Fishing for People.

Matthew 4:12-24

January 22, 2017

I.

In my first church there was a woman from Denmark.  She and her family would go visit her home every couple of years, and in 1984 they invited me along.  We toured parts of the country, in the course of which they took me to a tour of the west coast of Jutland, the part of Denmark that connects to mainland Europe.  There we saw the monumental concrete forts built in the 40’s by the Germans, who had conquered Denmark.  Hitler was afraid the allies might invade Germany through Denmark.  NATO had subsequently used some of these monstrosities for target practice since then, but they were still there, and I presume, they still are.  

My hosts were particularly ashamed about this because these fortifications were not technically and actually constructed “by the Germans.”  The Germans paid for them, but the work was done by Danish workers who needed the jobs.  In other words, many Danish men found themselves gainfully employed by their conquerors in physically building forts that were in effect their own national prison. 

I thought of that when I read this story about Jesus calling his firs disciples.  They were fishers.  And we know from historical studies that the Roman Emperor had declared himself the owner of all water and all fish, which meant that the business of fishing was highly regulated and taxed by the Empire.  Fishing was very lucrative for the conquerors, and very hard and not very remunerative work for the locals.  But it was work.  It was a job.  It was better than being unemployed and starving.  To be a fisher was to work for your own subsistence… and to make the Romans rich.

The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has a great term for this practice of working to benefit your oppressors.  He calls it “making bricks for Pharaoh,” referring of course to the condition of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt, as recounted in the book of Exodus.  But he also extends the meaning to include workers of all times, including our own, whose work serves mainly to enrich the moneyed elites who control the economy, and to strengthen their domination of local communities.

The Danish workers are a particularly egregious example of this, but it happens all the time usually in subtler ways.  We convince ourselves that our work is feeding our families and paying our mortgages — and it is.  But we do not want to realize that most of the wealth we are creating by our work does not get realized by us, but by owners, shareholders, bosses, bankers, executives, and others, who don’t do much if any of the work.

Just like these four men, Andrew, Peter, James, and John, most of the profit from whose work is being collected by the Empire, no doubt to feed the legions of soldiers who are busy oppressing, killing, raping, and crucifying their neighbors.  When Jesus shows up, he offers them a whole new framework for their labor.  He offers them transfigured and transformed work.  Instead of fishing for fish to make Caesar rich, he invites them to fish for people in the Kingdom of Heaven.

II.

We tend to make idols out of two big things in our lives: work and family.  They are both good, of course.  Work and family are valuable, necessary, and beneficial to our life.  Everyone agrees that society benefits greatly when people have good jobs and when families are strong and secure.  Work and family are practically the two pillars of a healthy community.

But they become idols for us when they are blown out of proportion and turned into ultimate or nearly ultimate loyalties.  When any parts of a system like this are overly elevated into positions of excessive importance, to the point that other factors are being forgotten or denigrated, we sink into destructive idolatry.  They can even become oppressive, as in Bruce Springsteen’s song, “The River,” when the singer’s life is all but over as soon as he receives “a union card and a wedding coat.”  Work and family are also the way society controls us.

It should get our attention that when Jesus calls disciples, he calls them to abandon their jobs and their families.  This is what we see Peter, Andrew, James, and John doing.  They leave their nets and their boat — the tools of their trade — and they leave their father, not to mention any wives, children, parents, or other family they may have.  

I will simply make the observation that the church does not require this separation anymore from our previous important, intimate connections.  It was common in the early church, though, for becoming a Christian to involve such a profound break with the past that you left your job and even your family to follow Jesus.  This later became and still is the case for monastic communities.  And there are are places in the world where this still happens.  But for 1600 years it has not been necessary or even normal for most Christians to quit their jobs and abandon their families in order to join the church.

Nevertheless, Matthew’s point in telling this part of the story is a reminder for us that discipleship is not a hobby.  It is not an activity we do in our spare time.  It is not separate from our other commitments, but on the contrary, discipleship must transform, orient, and define the other aspects of our life, even things as central and important as work and family.

III.

Jesus himself defines his ministry here in verse 17 when he issues his call for people to: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.”  By proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven and its nearness, Jesus is presenting a different, alternative way of organizing our common life.  Instead of the structures we are given by human powers and authorities Jesus offers a new vision of a different kind of Kingdom.  He gives us new work, and he gives us a new family.  

Jesus will later in his ministry say that we should strive first for the Kingdom of God.  He will say that we may follow either God or money, but never both.  The two are mutually exclusive; if we love one we necessarily hate the other.  Working for money is becoming a slave to the Emperor whose image was stamped on coins.  Jesus has nothing but disdain and sorrow for rich people who have sold their souls for wealth in this fleeting existence.

Working for God is a totally different thing.  Jesus invites these men to “fish for people.”  Matthew then briefly describes what this will entail.  Jesus expresses the good news of the Kingdom by his healing.  He cures “every disease and every sickness among the people.”  They bring to him the sick, “those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics.”  And his reputation quickly spreads all over, from Syria in the north, to Judea in the south, and across the Jordan to the west.

So when Jesus talks about God’s Kingdom, his actions show that it is about healing and wholeness.  It is about bringing people up from debilitated, broken, painful disabilities.  It is about restoring people to health, and banishing people’s diseases, physical as well as things we would identify today as psychological.  In other words, Jesus heads right for the most shattered, lost, hurting, incapacitated, even outcast individuals.  Instead of appealing first to the powerful and the leaders, as would be the church’s strategy so often in history, he locates and ministers to the opposite.  The people at the bottom, the victims of society, the losers.

I was reading something this week suggesting how much of the physical illness we see is caused at least in part by various sick characteristics of our civilization.  Some researchers wonder about how much Cancer, Alzheimers, Autism, Asthma, Heart Disease, Depression, Bipolar Disorder, and other maladies are by-products of the way we live and the chemicals we pump into our environment.  They notice that a lot of this was unheard of to traditional tribes until their are infected with the Modern World.  They notice that healthy families and healthy communities tend to produce healthier people.

“Fishing for people” would have to do at least in part with gathering people out of bad, violent, fearful, disordered relationships, and bringing them up into the light, into communities of shalom, equality, welcome, forgiveness, and justice.  Fishing for people is evangelism.  It is real and good work because it is about changing people by including them in a new, real, and good network of relationships.  

IV.

Fishing for people might also mean doing work that is transfigured to be performed in the service of human needs.  Instead of working to make Caesar richer, we could work to feed, empower, liberate, heal people.  Instead of working in competition to one another, we could work cooperatively, building each other up, sharing.  Instead of working for our own individual benefit, we could dedicate ourselves to work that helps everyone.

Finally, Jesus is clear that this requires repentance, which is the acquisition of a new mind and a new way of thinking and acting.  We simply cannot change ourselves and our world without having what Paul calls the mind of Christ, that is, a soul that sees and knows its connection to God and to all, that understands love as the basic truth of the universe, and that desires only to be nothing so that God’s goodness may flow through us without obstruction into our world.

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