If Jesus was out to make his mark, our story from Matthew today suggests that he was going about it in all the wrong ways.
Maybe ten years ago, when I was teaching middle school religion at a Protestant school, I first encountered the TV miniseries on the Bible called, creatively, The Bible, which I would use at times. It wasn’t a bad series altogether, though the Gospel stories lacked the personal appeal that we get in The Chosen. In any case, one of the worst scenes in the whole thing is the depiction of this story of Jesus calling the disciples in Matthew. In it we see Jesus hopping into the boat of Peter, who asks Jesus what they are going to do, and Jesus gives Peter this amazingly hokey expression and then says, with perfect sincerity, “Change the world.”
This is complete rubbish. The TV writers give us that amazing line because they think it is true, and because they know that most of us think it must be true, because obviously Jesus is great, and so he must be out there to change the world, following the advice of every high school or college graduation speaker for the past fifty years.
But if he were trying to change the world, he would be going to hobnob the first-century equivalent of Oprah. He would be going to New York or LA, or, in his case, Jerusalem, or even better, Rome. He would be telling amazing, inspiring stories and getting the attention of kings and emperors and influencers. But instead of all that, he goes as far from the centers of power as possible, to Capernaum in Galilee, which is basically like a lakeside village somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia, and instead of saying inspiring, original things, his first sermon is basically a one-line repetition of what his cousin John the Baptist had already been preaching for months: repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
I think we hear that word “repent,” and it brings up a very religious set of ideas: repent of your sins, acknowledge your faults, turn your life around. But its meaning in Greek is much broader. It can mean “change your mind.” Or possibly “think in a new way.” And so, rather than going around preaching what we might think of as a standard religious message, the kind of thing we might hear from a street preacher in the big city, Jesus is going around saying, without clear explanation, “Change your mind, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” People are amazed, indeed, both by his strange words and by his miraculous deeds. But most of these same people are those who, at the end of the story, say, “Let him be crucified.”
I think it’s fair to say, in this context, that when Jesus then starts going to a bunch of fishermen and saying, “Follow me,” there is something truly unusual about this character that cannot be categorized as one more very sincere fellow who decides, upon turning thirty, that it’s his mission to “make an impact,” to “change the world.”
If Jesus isn’t inviting the fisherman into some cool new first-century startup adventure, what’s he doing? We don’t really need to make it all that complicated. He’s inviting them to follow him.
We find this surface reading somewhat difficult, mostly because we have all been raised drinking the Kool-Aid of modern Western culture, which tells us about every five seconds that the goal of everything is to do your own thing, to be your own person, to be your own boss, to be a leader. Human dignity is supposed to be this infinite, independent thing, capable of greatness only when freed from the shackles of other people getting in the way.
Of course, we all know, at least on some level, just how delusional this ideal is. Nobody is truly and totally his own boss, and in some ways, this becomes even more true the higher up you get. Even the most powerful CEO answers to somebody, even if it is mainly just the economy and the laws of nature.
When Jesus calls on people to repent, to change their minds, he’s calling us in part to reconsider our preoccupation with ambition and independence and originality and instead find a new center, like the disciples, in following him.
You see, our Lord’s goal wasn’t to “change the world” unless by that we mean something rather different from all those people trying win elections or awards or leave their mark on culture. He intends to show us the way the world really is, and who he is, and who we are in relation to him. We think it’s a race to see who can end up on top, who can be in charge, but real life is an opportunity to follow this God and to find we can be important not by being in charge of everything, but by not being in charge of everything, by recognizing that the heart of things is not competition, but self-giving love. Though Jesus calls disciples, he himself is not the boss in the final sense: he follows his Father. Over and over again he says in the Gospels, I came to do the will of my Father.
All of those fishermen whom Jesus called in Matthew—Peter and Andrew, James and John—all of them became disciples, then apostles, bishops, and leaders of the early Church. They became leaders because they were really good followers, because they knew whom to follow, because they knew where they were going. They were able to take the work of Jesus to the centers of power, to Athens and Rome, to the ends of the earth, because they knew that their authority and their power was not theirs, but God’s. They didn’t set out to change the world; they set out to show the world that the world can never be what it was created to be until it understands its purpose to be the place where God meets us and gives us the chance to follow him and be his friends.
I’m not saying big world-changing ideas are bad. But big ideas are, in a way, too easy. We’ve been told for so long that we ought to dream big dreams. Cure cancer. Eliminate hunger. Fix the deep political division of our nation and finally end the culture wars. Wonderful goals, but also problematic goals. Obviously, not everyone is going to go on to cure cancer and rid the world of violence, and we set ourselves up for a false sense of failure if we imagine that we have just wasted our lives looking back at the age of forty and finding that we haven’t done any of those grand things. But, more importantly, those big goals can distract us from the smaller goals that might actually change our lives and prepare us for greater things . . . like getting better sleep. Making good friends who encourage us in virtue. Spending more time with our children or our spouse. Taking a few minutes every day in mental prayer. Making more sacrifices that actually feel like sacrifices, like fasting or giving generously.
For the disciples, following Jesus required leaving their fishing nets behind and literally following him around Palestine. For many of us, there are those moments where the call to discipleship does mean a dramatic change, a dropping of the nets. But it may also mean staying put. It may mean doing something simple that we know we need to do. Instead of dreaming about great things and admiring Jesus from a distance, we can follow Jesus now, where we are, and trust that he will use us, as he did those first disciples, for his greater glory.