Fascinating

“Fascinating”

Matthew 4:12-23

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

January 23, 2011

There always are at least three layers to every gospel passage we read. The first layer is the most obvious. It is what happens in the passage, the content of it. The second layer is what use the gospel writer makes of the passage. Why did he include it in his version of the gospel? What is he intending to say by it? And then the third layer is what the passage means to you in your life today.

Remember that the gospels were not written as histories, biographies, or chronologies of the life and ministry of Jesus. Rather, they were written to help people to experience Jesus the Christ in the midst of the situations and circumstances of their own lives in their own times. What good would it do to tell stories of Jesus the Christ if they were relegated to the past and had no power or pulse for us in our lives now? They might be interesting and informative, but they would just be stories, impotent to effect changes in us.

The gospel writers, like Matthew, meant to say that Jesus the Christ is a living presence whose spiritual energies are available to us if we avail ourselves of them. The gospel writers wanted us to get “saved” – and by that word “saved” I do not mean the trivial way in which it often is used…as the simple formulaic affirmation of creedal statements about Jesus that earn passage to some future celestial sphere.

The concept of “salvation” is so much bigger than that. It comes from a Hebrew word that means “spaciousness” or “roominess.” The way some Christians use the word “salvation” seems to me to make it small, flat, pigeon-holed. But etymologically speaking, with a good dose of theology thrown in, “salvation” in its original and deepest sense means to enter into largeness, to enter into the largeness of God.

Consider Israel of Bible times and into the present day: space matters. Part of the significant history of Israel is that it constantly is being hemmed in and pressured and constricted by other world powers. So, the ancient Israelites, as Israelis still do today, construed their salvation in terms of room, space, a place sufficient to live freely and securely. Their archetypical story involved deliverance from the confines and constraints of Egyptian slavery into a broad land flowing with milk and honey and freedom. For the Israelites, salvation took the form of ample space to be, to live, to thrive, to raise their families in peace, to practice their religion.

But the spaciousness to which the words “save” and “salvation” points also apply metaphorically. Time after time in the Psalms, the psalmists talk about salvation in terms of being brought into a more expansive life, into greater freedom, into a bigger way of thinking and living, into God’s largeness. A couple of examples:

Psalm 18 – After detailing the press of enemies and pressures crowding in on him, the psalmist says, “God brought me out into a broad place and delivered me because God delighted in me.”

Psalm 4 says in like manner – “When I was in distress, God gave me room.”

And yet another psalm says, “Though I am hemmed in, you, God, will lead me into a wide, open space.”

How many times we say something like that. When we feel stressed, we say we need space. When we feel beleaguered, we plead for room to figure things out. When worries besiege us and anxieties crowd in on us, we say we feel claustrophobic and need to get into a more open place.

This life is not first and foremost about getting into some later one. That is not the primary biblical definition or image of salvation. If we trust that God loves us, if we entrust our lives to God, we do not have to be about the rather selfish endeavor of trying to score a ticket for ourselves to some future heaven. Heaven, the New Testament says, Jesus says, is the experience of living in God and with God and we do not have to wait on that. In our gospel passage today, Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” The life that matters most is the one we presently are living. Salvation is entering into the big-hearted, large-minded, generously-spirited spaciousness of the kingdom of heaven. (What Matthew calls the “kingdom of heaven,” by the way, the other gospel writers call the “ kingdom of God .”) Our gospel reading today tells of the desire of Jesus to draw people into the spaciousness, into the salvation, of the kingdom of heaven and then for those who experience it to draw others into it. The kingdom of heaven for those who enter into it is never meant to be a private proposition.

“There is a wideness in God’s mercy,” says one of our bedrock hymns, “like the wideness of the sea” and it is in that divine wideness that we have the space, the room, the freedom to grow our big mind, our big heart, our big love that banishes in us the pride, prejudice, and provincialism of a small mind, a small heart, a small love.

Barbara Brown Taylor, one of America’s and Chautauqua’s favorite preachers, has written that “Salvation is so much more than many of its proponents would have us believe…Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk…It opens a door in what looked like for all the world a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.”

So we get to the second layer of our text for the day that asks why Matthew included the calling of the disciples in his gospel. Recall that Matthew was writing to the community of Jewish Christians who had fled to Antioch in the wake of the utter destruction of the Great Temple by the Romans. The Temple had been the center of their lives and faith and in the wake of its annihilation, these Messianic Jews – those who had come to believe that Jesus was the fulfillment of the law and the promised Messiah – were confused and confounded. Matthew wanted to assure them that Jesus the Christ was the new Temple and that this new Temple was not comprised of stones and sticks that could be destroyed but Spirit and soul that resided within them. The spiritual energies of Jesus the Christ would guide them through the changes they were facing and lead them into a spaciousness they hardly could imagine.

So Matthew tells of Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee and coming upon two brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew, fishermen both. And Jesus said to them, in the words of Eugene Peterson in his biblical paraphrase: “Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass.” Matthew says that immediately they left their nets and followed him. Same thing with James and John who were in a boat mending their nets with their father, Zebedee. Jesus bid them to follow and “immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.”

They – James and John, Peter and Andrew – must have been fascinated by Jesus to make such a response. They, like us, are fascinated when seeing someone thinking, feeling, or acting in a way we wish we could or would like to. When we are fascinated, we apprentice ourselves to that person who fascinates. It draws us into discipleship. One writer says that “a disciple is a fascinated person who desires to know and do what they see in another.”

Matthew portrays Jesus as a fascinating person. He does not back down or away from Galilee where Herod Antipas has imprisoned John but instead “goes all about Galilee .” He does not wait for people to come to him and ask if they might become his disciples. He assertively does the inviting, bidding people to turn in the direction of God and God’s ways. Jesus is courageous, forthright, and focused and his energy fascinates because it is the opposite of the common human traits of timidity and self-interest.

So, Matthew is saying to the community of Jewish Christians in Antioch , you were right to be fascinated by Jesus the Christ. You were right to attach yourselves to him. You were right to see in him your salvation as he will open for you a door in what looks to you now like a forbidding, foreboding wall. Trust him and follow him.

And then the third layer: Will you allow yourself to be sufficiently fascinated by Jesus the Christ to follow after him?

Years ago, Albert Schweitzer concluded his book on Jesus with what has become a well known valediction, winsomely writing of the way that even in our day Jesus still is calling disciples, still maintaining that true freedom paradoxically is found in being caught in the blessed nets of God’s glory and grace and hauled into the kingdom of heaven:

“He came to us as one unknown without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word "follow thou me" and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is."

There is no “learning who he is” from arm’s length or safe remove but only by following your fascination and allowing yourself to be caught by the same Fisherman Spirit who was in Christ Jesus. Anything less or else may lead to a life you want to throw back.

Amen.

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