighing of options between brothers and other family members. There’s only “the strange power of this Jesus, who declares and compels rather than explaining and persuading.”[3]
Jesus’ call to discipleship is not some kind of church commercial promising you your best life now or whatever desires your heart may harbor. With his call he claims you and me as his apprentices in the service of God’s reign. And when we hear this call, there are only two options: either we follow this urgent demand — for the sake of the world and God’s reign in it — or we pretend there is no call, no divine claim on our life.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the shadow of death light has dawned.[4]
We rightly hear this as a joyous occasion of great promise, but for some of us who’ve sat in darkness so long that our eyes and minds and imaginations have grown accustomed to the dimness of all things — for some of us the light is too great, too intrusive and disruptive. Herod had John arrested, because he didn’t want to hear about any justice other than his own. He had the Baptizer shut up, because all that talk about divine judgment and divine righteousness allowed people to envision a world beyond the one he maintained on Rome’s behalf. Herod has no interest in a world emerging around a truth he can’t control or spin into its opposite or silence.
When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. “He withdrew” — the connotations of the Greek range from “he went away” or “he departed” to “he fled.” In Matthew the term is used to describe Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to Egypt because of Herod and later from Judea to Nazareth because of one of Herod’s sons. And the same terms describes Jesus moving into the wilderness after Herod had John beheaded.[5] Raj Nadelia notes that “in each instance, people flee because of imperial violence or the possibility of such violence,” and that “given the threat of imperial violence, it would have been tempting for Jesus to flee to safety and avoid confronting the empire entirely.”[6] But far from it, Jesus went to Galilee where Gentile control had been the status quo for seven long centuries, and there he built a movement among farmers, fishermen, and day laborers, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” For some, his light was too great, too intrusive and disruptive, too radical, for others it meant that following him they could begin to see the outlines of what the kingdom of heaven come to earth might look like: life made whole.
In Jesus, the reign of God has invaded the world, and his call to discipleship claims us as citizens of heaven and workers in God’s mission. This doesn’t mean that we all quit our jobs and hit the road with Jesus or that we cease being the children of our parents, the siblings of our brothers and sisters, or the parents of our children. But this call does make our lives part of God’s healing and liberating work, and it redefines the meaning of words like family and neighbor and righteousness.
So the fishermen leave their nets and their boat, but they do not stop fishing. They put their skills to new use. Fishermen turned mission workers. Instead of catching fish, Peter and Andrew brought people to Jesus, or something like that. Fishing for people sounds just fine until you think some more about the details: fish get caught in a net, they are pulled out of the water, then there’s a lot of wild wiggling and tossing, but eventually they all end up — fried, baked, or poached — on somebody’s dinner table. Fishing for people loses its missionary innocence when you think about the many ways in which fish are tricked with bait and fooled with lure only to get hooked and reeled in. Fishing for people, if it is to have anything to do with the mission of Jesus, cannot be about tricking or fooling people, though.
The prophet Jeremiah spoke of fishermen as instruments of God’s judgment:
I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them; and afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight.[7]
Here the Lord announces a day of judgment, and people will be caught like fish and hunted like animals hiding in the clefts of the rocks. Read next to this passage, fishing for people sounds frightening. Have Peter and Andrew, James and John been called to round up people for God’s imminent judgment as the kingdom of heaven is drawing near? It this what’s behind the urgency and speed with which Jesus is moving from scene to scene?
The disciples followed Jesus as he went throughout Galilee, teaching in synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. They watched and learned. Great crowds gathered, people came from all over Galilee and neighboring regions, but this was no roundup operation. People were drawn to Jesus and followed him and they witnessed the power of God making things right and whole.
How did the disciples participate in this movement? Mending nets used to be part of their daily work: after the catch was brought in and taken to market, they would sit on the beach or in the boat, checking the nets for rips and holes, and repairing them. As fishermen they had many skills: they knew how to be patient, they had developed endurance, they worked well with others, and they had learned to cope with failure as well as success. But perhaps the best gift they brought to the mission of Jesus was their ability to notice even the smallest tear in a net, and their skill and care in mending it.
The purpose of God’s judgment is to make things right in the world. God doesn’t judge to condemn the world, but to restore and make it whole; God judges in order to mend what is torn and broken. In the advance of God’s reign in the world, the only fishing that is going on is done with a net that has been cast wide — and dropped to the deepest depth, deeper than even our best hopes can reach, down to where people sit in great darkness and in the shadow of death — and God is pulling the net in, carefully so as not to lose a single one. The net is Christ and all who belong to him, all of his siblings, young and old, the whole family of God, fishing for people.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the shadow of death light has dawned.
We are the net, woven into a web of new relationships and mended by the grace of God, and we are the catch. And we are being pulled up from the dark depth to live in the light of God’s glory.
This fishing expedition is a rescue operation, and Jesus calls us to it for our own sake as well as for the sake of the kingdom of heaven on earth — and the two are one, because in the end we can only be whole together.
In the end we can only be whole together — regardless of what the servants of empire dream up to appropriate or otherwise silence the life of Christ in our day. I close with the opening lines of the Psalm for today:
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?[8]
[1]Matthew 3:2, 17
[2]The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964; available at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6kf3qx
[3]Placher, Mark, 31.
[4]Matthew 4:16 quoting Isaiah 9:2
[5]ἀναχωρέω Mt 2:14; 2:22; 14:13
[6]http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4366
[7]Jeremiah 16:16-17
[8]Ps 27:1