From that time, Jesus began to preach and to say, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” As he was standing by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen. He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They immediately left their nets and followed him. He walked along from there and saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him. He went around all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness among the people. (Matthew 4.17-23)
After weeks of waiting, we finally find Jesus beginning his public ministry in these verses. It’s been a long wait after the last few weeks, working our way through the nativity, the visit of the magi, and John the Baptist at the Jordan River. Here in Chapter 4 of Matthew’s gospel, we get to see Jesus all grown-up, baptized, and tempted in the desert. With all that behind him, he’s ready to begin his mission, his purpose in life.
It is important to see that Matthew makes a big point about geography as he puts Jesus on his path in life. Earlier, in 3.13, the evangelist told us that “Jesus came down from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him.”Here in 4.12, he writes,“When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.”
For Matthew, this information is important, often finding ancient passages in the Hebrew scriptures, particularly from the prophets, to support where Jesus is and what Jesus does, in this way making the case that he is the fulfillment of the promise for a Messiah. Matthew makes it clear that Galilee is where Jesus begins his ministry because it fulfills an ancient testimony.
Not only that. It is where Jesus does almost all of his teaching, healing, and spreading the good news. Except for those last few days in Jerusalem, Jesus’ life and actions will be done in Galilee. Of course, Matthew follows the lead of Mark in confining the mission to Galilee. Luke will follow their lead. Only John has Jesus traveling back and forth to Jerusalem, as many as three times.
Many of us are unfamiliar with the geography of the Bible. So, it might benefit us to learn that Galilee was at the northern edge of Roman Palestine, with Syria a hop and a skip above Galilee. In terms of land area, Galilee was about forty-five miles from north to south. To the south was Samaria, a region that separated Galilee from Judea, both in terms of religion and practice. An ancient schism, rooted in where to do sacrifices, had caused the initial rupture.
While both Galilee and Judea were considered alike in their practice of Judaism, Galilee, seventy-five miles separating Nazareth from Jerusalem, was considered the far away provinces and its residents were thought as, at best, hicks. Or as we find one of John’s disciples saying when he first hears of Jesus, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”
Likewise, when Jesus was hauled before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem and Peter hid in the shadows in the courtyard, someone saw him and said, “You too are one of them, even your speech gives you away.” We can conclude the city folk saw the Galileans as their cousins from the country, complete with a hickish drawl and backwoods manners.
For the most part, the major means of livelihood in Galilee were farming and fishing. Knowing this helps us understand why so many of Jesus’ parables would be built around these occupations. It was what was most familiar to him and to his fellow Galileans. We could conclude Jesus used what was at hand as his teaching tools.
Also, it is of interest to see that Matthew makes Capernaum the home base of Jesus, not Nazareth. We have no idea as to why Jesus chose Capernaum. Some have speculated that it was the hometown of Peter and hence Jesus also adopted it as his own. While it may have been Jesus’ base of operations, Matthew makes it clear that Jesus and his small band of followers hit the road, so to speak, moving around Galilee. Or, as the evangelist describes it, “He went around all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and illness among the people.”
We’re also introduced to the Sea of Galilee in the passage for today. It was a fresh water body, eight miles in width at his widest point, and thirty-two miles around. Capernaum rested on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee and, as a result, was a fishing village. It is for that same reason that the first people Jesus extended his invitation to others to follow him were fishermen whose livelihood was dependent on fresh-water catches of fish.
Matthew makes the invitation simple and direct, telling us that Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee one day when he saw two brothers who were casting a net into the sea and he said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” A short while later, he saw two other brothers who were in a boat, mending their nets, and he also called out to them to follow him.
In most ways, Matthew sticks closely to Mark’s text when describing the call of the first disciples. And while he does not use the word “immediately” as frequently as Mark does throughout his gospel, we find him using it here when he describes the fishermen’s response to Jesus’ invitation, stressing that “at once they left their nets” or again, “immediately they left their boat.”
There are any number of possible ways of explaining the quick response of these first four followers–Peter and Andrew, James and John. The preferred explanation is that Jesus was persuasive and his manner was attractive. Perhaps they also were intrigued by his central message–identical to John the Baptist’s–found in the words we hear Matthew put in his mouth immediately before the call, “Jesus began to preach and say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”
While there is a want to eulogize the disciples for their unhesitant response to Jesus’ invitation, it bears some scrutiny because, as time would prove, they often misunderstood Jesus as much as everybody else did and, in the end, they all ran for cover when Jesus needed them the most.
So, in fairness, I suspect their response at the start may have been a bit less sure and spontaneous than it is presented. Or, if they started strong, they didn’t stay strong, which would be much truer to the human experience that we live with every single day, making these guys very identifiable to us.
As I look at the start of Jesus’ public ministry as told to us by the evangelist Matthew, two things stand out. One is location as we have seen; the second is the people he called to follow him. And both can’t be looked at without immediately noticing the complete ordinariness of each of them. There is nothing extraordinary about Galilee just as there is nothing extraordinary about those four fishermen who were on the job when Jesus called them.
That point should say something to us, I believe. If such was the place where Jesus did the majority of his work and if such were the people he trusted to be his followers, then, by extension, we can say he calls us where we are and whoever we are. We can do the work wherever we find ourselves, even if far from the bright lights of the city, and we can do the work even if we consider ourselves nobody of significance, more likely seeing ourselves as just ordinary people living very ordinary lives.
No matter. The call comes to us where we are and the call comes to us whoever we are. The most central point of the Christian belief is that God became man. But we often fail to appreciate the second part of that belief–God became man in a nowhere place among people who were nobody special. There is a profound point to be taken from that fact, a reminder that every single spot in this vast world is a place where we can bump into God and, in that encounter, be called to do his work.
It is easy for us to think otherwise, to believe there is little we can do in the corner of the world where we live. But it is not so. Jesus, the Son of God, found his mission in the backwaters of Galilee, walking those dirt roads day in and day out, helping the people he found along the way, poor people, hungry people, forgotten people.
Until the last week of his life, he stayed right where he was, his sphere of influence about forty-five miles north to south, and thirty miles east to west. So, our own sphere of influence does not require a world stage, only a few steps out of our front door. It is the same sentiment that Mother Teresa was quick to share with others. When admirers used to travel long distances to Calcutta, wanting to work with her, she would tell them, “Find your own Calcutta.”
Another time, when visiting Phoenix, she was interviewed by the local radio station. The announcer asked Mother Teresa if there was anything he could do for her. Probably, he expected to hear a request for a donation or a good word. Instead, much to his surprise, she answered, “Yes, there is. Find somebody nobody else loves and love them.”
In both instances, the spry little nun showed that the mission of Jesus is right before us. We often hear the phrase, “All politics is local.” So is the work of Jesus. It stares us in the face every single day. Right around the corner is someone nobody else loves. We can love that person. A walk down the street and we will find someone who needs a warm coat. We can take the extra coat out of our closet and give it to that person. As we move down the aisle of the grocery store, we will see a single mom struggling with her two small children, worried about how she is going to feed them. We can help her.
What we find today at the start of Jesus’ ministry, then, is an important message for our own answer to the call of Jesus to follow him. He isn’t asking us to go thousands of miles and he isn’t asking us to be anybody but who we are. His work can be done anywhere and it can be done by anybody. It doesn’t require specialness in either instance.
In his book “The Whole Language,” Father Gregory Boyle, the Jesuit priest who started Homeboys Industries in one of the roughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a widely successful gang-intervention and rehabilitation program that has offered hope and a new path for thousands of young men and women who had nothing left to live for, surrounded as they were everyday by poverty, by violence in the streets, and by the ugliness of life wherever they looked, tells of the visit that a couple from the Midwest made one day to his place of work.
It had been on the couple’s bucket list, as hard as that is to imagine. After spending several hours getting a tour of the facilities, including Homeboys Bakery, visiting with these gang members who had turned around their lives, and listening to some of their stories, the wife couldn’t speak after they had returned to Father Boyles’s office. It took her a few moments to compose herself before she finally found the words that she wanted to say to Father Boyle.
And what did she say? She said, “This is the Sistine Chapel.” This is the Sistine Chapel. Father Boyle smiled. He knew what she meant. It didn’t take a trip to Rome or to stand before one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces to feel the presence of God. She had felt it on a turf of downtown Los Angeles, the city of angels, where ex-gang members did not wear wings, but heavy tattoos, hardened souls who had found love and redemption in the last place in the world where anybody would have expected to find it, with loud city noises all around and exhaust fumes filling the air.
It is the same thing that Matthew is trying to tell us. This is the Sistine Chapel. Where? Right here where we live. All it needs is some touch up paint done by the hands of a painter willing to splash a little of the love and mercy and goodness of God on all the city walls that surround us, covered as they are with dark graffiti, obscene words, and dead dreams. The only question for us is if we’ll get out our paintbrushes to do the work.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 