Zebedee
Matthew 4:12-23
Click here for the video, "Zebedee."
When our family left Denver so that I could attend seminary in Austin, Texas, one of the things we left behind was our home church. And that was hard, because we began attending that church when Marie and I were still dating. The associate pastor presided at our wedding. Miranda was baptized there. We loved that church, and that made it hard to find a new church once we got to Austin. There was no shortage of choices, but few that we were excited about going back to a second time. One of the good things to come from sampling all those different houses of worship was seeing the differences from week to week. One of those churches concluded worship with a song that included the line, “Now that worship is over, the service begins.”
Which is sort of what our reading from Matthew is about this morning. Jesus has already presented himself to John as the Jordan, where he was not just baptized, but anointed by the Holy Spirit that broke open the heavens as a voice declared, “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.” That’s some pretty powerful worship. So powerful, in fact, that it drives Jesus into the wilderness for some equally intense soul searching. What happens on the other side of Jesus’ forty days spent in the wilderness is the subject of this morning’s reading, and it begins with some hard news. Jesus gets back from his retreat to find out that the Baptizer has been picked up by Herod’s guards and thrown in jail. Up to this point, the crowds had been coming out to see John, to hear John. They hadn’t really heard anything from Jesus, just about him when John mentioned the one coming after him. So, now what?
Jesus withdraws from Judea and returns to the north country of Galilee to effectively begin his ministry. For reasons that will be made painfully clear when he goes back to preach at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus decides not to set up shop in Nazareth. Instead he goes with the more populated and slightly more worldly town of Capernaum, on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee along a well-traveled trade route from Damascus. At first glance, it looks like a smart decision- one that puts a little distance between him and the powers down south who had come for John. The gospel writer frames it less as a savvy act of self-preservation, however, and more as one more act of fulfillment, one more way in which Jesus’ life fills full the words of the prophet that talk about the people sitting in darkness who have seen a great light. Matthew makes it clear from the outset that what happens with Jesus, even the town where he resides, is the working out of something much larger than the life of a single man. Jesus is living out the larger designs of God, as revealed by the prophet long before Jesus was born, to redeem a broken world. When Jesus arrives in Capernaum on the heels of his baptismal anointing and subsequent spiritual trial, he is ready enter into the work that will bring about this larger plan of God’s. And how he begins sets the tone for the what is to come.
He begins by proclaiming what John had been proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” The words are roughly the same, but what he does with them marks a departure from what John was doing at the Jordan. John’s cry was a demand that people clean up their lives, have a change of heart that would prepare them for something more. But with Jesus, repentance is less a call to contrition and more a call to reorientation; a call to head in a new direction. If John’s call to repentance was in anticipation of what was coming, Jesus’ call is an announcement of its arrival. The kingdom has come near, and its coming is going to change your life. Usually when people talk about changing their lives they talk in terms of self-improvement. I lost 50 pounds, and it really changed my life. I read Tuesdays with Morrie, I discovered mochi, I quit smoking, I took up running, or knitting, or painting;, I went back to school and got my degree and it changed my life. Sometimes it’s something small, sometimes it’s something much bigger. For the most part, the changes that we seek are those that are meant to have a positive impact on our lives; they’re changes that we think will make us happy, bring us peace, increase our sense of security and well-being in a world that we perceive as increasingly uncertain. But the change that Jesus is talking about, the kingdom whose nearness he proclaims, may not bring us any of the things that we typically look for in the changes that we seek. At least, not in the ways that we are used to. When Jesus arrives in Capernaum with his message of changed lives and the nearness of God’s present realm, he ventures down to the water’s edge to invite a few fishermen to follow him. Who knows why he chooses them? They certainly aren’t the movers and the shakers. They don’t have any real influence or power. Maybe that’s why he chooses them. They were willing, or able, to leave their nets where they lay. They literally dropped everything and took him up on his invitation. And in case we are tempted to judge the split-second decision of Peter and Andrew as some kind of fluke- the desperate response of fishermen of such limited resources that they have to fish from the shore because they don’t have a boat- Jesus also invites James and John. Peter and Andrew didn’t have anything to lose, really, by following Jesus. They were already living day to day. Maybe leaving that to follow Jesus isn’t too surprising. But James and John are a different story. James and John were in the family boat with their father. They wouldn’t have been there if they didn’t see some kind of future in it for themselves. And yet, they too left everything to follow Jesus. G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is something that chooses us, not a thing that we choose.” Perhaps that is what Peter and Andrew, James and John heard in the invitation that came to them. Maybe Jesus words about a kingdom come near sounded like an adventure, the promise of something far greater than their lives had become, certainly greater than the family fishing business. James and John don’t just leave their nets like Peter and Andrew. Did you notice? Matthew say, “Immediately they left the boat, and their father, and followed him.”
So, what about Zebedee? Why didn’t he drop everything too? I mean, he was right there, literally in the same boat as his two sons when this unfamiliar rabbi came wandering down the beach. Didn’t he hear the same call, the same invitation as James and John? It had to be hard for him to watch the future that he had imagined for himself, his expectation for how things were going to be, walk away with someone he had never before laid eyes on. But that is exactly what happened. When Jesus shows up, the adventure of God’s realm laid out before us and the change brought about by God’s power at work in the world goes far beyond how much we might weigh, or the books we read, our habits, our hobbies, or even the things we’ve learned or haven’t learned. The kingdom that draws near to us summons us in a way that redefines our primary family relationships- brother, sister, father, son, mother, daughter- every bit as much as it redefines what we come to see as our work. Instead of making all the well-established patterns of our life more secure, strengthening our families and making us more productive at our jobs, this way of life promises to disrupt many of the things we have taken for granted, making our lives less secure and less predictable.
It would be easy to lose Zebedee in the swirl of this story, in our rush to follow Jesus. But some days find us relating far better to this forgotten father than to the four who drop it all to have their lives radically reordered by the adventure Jesus offers. Some days we’re just bored commuters stalled in traffic, or distracted shoppers doing yet another circuit at the mall. We not always ready for adventure. We may be trying to follow Jesus, but we’re also dragging our feet hoping he didn’t really mean what he said. We drag our feet and try to have it both ways. We want a way to be his disciple and stay in our boats. We look for a way to follow him while following the path our family expects us to walk. Even the four who start out with such boldness will begin dragging their feet as the path Jesus walks leads them nearer and nearer to the danger of the cross. James and John will let their ambitions get the best of them as they jockey for positions of prestige and influence. Peter will challenge Jesus’ predicted death and then abandon and deny him when the events leading to that death are set in motion.
It turns out that this adventure that finds us, this call to follow Jesus is just the beginning of the end of safety, the beginning of the end of a life spent believing that we can ever make ourselves truly secure against the uncertainty of the world and the dragging of our own feet. Because in the end, playing it safe is just about the most dangerous thing any of us can do. And following Jesus, allowing the present power of God at work in this world that draws near to us in him, allowing that to reorder our lives, brings the kind of change that redefines family according to the household of God, and redefines our work according to how our lives will ultimately serve the larger purposes God has in mind.
The time has come to get out of the boat, drop the safety nets, and stop dragging our feet. The adventure has found us. We can play it safe, or we can join the adventure. One way or another, it is bound to change our lives for good. Alleluia, amen.