Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 22, 2023
Scripture: Matthew 4:12-23
I want you to imagine what it must have been like for those first couple of disciples of Jesus – for Simon Peter, for Andrew, for James, and for John. They were all fishermen, and at least in James and John’s case, they were sons of fishermen… and it’s quite likely that Peter and Andrew’s father was a fishermen too.
That was the only life they had ever known. They had grown up next to the freshwater Sea of Galilee surrounded by nets and by boats and by the smell of fish. Once they were old enough, their father would have taken them out on the boat and taught them to cast a net into the water, and when they weren’t out on the water, they would have been learning how to mend nets. They likely learned at a young age all of the tricks of the trade to sell the fish that they caught – to barter in order to bring in enough coins to keep a roof over their family’s head, and likely also to pay the rent for the boat that they fished from.
If you flip forward a couple of chapters, you will find a story about Peter’s mother-in-law, so we know that at least one of this group of four was married. Matthew and the other gospel writers don’t give us any other details about their families, who their spouses were, or whether they had any children. I wonder if the four of them did have children who were now old enough so that their fathers had started to teach them about fishing, to begin to pass the family business on to the next generation.
And yet when Jesus shows up there on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and calls out to them, “Follow me,” we are told that immediately they left their nets and their boats and their families and followed Jesus. Immediately. No hesitation. In an instant, the whole course of their life was changed.
I wonder what was going on in their hearts and their lives that caused such a sudden and dramatic change.
I’ve heard it suggested that there must have been something so powerfully attractive about Jesus that these fishermen would leave everything behind to follow. Whether it was something in his eyes, or something in the way that he carried himself, or something in his voice – Peter, Andrew, James, and John weren’t able to do anything but obey and follow.
I’ve also heard it suggested that maybe they had reached the tipping point and they were ready to join the revolution. Remember that they were living in a corner of the Roman Empire – the emperor in Rome determined how their lives were played out, and the emperor’s decisions were enforced by military power. In the history of that part of the world, there had been revolution after revolution, all with the aim of overthrowing the Roman occupation of the land; and as we know from the history books, none of them had succeeded.
We heard in today’s reading that Jesus’s ministry began right after he got the news that John the Baptist had been arrested. Was this Jesus’s tipping point? John could no longer get the message out there, so now it was up to Jesus himself. And maybe Peter, Andrew, James, and John had reached a similar tipping point, tired and frustrated at being on the bottom rung of a society, most of their money going to the emperor, and always at risk of going hungry or losing their home. And so when they heard rumours of this preacher proclaiming a new way for the world to be, they dropped everything to join the revolution.
I can hear the voices of the village aunties, echoing the refrain that is heard in every time and every place of war – “what a waste of five young and promising lives.”
But I also wonder if there might be a third explanation – something that goes beyond Jesus’s personal magnetism; something that goes beyond the promise of uprising and revolution. Because when the Holy Spirit is working in our lives, sometimes the change is gradual, but sometimes the change is immediate and we know in the blink of an eye what we are called to do even when we can’t give any rational explanation for it. And so I wonder if that radical and immediate change that we see in the lives of Peter, Andrew, James, and John, isn’t for any reason that we could explain, but it is rather because the Holy Spirit changed the entire course of their lives in that instant. After their encounter with Jesus, their lives would never be the same again.
Change and transformation are at the very heart of Jesus’s message. This is the very beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. Like I mentioned last week, one literary trick that the writers of the gospels employ is to use the first public words of Jesus to be a summary of his whole ministry in the gospel. And here in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’s first public words are, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In fact they aren’t just his opening words, but Matthew tells us plainly that this was the message that Jesus was preaching as he traveled around Galilee.
The word “repentance” is one of those churchy words that has been given a bad rap, mostly because it has been used in harmful and threatening ways – “Repent of what you have done, or else.”
But the Greek word that most English translators translate as “repent” has a very different meaning. Or maybe I should say that the meaning of our English word “repent” or “repentance” has shifted over the centuries so that we have lost its original meaning.
The Greek word here is “metanoia” and it doesn’t mean to feel sorry, or to apologize, though that may be part of it. Instead, metanoia is an action word, meaning to change your path. I think that I’ve used this example before, but if you set out from here to drive to Moncton, but you find yourself in Lorneville, you are on the wrong road, and you are better to metanoia, you are better to repent, you are better to change your path right away, rather than waiting until you get to St. Andrew’s exit to do so.
When it comes to behaviour that isn’t in keeping with the way of Jesus, then yes, we maybe should feel sorry for what we have done, and if our actions have harmed another, then an apology is likely going to be part of our metanoia, part of our repentance; but if we keep on doing the thing, then it isn’t repentance, because repentance requires us to change our path. On that road trip to Moncton, saying sorry as you pass the signs to Lorneville and not doing anything else isn’t going to get you on the right path to Moncton!
One translation of the bible that I like reading from, the Common English Bible, translates that word, metanoia, not as “repent” but instead as “change your heart and life”; and I think that in the 21st Century, that maybe captures the meaning of the word better that “repent.” “Change your hearts and your lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!”
And I think that Peter, Andrew, James, and John maybe give us the ultimate example of metanoia. In that moment, their lives that were heading down one path, a path of fishing in the Sea of Galillee, has taken a sudden turn, and now they are literally following after Jesus. The Holy Spirit has changed their hearts and their lives in an instant, in a way that we can’t explain in any rational way.
And maybe this is the metanoia, the repentance, the transformation that we are all continually being called to. It may not be as spectacularly visible as the transformation of the fishermen in today’s story, but as we move through our lives, the Holy Spirit is always working within us, always transforming us, always nudging us this way and that so that as we move through life, our lives are aligned with who God created us to be, and with the way that Jesus shows us.
Ross drove over to Long Reach with me this morning, and in the car we were talking about the theme of today’s service; and in our conversation, we realized that one local example of metanoia here at Two Rivers Pastoral Charge is our Affirming Journey. We were on this pathway going this direction as a welcoming congregation, but then the Holy Spirit nudged us in our journey – nudged us to expand our love, to become more welcoming and Affirming – so that now our path is taking us in this direction, more aligned with God’s expansive love.
The Holy Spirit is always transforming us, so that we might be channels of peace and of love, so that we might bring God’s healing power to the world, so that we might be hope-bearers, so that we might reflect the light of Christ into the shadows.
This is metanoia, this is aligning our path with the path we are called to follow, this is changing our hearts and our lives so that we might be Christ’s presence in the world.
Rather than a threat, I hear this as an invitation. We are invited to change our hearts and our lives; for God’s world, God’s kingdom is at hand. It’s just around the corner, and we are invited to be a part of it! O, Holy Spirit, come and transform us, so that we can be part of this new thing. Amen.
“Sea
of Galilee”
Photo by Michael Coyer on flickr
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