READINGS

1. Matthew 4:12-23
2. Ezekiel 47

HOMILY

At the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, we've read Matthew's account of the baptism.

Last week, we had a little dip into John's understanding of the same event.

Today we continue on with Matthew's gospel.

We skipped the reading of The Temptations of Jesus, which happened between the baptism and our present text, because we're going to get its reading during Lent.

So what we have now is after Jesus's Temptations.

After he's come back, roughly to the area where John was, Jesus sees that John has been arrested by Herod Antipas and presumably taken to prison in Tiberius.

So then it says 'he withdrew to Galilee'.

That's an odd translation, because the verb can mean 'withdrew', but King James quite rightly has 'departed', where he moved to.

Going to Nazareth leaving there and going to Capernaum was actually going closer to Tiberius, which was the royal capital in the Galilee.

It was the area which Jewish people didn't go into, because it had apparently been built on a cemetery, thus considered thoroughly impure.

Jesus, however, is not moving away from the place where John had been taken, so withdrawing is an odd word.

Jesus is moving in that direction, but staying within a place more acceptable to Jewish people.

Jesus leave Nazareth, makes his home in Capernaum - by our standards a small village, but it was the Jewish capital of the area.

The key thing about it is that, although it was a small port, it was on the main North-South road, so there was an awful lot of people going through the whole time.

Matthew's geography is somehow hagiographical, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,  
the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan,  
Galilee of the Gentiles

The original in Isaiah doesn't have 'on the road by the Sea', but it has 'on the sea Road'.

Rather than referring to the Sea of Galilee, he refers to the root that went along actually quite far inland by the sounds of those days, but along between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

It was known as the Sea Route, so it ran from Egypt's to Mesopotamia and this was where it ran on its way between those two points: it was a major major traveling route.

It says duality of the Gentiles, which refers to the fact that, after the fall of the first Kingdom to the Assyrians of the northern kingdom, then to the syrians in the 8th Century, the Assyrians did a deliberate policy of deportation and importation of different peoples.

So there was a thoroughly mixed bunch of peoples of different types - by no means all Jews or Gentiles -, all living together in this area.

It was a very much a mixed culture mixed religion area.

Then the prophecy says:

the people living in darkness  
have seen a great light;  
on those living in the land of the shadow of death  
a light has dawned.

Whatever it meant at the time that Isaiah wrote it, would easily have been understood to refer to the area ruled over by Herold Antibas from Tiberius, because that was a City built on the cemeteries of the shadow of death that light has dawned.

So Jesus is moving into this place to begin to fulfill of the prophecy of Isaiah in a thoroughly mainstream, much traveled route.

In other words, there's a very good communications point for all for the whole area.

From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Now immediately he's taking up John's preaching. That's exactly the same phrase that Matthew describes John as using.

So here John has been taken away. His period has come has come to an end, so Jesus immediately starts repeating the same thing as John has said.

However, his understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven coming near turns out to be somewhat different.

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 19 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” 20 At once they left their nets and followed him.

Now behind this there is a whole set of imageries from The Book of Ezekiel 47.

The first thing was that a river was going to flow out from the new Temple and it was going to bring life to people.

This appears to have been fulfilled in John's baptism leading to Jesus's baptism and then the river was going to flow into a brackish* lake and bring it to life.

brackish: ==mix of fresh and saltwater==, making it slightly salty, like in estuaries where rivers meet the sea.

The brackish life is actually referred to as being in roughly the same area as the Sea of Galilee was.

Jesus appears to be talking about bringing to life the war from the waters that are flying to the new Temple in the Sea of Galilee and indeed people are being caught the fish there.

So there's a suggestion that the coming of the Kingdom, which is being proclaimed by Jesus, is fulfilling very exactly a prophecy from Ezekiel, from where comes the image of the fisherman.

It's even more important that, after the fishing element, we're then told that the New Kingdom would evolve setting up um the boundaries of the land in order to choose the 12 people of Israel.

So the the Kingdom of God is going to have a new 12 tribes, and then it says you shall divide it equally.

That's our translation, but actually the original uses the term 'you shall divide it brother by brother'.

In other words, it's very important that Jesus starts by choosing two brothers as being the signs, who are of the coming in of the Kingdom, the signs of the two of the new tribes.

The importance of brothers is brought out by Jesus choosing brothers.

His first choices of two sets of Brothers.

He said to them 'follow me and I will make you fish for people'.

He's inviting them into this project of the coming of the Kingdom, because he's not particularly asking them to repent yet.

He's asking them to do something much more drastic, which is to follow him.

Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

So we're continuing with this absolute equality of those in the New Kingdom.

Again, James and John, famous at the sons of thunder, sons of Zebedee.

Something we are going to get with great insistence in Matthew: there are no fathers in the Kingdom; we're all equal; no man is your father.

We're talking about an entirely horizontal belonging in the Kingdom, even these disciples who will be the signs of the twelve are equal amongst each other and have an equality with us, because there is only brethren, only siblings in the Kingdom that is coming in.

So from the very beginning, Jesus starts to indicate making enriching this text of Ezekiel.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, ...

This is written at a time when there was some separation between Christians and Jews, because he's referring to their synagogues.

Proclaiming the good news suggests that he's doing that outside of the synagogues, in places where everybody is.

He's got two messages: teaching for people who will understand the texts and proclaiming, which is done amongst people who don't necessarily understand much about texts.

We're going to see how important these are during the rest of the Gospel.

... proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 

That's going to be how the Gospel from here on works.

We're going to get first him teaching the kind of things he teaches in the presence of Jewish authorities and explains things and then later the signs, the curing every disease and sickness.

These are the signs Matthew sets up in advance: the structure of what's about to happen.

Notice that, at this stage, although he's calling the disciples, he's not primarily teaching them.

He does his special teaching for them in the second half of Matthew's gospel; in the first half, it's reaching to the people.

It's not only Jewish people: we get misled by the later phrase 'have I not come to teach, to care for the the lost sheep of Israel', which may have been a much more ironic statement than we usually treat as to thinking that he was only talking to Jewish people.

It's quite clear, in this region, that if he was talking to people, then that's clearly not the case as the very next verse says:

News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. 25 Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.

He'd chosen deliberately a point of irradiation that was going to talk to Jews, Gentiles, people from who had lived within the Jewish general region, even if not being Jewish and people even beyond that you know as far as Syria.

The universality of the mission is a very interesting beginning.

It does seem to start very early on in Matthew's gospel and we'll see how that works itself out over time as we get on with it.

Anyhow here, at the very beginning of the Gospel, Jesus is the beginning of his ministry. Jesus is kind of marking his territory.

Once John is arrested, he moves into place and starts by saying the same thing as John: 'repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand'.

Then he already begins to create the sign of the Kingdom that is coming, in the face of which people are going to be able to repent.

It's always God showing God's self first that enables repentance, rather than a moral instruction followed by something nice.

In practice, the indicative always comes before the imperative, even though, in rhetoric, sometimes it's the other way around.

That's a central the Matthew as it is to all the gospels and to any understanding of Grace.

A powerful beginning with Matthew setting up quite clearly how he is going to be tackling these things from now on: first teaching and then signs.

The only time that teaching is used of anybody other than Jesus in Matthew's gospel is at the very end when Jesus commands the disciples to baptize and to teach.

But here it's only Jesus who teaches the disciples when it comes to be their turn will be sent out to proclaim, to cure and so forth.

Teaching here is Jesus's preserve until the very very end with the Great Commission.