Epiphany 3, Year A | Matthew 4:12-23
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
January 22, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” – Matthew 4:19[1]
It’s hard to believe Christmas was almost a month ago. All our major American cultural celebrations have passed. At this point, drifting through Epiphany, we tend to shift our focus to Lent and its arrival exactly one month from today. And while we’re waiting for Ash Wednesday, it’s easy to ask ourselves what exactly the point of the Season of Epiphany is. In a lot of ways, it’s feels like a sort of holding space, a pause failing to distract us from the coming 40 days’ of repentance and preparation to follow Jesus into death. But it’s important for us to pay attention to the present as well as the future, to live the Bible’s stories, and our own, as they come to us, neither jumping ahead nor trying to rebuild the past but paying attention to where we are at the moment.
Epiphany might feel like we’re just waiting for the next big thing, but it’s an important portion of the Church Year that allows us to turn our attention to revelation, bringing to light the incarnate reality of Christ and the Gospel. As such, that’s a good place to start as we begin looking at each of our Bible readings throughout this season. Isaiah shines that light directly in our faces this morning, announcing “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; | those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”[2] Matthew then picks up Isaiah’s theme and turns it into a spotlight on Jesus, who has recently returned from his baptism and temptation. We catch his entrance to public ministry in time to hear him proclaim the Good News for the first time: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near!”[3]
But Matthew fails to flesh out this pronouncement, immediately jumping into the calling of the first Apostles. If you were here last week, you might remember that the Book of John told us a slightly different story, beginning with Andrew leaving John the Baptist to follow Jesus, quickly inviting Peter to join him, and then making the first declaration of Jesus as the Messiah—God’s anointed one. But Matthew and Mark instead offer us a scene where Peter and Andrew are called at the same time, with James and John joining them shortly after. At this point Jesus also utters one of the strangest phrases in the Bible: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”
“Fishing for people”—or “fishers of men,” as I grew up hearing the phrase—has both delighted and confused me for about as long as I can remember. My dad loved to go fishing, and as a child, I always wanted to join him. He liked to take his rowboat out on the lake, but we generally stayed on the dock—likely because being on the water absolutely terrified me. Dad was always excited to catch a trout or bass while I preferred the smaller fish like perch, bluegills, and especially the ugly brown bullheads that filled the waters around Door County.
Based on my understanding of the activity, “fishing for people” was both a hilarious and uncomfortable image. Thinking of people eating worms and getting pulled up into the air or flopping around on a pier made me giggle. But having caught myself with a hook a couple times, I also recognized it would be a tremendously painful experience. It was bad enough snagging my arm or back; imagining one of them embedding itself inside my cheek was nearly unthinkable. So despite the positive spin church tried to put on Jesus’ phrase, I knew that I certainly wasn’t interested in being caught, and I was pretty sure no one else would particularly appreciate it either.
As I got older my concerns with the phrase continued to grow. After all, fish like being in water. They need to be in the water and have to be forcibly removed. They would suffocate if left in the open air, and even if placed in a bucket or hooked on a line back in the water, they were just biding time until someone decided to eat them. That more or less makes it sound like we’re being told to kidnap people, place them in a hostile environment, and make them sit around waiting for their doom. So why would Jesus talk about that like a good thing? It certainly didn’t sound like Good News to me. It still doesn’t.
Even once I understood that fishing with a net was much different than fishing with a hook, this saying continued to confuse me, becoming one of those parts of the Bible I mostly just tried to ignore—until I learned about the ancient view of the Cosmos.
We’ve talked a few times about how people understood the universe to work back in Jesus’ day. There were three primary realms: the Heavens, home to the Celestial beings; the Earth, home to humans and animals; and the Underworld, home to the dead and things unknown. Each was associated with part of nature. The sky represented the Heavens, land Earth, and the sea the Underworld. The skies displayed an example of perfect order, stability, and contentment—everything running exactly as God instructed. The ravenous sea, however, wished to consume everything, returning chaos and death to all reality. The Heavens, however, kept the Underworld at bay, preventing the great waters from devouring the land. That made Earth—our realm—more than a simple barrier between the powers of sky and sea. It was an incursion, evidence of the Heavens authority and proof that order could overcome chaos, at least to some extent. The Celestial host had tasked humanity with wrestling against any of Chaos’ encroachments in order to ensure the Reign of the Heavens throughout the Earth.
Coming back to our text, we find Jesus proclaiming that same Kingdom/Reign of the Heavens. It’s probably no coincidence then that the first thing Matthew shows us Jesus doing after making his pronouncement is to stroll along the shore of the sea. This man from Heaven doesn’t just wander the Earth but directs himself right up to the edge of what still remains of the defiant and rebellious Underworld.
In that context, fishing for people begins to make more sense. Jesus is offering to make Peter, Andrew, James, and John fellow servants of the sky, allowing them to join the work of drawing the denizens of the sea from the unpredictable realm of Death and Chaos to the stability of land and the light and uncontested authority of the Heavens. The image becomes even clearer when we discover that the word Jesus uses for “fishing” makes absolutely no reference to fish. It’s more literally translated as “sunning” or “daylighting.” So contrary to my concerns, Jesus has never been suggesting that he’ll teach the Apostles how to hook people and snatch them from their natural habitat in some sort of bait and switch evangelism. He’s offering Andrew and the other soon-to-be Apostles the opportunity to join the Celestial work of liberating the dead, of raising people consumed and overwhelmed with Chaos from cold and heavy darkness to the light of the sun, where the Holy Spirit can once again breathe into them the breath of life, restoring them from the inside and further inspiring the Reign of the Heavens where once it had no hold.
Jesus offers us this same opportunity today. Like those first Apostles, we have the chance to repent—which is simply to change—and to join his work. Our efforts to spread God’s message of love aren’t simply intended to transport people from one environment to another, to alter someone’s context in hope of cleaning them off and drying them out. We’re forming an entirely new creation. We participate in the work of God, reaching through the darkness and drawing people to hope and possibility and light. We join Jesus in daylighting “those who sat in the region and shadow of death”,[4] reflecting the brightness and warmth of God’s “great light” among those who may have never even imagined it. We raise “the people who walked in darkness” to where they can finally breathe God’s Breath and receive God’s life, where they too can join in Christ’s invitation to “fish for people.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Isaiah 9:2
[3] Matthew 4:17
[4] Matthew 4:16