NewCreation

Homily for Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the third Sunday in ordinary time. And we return to our reading of Saint Matthew's Gospel. You remember that two weeks ago, at the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, we read Matthew's account of the baptism, and last week we had a little dip into John's understanding of the same event. And today we continue on with Matthew's Gospel. There's been just a slight jump. The jump is the reading of the temptations of Jesus, which happened between the baptism and our present text. But that's obviously because we're going to get the reading of the temptations during Lent, where it comes traditionally each year. So what we have now is after Jesus's temptations, so after he's come back roughly to the area where John was. Jesus hears that John has been arrested. He's been arrested by Herod Antipas, and presumably taken to prison in Tiberias. So then it says he withdrew to Galilee. That's an odd translation. The verb can mean "withdrew," but King James quite rightly has "departed," because in fact where he moved to — in other words, going from Nazareth and going to Capernaum — was actually going closer to Tiberias, 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, and so was considered thoroughly impure. But Jesus is not moving away from the place where John had been taken, so "withdrawing" is an odd word. He's moving in that direction, but staying within a place more acceptable to Jewish people. So he goes to the Galilee, he left Nazareth, his home place, and made his home in Capernaum. Capernaum was by our standards a small village, but it was the Jewish capital of the area. And the key thing about it is that it was a small port, but that it was on the main north-south road, so there was an awful lot of people going through the whole time. And Matthew says "in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali" — apparently it was genuinely the territory of Naphtali, but not of Zebulun. So Matthew's geography is, let us say, hagiographical. "So that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles." Well, actually, I'm just going to look here — the original in Isaiah doesn't have "on the road by the sea," it has "on the sea road," and that rather than referring to the Sea of Galilee refers to the route that went along — actually quite far inland by the standards of those days, but along between Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was known as the sea route. So the sea route ran from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and this was where it ran on its way between those two points. It was a major traveling route. And it says "Galilee of the Gentiles." So again, referring to the… After the fall of the northern kingdom to the Assyrians in the 8th century, the Assyrians had a deliberate policy of deportation and importation of different peoples, so that there was a thoroughly mixed bunch of peoples of different types — by no means all Jews, by no means all Gentiles — all living together in this area. It was very much a mixed culture, mixed religion area. And then the prophecy says: "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and those who sat in the region and shadow of death." And this, whatever it meant at the time that Isaiah wrote it, would easily have been understood to refer to the area ruled over by Herod Antipas from Tiberias, because that was a city built on a cemetery — so the shadow of death. But light has dawned. So Jesus is moving into this place to begin to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah, in a thoroughly mainstream, much-travelled route. In other words, this is a very good communications point for the whole area. "From that time Jesus began to proclaim: '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, John's period has come to an end, and Jesus immediately starts repeating the same thing as John has said — but his understanding of the kingdom of heaven coming near turns out to be somewhat different, as we're about to see. So as he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." Immediately they left their nets and followed him. Now behind this there is a whole set of imagery from the book of Ezekiel. The prophet Ezekiel described what was going to happen from the new Temple — this is Ezekiel chapter 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. So that 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, and the brackish lake is actually referred to as being in roughly the same area as the Sea of Galilee. So Jesus appears to be talking about bringing to life the waters that are flowing from the new Temple into the Sea of Galilee, and indeed people are being taught to fish there. The image of the fishermen comes in Ezekiel. So there's a suggestion here that the coming of the kingdom which is being proclaimed by Jesus is fulfilling very exactly a prophecy from Ezekiel. And it's even more important — what comes after the fishing element… We're then told that the new kingdom will involve setting up the boundaries of the land in order to choose the twelve tribes of Israel. So the kingdom of God is going to have a new twelve tribes; it's going to be inherited by the twelve tribes. We're going to get twelve disciples later. 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, signs of two of the new tribes — "brother by brother," suggesting something about the absolute equality of it. Because the phrase of course does mean "you shall divide it brother by brother," which does of course mean "you shall divide it equally." But here the importance of brothers is brought out by Jesus choosing brothers. His first choices are two sets of brothers. So 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. Curiously, he's not particularly asking them to repent yet. He's asking them to do something much more drastic, which is to follow him. Which he does: "As he went on from there, he saw two other brothers" — so we're continuing with this absolute equality of those in the new kingdom — "James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets; and he called them. Immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him." Again, James and John, famously the sons of thunder, sons of Zebedee. And something which we were going to get with great insistence in Matthew's Gospel: you abandon fathers. There are no fathers in the kingdom of this coming. We're all equal. "Call no man your father" — we'll get that later on. And that's something which is hugely important for understanding what 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 are only brethren, only siblings, in the kingdom that is coming in. So from the very beginning, Jesus starts to indicate — enriching this text of Ezekiel — what he's doing. This reality of what the kingdom that is being announced is actually going to look like. Then it says, "Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues." So obviously this is written at a time when there was some separation between Christians and Jews, because he's referring to their synagogues. But that's something that he's doing. He's teaching in the synagogues, but proclaiming the good news suggests that he's doing that outside the synagogues in places where everybody is. So he's got two messages: teaching for people who would understand the texts, and proclaiming, which is done amongst people who don't necessarily understand much about texts. And we're going to see how important these are during the rest of the Gospel. "Proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every 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. So we can get a chunk of Matthew that is now teaching coming after this, and a chunk thereafter that is the signs. Here 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. But it's not only Jewish people. We get misled by the later phrase, "have I not come to care for the lost sheep of Israel" — which may have been a much more ironic statement than we usually treat it as — into thinking that he was only talking to Jewish people here. But 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: "So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan." In other words, he'd chosen deliberately a point of irradiation that was going to talk to Jews, Gentiles, people who had lived within the Jewish general region even if not being Jewish, and people from even beyond that, going as far as Syria. So it's a very interesting beginning. The universality of the mission 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. But anyhow, here at the very beginning of the Gospel, Jesus is at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is kind of marking his territory. Once John is arrested he moves into place and starts. He starts by saying the same thing as John: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And then he already begins to create the sign of the kingdom that is coming, and in the face of which therefore people are going to be Able to repent, because of course it's always God showing God's self first that enables repentance, rather than a moral instruction followed by something nice. The indicative always comes before the imperative in practice, even though in rhetoric sometimes it's the other way around. That's central to Matthew as it is to all the Gospels and to any understanding of grace. A powerful beginning, with Matthew setting out 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. But teaching here is Jesus's preserve, if you like, until the very, very end with the Great Commission. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.