Jan. 27, 2008

“Dropping Everything and Leaving”

By Harry T. Cook

Matthew 4: 12-13

An issue is raised for aspiring Christians in today’s reading from Matthew, which depicts the calling of four of what would become a total of 12 disciples. All four of them – two pairs of what the text calls “brothers,” but which may not mean blood brothers – were engaged in some way in the fishing business.

Their names were Peter and Andrew, and James and John Zebedee, the latter perhaps engaged in a family fishing business because their father is mentioned in the text. Fish were important then as now to the Mediterranean diet, meaning, one would think, that fishing was a fairly prosperous business. I think that’s what Matthew wants us to think.

So one day Jesus shows up, having learned that John the Baptist – that other troubler of the powers that were in the first third of the First Century C.E. – was in prison and therefore out of the public eye. Matthew is maybe hinting that Jesus thought he could not go solo on what would be a difficult mission and so was out recruiting.

Why would Matthew imagine that Jesus could successfully have beguiled four businessmen into dropping everything and going off with him into the unknown? What made Matthew think that his first hearers or readers, much less those of subsequent generations, would credit that story?

Who with any sense of responsibility can simply walk away from a home, a business or a family to follow a guy who makes the silly promise that former fishermen will catch people instead? You can hear Father Zebedee mutter to himself as sons James and John show him their backs that the family is in the fish business, not the people business. And besides people have to eat, and fish is a staple. So what gives?

Only one thing I know of impels a person to so abruptly and radically change the course of his or her life. It’s called “love at first sight,” and almost always ruins and disappoints. Love at first sight is the proverbial 99 times out of 100, at best infatuation and at worst pure lust – if that’s not an oxymoron. So when the passion wears off and the lights come on . . .

It’s that one time that changes lives and worlds. And that’s what Matthew wants us to believe about the encounter between Jesus and the fisherman. Matthew wants us to believe that Jesus appeared so irresistible that Peter, Andrew, and the Zebedee brothers had nothing to do but drop their nets where they were, abandon their formerly made commitments and take on a brand new one.

Matthew may have wanted any who heard or read his version of the gospel to understand that followers of Jesus are always in the “people” business, not the fish business or the grocery business or the oil business or in anyone of the thousands of businesses that make up human commerce. Not that the fish, or the grocery or the oil business is unimportant or unnecessary. That’s not Matthew’s point. It’s that the “people” business is often neglected, so somebody better be in it. And why not recruit a pair of successful fish business guys to apply their cleverness and experience to it?

So it is that any church worthy of the name is or should be in the “people” business. Not necessarily snagging them unawares or netting them up like so many herring. The word “church” as found in the New Testament actually means “people” – as in the Greek word ekklesia – meaning ones who are called together, and that for a purpose. What purpose?

The answer to that question is one with which the Christian church has wrestled mightily over the centuries? For the purpose of making people believe and espouse the same doctrines? For the purpose of building more stately cathedrals? For the purpose of supporting a remote hierarchy in the manner to which it has either become accustomed or would like to become accustomed? For the purpose of saying to the rest of the world’s slobs that their religions are deficient and irrelevant – a message we hear with increasing frequency from the papal apartments in Vatican City?

Supposing for the moment that Matthew’s narrative represents something close to the actual truth of the matter – that people like Peter and Andrew and James and John dropped everything and went with Jesus – you know that, at some point when the newness of it all began to wear off, one or more of them wondered what they were doing, why they were going down pathways far from home through ever more distant days.

On one of those days, Matthew will go on to write in chapter 26 verse 56: All the disciples deserted him and fled. A chapter later Matthew will depict Peter’s particular defection: I do not know the man.

Thus ended the “people” business – at least for a time. But it would never be the same again with that desertion and defection as part of its history. And thus would the people named for Jesus Christ go on into our own time trying, often unsuccessfully, to remember they are, in fact, in the “people” business, which, done right, does not build up bank accounts or build mega-churches or do anything other than care – care for people of all sorts and conditions until . . . until what?

A friend gave Sue and me for a wedding present a ceramic cow. The gift tag said, “May you love each other until the cows come home.” That’s the answer to “until what?” Not “until the going gets tough.”

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.