Two Sundays ago, we celebrated the baptism of Jesus. In today’s gospel, we learn that immediately following his baptism in the Jordan in the south, Jesus has gone to Galilee, his home area in the far north of Israel. The area Matthew in the Gospel and Isaiah in the Old Testament calls “the territory of Zebulon and Naphtali” had long been occupied by invading forces, first the Assyrians in Old Testament times, and now the Romans in Jesus’s day. Jesus’s decision to start his work in a place identified with foreign occupation signifies his sense of himself as one who forwards God’s plan to liberate us from everything that holds us down.
In today’s gospel [Matthew 4: 12-23] we also hear a lot about fish. When I was a boy I once asked my father, a lapsed Catholic, why Roman Catholics always eat fish on Fridays. Without missing a beat, he replied: “That’s because the apostles were fishermen.”
As we just heard in the gospel,
As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
Leave it to a member of the Hall family to suggest a cynical marketing strategy behind a dietary law.
The Vatican decided to end the fish-on-Friday policy in 1984, suggesting alternate forms of penance. But fish have always had an important place in Christian tradition. The first disciples were fishermen, and the early Christians often used the fish symbol as a covert way of identifying themselves in a time of persecution. The Greek word for fish, ἰχθύς (ichthus), is an anagram for the words Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior.
And even before the time of Jesus, the book of Jeremiah (16:16) talks about fishing neither as breadwinning nor as a peaceful piscatorial pastime but as a method of rooting out evildoers:
I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their ancestors. 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.
So part of what this gospel tells us is that God wants us to fish for people. And part of what it tells us is that it’s always a good time to throw the rascals out. What I find most interesting today, though, is the way Jesus engages with these fisherfolk: Andrew, Simon, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. He talks with them as if he knows them, as if he is keyed in to their innermost thoughts and desires. I know they’re fishermen, he seems to say, and (to mix a metaphor) I will help them cast their nets for bigger game.
One of the problems with talking about Jesus’s most famous statements (as in the phrase “fishers of people”) is that we tend to set stained glass around them and treat them as if they only have one possible meaning. To be sure, most Christians over time have seen this as a call towards evangelism, as a way of bringing new people into the life and work of the church. But it seems to me that there is an additional layer of meaning to this encounter that we don’t often explore.
Simon, Andrew, James, and John were fishermen. Jesus addresses them in the language of their own life work, not about serving the church. He says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” He doesn’t say, “Follow me, I will enroll you in a newcomers’ class, and soon after that we’ll put you on the vestry. Oh, and here’s a pledge card.” Jesus asks not that they serve the church but that they follow him and serve the world. He asks them to do so in the terms of who they actually are. These fishermen follow Jesus not by dropping their nets and changing careers or volunteering. They follow Jesus by doing what they do and being who they are as they are, where they are in the world.
Too often we have equated Christian discipleship with serving the church. But if we attend to what Jesus is doing and saying in today’s gospel, Jesus himself equates discipleship as following him by being faithful, generous, and loving in the terms of your own life. Whatever your profession or life’s work, God wants you not to drop it so that you can set up chairs in the parish hall. God wants you to do your work in the world as a Christian person, to see all your activity through the lens of following Jesus. Of course, it is important to get involved in church and do what you can to serve and support it. But the principal way to follow Jesus is to be fully present to your workplace, your household, your community as the arenas where you bring God’s love, forgiveness, healing, and justice into your relations with those with whom you spend the other six days of the week.
Today’s encounter at the Sea of Galilee is the time when Jesus begins his real ministry by saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” From here on in, Jesus and his companions will proclaim a new reign of love and justice which will replace the old world of occupation and oppression. Jesus means to free us in all aspects of our lives and to enlist us as his agents of good news, healing, and wholeness. Coming to church is vital, but you can’t do God’s liberating work only or even primarily in this building. You do it in the places you regularly engage other people.
How we treat each other (both outside and inside these walls) matters. In today’s epistle [1 Corinthians 1: 10-18] Paul calls for church unity:
Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.
Having worked in the church far longer than Paul ever did, I’m not sure I have ever known a church where everyone was in agreement about everything. Churches have always been places where we regularly bump into each other with conflicting ideas about how best to follow Jesus. Just as we represent God to the world out there, so we represent God to each other in here.
Too much of our religious thinking focuses on our role in the church rather than our role in the world. The church exists to forward God’s mission of bringing the kingdom of heaven near. We’ll never be of one mind on how best to do it. But, to the extent that we see ourselves not as church mice but as fishers of people, as we give ourselves to Jesus’s call to bring that kingdom near in all the venues of our lives, then we’ll be following Jesus faithfully and we can trust that God will use us to God’s purposes in the blessing and liberation of those around us.
God calls you as who you are where you are. Let God use you there and leave it to trust that God will sort it all out. You are God’s agent here, at home, and in the world. And that is not a fish story. Amen.
Hoom
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