Sermon for the Third Sunday of Epiphany
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Epiphany 8am
Isaiah 9.1-4; Matthew 4.12-23.
Our Gospel for today has Jesus calling the first disciples including Simon who would later be renamed Peter by Jesus: Three of these four became particularly close to Jesus and we often hear in the Gospels a phrase like; ‘Jesus took Peter, James and John’ or ‘He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James and John’. Peter, James and John were with Jesus went he went up the mountain and was transfigured, and when he prayed for deliverance in the Garden of Gethsemane. Sometimes the fourth, Andrew, is added to the three, sometimes not.
All of them were fishermen. These were men with boats and nets and a rich supply of freshwater fish from the Sea of Galilee; an inland sea supplied from the River Jordan and countless underground springs. Most of Jesus’s ministry took place on its shores and beaches, and he often crossed over from one side to another.
The way the story is told in the Gospels Jesus’s call seems dramatic and spontaneous. But this is a story of fish and fishermen. Fishermen can’t guarantee a good catch. They have to watch and observe and guess and hope. It is often trial and error. Jesus must have seen the two pairs of brothers going about their business, for days weeks, months even: noticing things about them, whether they were talkative or silent, how they got on with another, how they approached the daily tasks of cleaning the nets, preparing the boats, navigating the lake, landing the catch. For Jesus, attempting to catch a man as impulsive as Peter, as deep as John, as solid as James and as loyal as Andrew you would have to watch and you wait.
And that is important. Jesus was not just trying to create a fanbase of admirers. He was trying to bring in something new: a way of thinking, and speaking and healing and challenging and loving which would in time turn the world upside down. ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’
A lot of mental effort goes into producing job descriptions these days. Qualifications, specifications, main responsibilities, reporting structures, outcomes and assessments. Interviews, presentations and personal statements to be poured over and compared before an offer is made. We might think that Jesus was looking for the particular blend of “character, competence and chemistry” that he needed for his mission. But that is to miss what the text implies, that even though he might have watched them for weeks there was still something immediate and spontaneous about the actual call. Perhaps Jesus didn’t mind very much who they were, just as when you go fishing you don’t mind very much which trout nudges the end of your line as long as one does. It is all in the timing. So you are watching for the moment, for the tug on the line, the opportunity to speak those life-changing words ‘follow me’.
We are told that they did follow. They left their nets and followed him. They left their family businesses to become apprentices in a different business altogether; one where they too would learn to notice, and watch and wait and speak the good news of salvation.
There are things to bring out of this story for us, to bring it into alignment with our own stories, our own attempts or half attempts to be followers of Jesus.
One is that salvation does not lie within ourselves. The fishermen at the sea of Galilee were well occupied. They had a business to run, families to feed, boats and nets to look after, obligations to settle, repairs to make, debts to pay off. There was nothing apparently missing from their lives. They would have had their fair share of satisfaction, stress, exhaustion. But when Jesus calls them to follow; they find that they are attracted out of all this. The important duties and opportunities of life give way to the urgent desire to respond to Jesus, to move out of themselves and into the unknown. Do we hear that call?
Our society is so unimaginative about what it thinks brings satisfaction to human beings. We are caught in a spiral of competitive living on tramlines which we did not create: school, exams, qualifications, job if you are lucky, finding a partner, mortgage, children, promotion, bigger mortgage, more responsibility, late retirement, a few years in the sun, illness, death. You can fall off the spiral at any time and it is hard to get back.
Meanwhile everyone is owed respect, no one has to earn it. Every child is a little genius, it is for the school to recognize it. Every criticism is an insult, every insult requires apology because our egos are so frail we cannot shrug off the beastly things that people sometimes say or write or think. But the Gospel does not call us to self-defence or self-satisfaction. Fulfillment cannot be bought. Character can’t be slipped on and off like a dress or a suit. Think of Jesus at the lakeside, watching, waiting.
Christ does not intrude on who we are and what we are; does not flatter us or seduce us or insult us, but simply calls us to follow. I would suggest that you will only know what you are truly capable of within the company of Christ. And that is because he knows you already, he has been around you and within you for years, decades, before birth. It was in your baptism that he first laid his claim on you, he called you for his own and he has been calling ever since. He knows you are more than the sum of your achievements and much more than the trail of your failures.
Peter and Andrew and James and John left the lake and followed Jesus. But they returned to the lake after the resurrection. There is the story of meeting the risen Christ where they had first encountered him, of the miraculous catch of fish and the breakfast on the shore.
Our life is our mission, and our mission field is the world we live in; and our world as we know is a place of sunshine and storm, swirling depths, companionship and rivalry, honour and deception, danger and potential. Christ calls you to become like him, to become the kind of person whose life proclaims and reveals the kingdom of God in all the beauty and trouble of today. There is no other call so urgent, and yet the one who calls is infinitely patient, waiting and watching for you. Just you, and you and you and you. And by practice, by prayer, by the attention and the time you give to him, you become like him, like the one who stands by the lakeside, a stranger to the seductions and attractions of the world, yet loving the world for what it is becoming, secure in dignity of your own person and the immensity of God’s riches.