There's a New King in Town

Sermon for Jan. 22, 2023

Isaiah 9:1-4; Matthew 4:12-23

One of the first questions you have to ask about a passage of Scripture is this:  Who’s this story about?  Where’s the spotlight shining?  Well, about today’s Gospel reading, most often we approach it as a story about Peter, Andrew, James, and John.  After all, we name churches after these guys.  And it’s their action that gives the story its drama.  There they are, fishermen out fishing, spending another day trying to provide for their families and make ends meet in a system that’s wired against them … because the scholars will tell you they aren’t out there as small-business men but as contract agents working for the Roman occupiers, assigned a quota of fish to  give the authorities.¹  Anyway, these guys are minding their own business, trying to feed their families and keep the Romans off their backs, when Jesus shows up and calls them to join him.  And they respond, following him right then and there.  So, isn’t this a story about them?

You’d think so.  But instead, I think it’s more a story about the new king in town, the new emperor representing a higher authority in this outpost of the Roman Empire.  Even though he doesn’t do all that much in the story, it’s really about Jesus.

We can see that from the quotation from the Book of Isaiah that Matthew drops in.  Why does he do that?  It seems like it just interrupts the flow, right?  But it matters to Matthew that Jesus is fulfilling the prophecies and hopes of the Jewish people; so in his Gospel, he does this 14 times, pointing out how something Jesus does shows God making good on the covenant to deliver and restore Israel.  So, Matthew reminds the Jewish people hearing this story that God had promised to bring light and hope to people sitting “in darkness” in the area where Jesus is now making his home (4:16) – Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee.  Back in Isaiah’s day, 700 years earlier, another foreign power, the Assyrians, had conquered the Jewish people in this area and set up their empire.  But God promised through Isaiah, as we heard in the first reading today, that God would make that land “glorious” (Isaiah 9:1).  And how?  By bringing to the throne a king who would rule with the goodness and justice and the geographic scope of King David, someone who would reestablish God’s dominion in “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Matt 4:16).  Well, with Jesus moving to this area, now occupied by the Romans, Matthew sees God’s ancient purposes being realized 700 years later.  Jesus is making good on Isaiah’s promise that God’s kingdom would return there, bringing light and life not just to the Jewish residents but to all the people living under foreign oppression.  And when God’s kingdom comes among them, the people in “Galilee of the Gentiles” will see divine light dawning in this “region and shadow of death” (Matt 4:16).

Then, Matthew continues, Jesus starts proclaiming what God has sent him to proclaim – that “the kingdom of heaven has come near” (4:17).  In fact, the kingdom of heaven is coming near in him.  Of course, Matthew knows, and we know, this won’t be the kind of kingdom that Israel used to know, hundreds of years earlier, one with a human king sitting on a throne and ruling as God’s viceroy on earth.  Instead of being a geographic kingdom, the “kingdom of heaven” Jesus proclaims is a state of being – the reign and rule of God revealing itself to be so much more powerful even than the reign and rule of Caesar and all his armies.  Jesus may not be the kind of king they were expecting – just the opposite, in fact.  He’s a king who’s come from the bottom rung of society and who hangs out with the folks the powerful people want to ignore.  But by quoting the passage from Isaiah, Matthew is signaling that Jesus is God’s true king true anyway, that the prophecy is indeed being fulfilled.  God’s just establishing the “kingdom of heaven” in a really surprising way.

And then Jesus comes to the Sea of Galilee and encounters these fishermen.  Their response to him has always seemed odd to me.  Could you imagine just dropping everything, even literally dropping the tools of your trade, and following someone who comes and calls you?  How could that happen?  Now, it’s not like they were leaving a lucrative, well-respected profession.  Fishermen were “despised” in their society, one commentator says,² and they were lucky to eke out a living after turning over much of their catch to the Romans.  But still:  Jesus comes to Peter and Andrew and says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” (Matt 4:19) – and they do it.  For James and John, it’s even harder to believe.  They’re working with their father, Zebedee, and the minute Jesus calls them away from the boat, Zebedee “loses his workforce and his retirement plan,” says a commentator.³  So much for “honor[ing] your father,” as the fifth commandment requires (Exodus 20:12).  Plus, to make the situation just that much harder to understand, Jesus hasn’t even healed anyone yet or cast out any demons – so it’s not like these fishermen were wowed by his miracles.

But clearly, they’re wowed by something.  And I think it goes back to what Matthew is telling us in that reference to the ideal king of Israel.  Jesus is proclaiming that the reign and rule of God has come among them – in fact that they’re standing in the midst of it.  He is God’s ideal king, the one promised to come from the “house and lineage of David” (Luke 2:4 KJV).  And it turns out that these nobodies in the boat are indeed somebodies after all, despite how the world sees them.  If Jesus is God’s ideal king, these four fishermen are the king’s ideal subjects.  They know a divine command when they hear it.

So, maybe it’s worth considering this question: In today’s reading, who’s choosing whom?  We’re used to choices lying with us.  We live in a society where the rugged individual reigns supreme.  Much of the energy and commerce in our society centers on persuading millions of rugged individuals to make particular choices, choices that determine whether businesses or political parties or churches will continue as going concerns.  Everywhere we look, someone or something is asking us to choose this rather than that, recognizing that, in our market economy, the power rests with each of us.

So, one reason we may have trouble understanding these disciples is that their world is upside down – or ours is.  In the world of Matthew’s Gospel, Peter, Andrew, James, and John are individuals, to the extent we know their names.  But we know nothing about them, other than their “despised” profession and their social class.  And the story tells us nothing about their motivations:  What led them to choose Jesus over fishing?  Why was he persuasive?  Why was his deal the best deal?  The story isn’t concerned with any of that.  Instead, the story comes from the opposite point of view.  It’s not about these fisherman and their power to choose; it’s about Jesus and his authority to call.  The king has come, announcing his reign as God’s viceroy on earth.  And the king has chosen them.  They are soldiers deployed on a mission.  If they did have a response that the story omits, that response was simply, “Sir, yes sir.”

So, for us, the question isn’t so much, “What would have made me leave my business and follow Jesus?”  Instead, the question is this:  How will I respond to the reality, breaking into my everyday existence, that God is the one truly reigning and ruling over my world … and me?  If that’s true – and we proclaim we think it’s true every time we say the Lord’s Prayer – if it’s true that we’re asking for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven – what does that mean for my life?  When the king walks through your workplace or your living room, when the king pops up on your social media feed alongside the culture’s other “influencers,” and calls you to follow – what will you say? 

Like Peter and Andrew and James and John, we can’t say what that moment of calling will look like.  But we can say to whom the call will come.  The reign and rule of God looks like this: one nobody after another saying “yes” to the call to share divine love with other nobodies – focusing not on the Romans dominating our governance or the self-interested religious leaders telling us how to live, but focusing on the king who walks by, and calls us to put down the nets of our own making, and empowers us to come along and fish for people beside him.

1.      New International Study Bible, 1753 (note).

2.      NISB, 1753 (note).

3.      NISB, 1753 (note).