(Matthew 4:12-23, from The Third Sunday After the Epiphany)
I long assumed that Jesus’ first sermon had been a dud.
“… Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,'” Matthew writes in Chapter 4, verse 19. It’s surely a paraphrase, which, I figured, suggested Matthew considered the details too unremarkable to record. It’s also wholly derivative, matching, word for word, Matthew’s paraphrase of John the Baptist’s message, in Chapter 3, verse 2.
And Matthew records nothing in the way of a response to the message. The story just moves on to scenes of Jesus calling his first disciples, Peter, Andrew, James and John. It seemed to me that Jesus became a sensation only later, once he started healing the sick and banishing demons. His breakout homily seemed to be the Sermon on the Mount, which Matthew spends three chapters reproducing in detail, starting with verse 1 of Chapter 5.
I think there’s a lot more going on in that first sermon, though, than my ears were tuned to hear during the first part of my life as a Christian. “Repent,” in the vernacular of my fundamentalist upbringing, meant, “Stop sinning,” which, in turn, meant, “Stop drinking, smoking, dancing, gambling, cussing, fooling around, hanging out with worldly people, and so on.”
But the idea translated as “repent” in this passage involves a lot more change than a change in behavior. It refers to a wholesale change of one’s mind – not just the way you act but also the way you think, and the way you see and understand the world. The translation in “The Message” gets pretty close: “Change your life. God’s kingdom is here.”
Which helps explain what happens next in Matthew’s story. In the very next verse, Jesus crashes into Peter’s and Andrew’s wholly routine lives as fishermen and says, “Forget about this, and follow me. You should be fishing for people, not perch.” Moments later, James and John get the same call. All four immediately abandon their nets and boats – which is to say, their whole lives – and go with him.
And the second half of that first sermon is no less radical. I’ve said many times before that, in first-century Palestine, everyone knew that there was one, and only one, kingdom, and Caesar was its undisputed head. Start running your mouth about some alternative kingdom, and Rome would nail you up on a cross so everyone could watch you die in agony, see birds pick at your rotting corpse, and be reminded, again, that the emperor did not take kindly to people imagining alternatives to the way Rome had organized the world.
That’s precisely why Jesus, hearing about John the Baptist’s arrest, “withdrew” (the actual word in 4:12 is more like “fled”) to northern Galilee before continuing John’s sermon series.
Perhaps you can see, now, the scope of the change that Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James and John to make. They had been eking out a living catching fish for Caesar in a lake Caesar regarded as his. They were little more than slaves, really, given the empire’s exploitative regulation of the lake’s fishing industry. Jesus called them to switch their allegiance to a new kingdom that had arrived – or rather invaded.
Two millennia later, that invasion is still underway, and Jesus is still recruiting traitors to the status quo, defectors from the ranks of those sweating their lives away in idolatrous service to the Caesars and little-“g” gods of the age.
“Repent,” Jesus says. “Change your life, and follow me. You were made for more than this.”
