Third Sunday after Epiphany; 22 January 2023; Epiphany 3A (RCL); Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 5-13; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23.
Last week, we heard the call of the first disciples as reported in John’s Gospel. There, John the Baptist identifies Jesus, and disciples begin to follow, and themselves call others. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus calls his disciples directly, and the stories are a bit hard for us to comprehend. What was so compelling about Jesus’ call, that these people would leave everything behind and follow?
Matthew, of course, has to see everything as a fulfillment of prophecy, and so begins with a quotation from Isaiah 9 (which the lectionary helpfully assigns as the Old Testament reading for the day). Zebulun and Naphtali were the regions annexed by Assyria in the 730s BCE, and Isaiah 9 looks like a hymn of thanksgiving for their liberation, as well as for the birth of a new crown prince. Matthew has Jesus leave Nazareth and move to Capernaum, so that he might begin his public ministry in this region, “Galilee of the Gentiles.” I suspect he is also making claims about Jesus as the crown prince announced by Isaiah (which is why we read this passage on Christmas Eve).
In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ first public words were “What do you seek?” In the Synoptics, they are, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God (or heaven) is at hand.” John is inviting us into his Gospel to discover where Jesus remains (Rabbi, where do you remain? Come and see). Matthew is compelling us to discover the Kingdom and how we might live in it.
Jesus first encounters Simon and Andrew, who are probably quite poor. They are casting a net into the sea. They have no boat, but probably waded into the water to cast their “two-handed net” and catch what they could. Jesus invites them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” I suspect Matthew wants us to wonder what could be so compelling about such an invitation that they would simply leave their living (poor though it might be) behind and follow. Neither Matthew nor Mark give us any indication of prior relationship (Luke includes the miraculous catch of fish in the call story). If we want to conjecture that the men knew Jesus before he called them, we do so without any help from Matthew.
James and John are in a different situation. Their father owns a boat. They’re leaving behind a family business as well as family. Again, we are left with the question of what could be so compelling about Jesus’ call, with no help from the evangelist. We are told that James and John are in the boat, mending their nets. I find it an interesting coincidence that in our reading from 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the exact same vocabulary. He writes imploring that “there be no schisms (or rips) among you, but that you be mended into the same mind and same purpose.” It’s a powerful metaphor.
What does it mean to be fishers of people? In my Nazarene days, it meant bringing souls to Christ (whatever that meant!). I always imagined an angler casting a line through conversation, and reeling someone in to a conversion to Jesus. That’s not the image Matthew is using. His fishers of people are casting nets (that occasionally need mending). Could he mean rescuing people from drowning? Or gathering people in to community? In Chapter 13, Jesus compares the kingdom to a net thrown into the sea catching all kinds of fish. The fishers then sort the good into baskets and throw out the bad. So, the net in some way represents the relationships within the kingdom.
Here’s where the metaphor of mending comes into play. Gathering people into the kingdom also means mending the relationships between them, mending the rips that separate us. Galilee at the time was under the thumb of Herod as proxy for the Roman Empire, shredding the social and economic relationships that hold people together in a just society. Gathering people into a new set of social relationships, mending the damage done by Empire — that might be compelling. Who are the people who walk in darkness in our day, and how might we fish for them? Answering that call will be just as disruptive for us as Jesus’ call was to Simon and Andrew, James and John.