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Follow Me
by Margaret Guenther
January 27, 2008
[Matthew 3:12-23]
It’s important to remember the context of this Gospel — we are right at the beginning of Jesus’ active ministry. He has been baptized by John, led into the desert to be tempted by the devil, and ministered to by angels. Now he has returned from this ordeal of forty days in the wilderness to learn that John, the prophet who proclaimed him, is in prison.
This is an uneasy time, a dangerous time. It would be much easier to Jesus to fade into obscurity, to return to the useful craft of carpentry.
But instead he begins to preach. And he preaches boldly: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In other words, God is near. We are on the brink of momentous change, he promises, God’s kingdom is coming — which is, after all, what we pray for nearly every time we come together as Christians: Your kingdom come, your will be done — not just in heaven, but here, right now, in the midst of our imperfection, our ordinariness and everydayness. This is a bold prayer, inviting radical change and transformation. We are asking, begging to be shaken out of our complacency. We are pleading for radical change.
“Repent,” Jesus commands or invites or maybe a little of both, “ for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” “Repent” is one of those words most of us like to avoid. I know that I resist it. It suggests unacknowledged guilt, reproach, a demand that we show maybe grudging acknowledgment or even contrition for our transgressions — or else! But to repent means much, much, more. Repentance means to turn around, to redirect our steps, to correct our vision. True repentance is more than restorative — it is life-giving.
And Jesus’ command to repent brings good news. We all remember those New Yorker cartoons of weird, disheveled people wearing sandwich boards proclaiming: “Repent! The end is near.” But Jesus does not say “the end is near” but rather “the kingdom of heaven has come near—is at hand.” Good news! Even if it shakes us up and compels us to take stock of ourselves. The coming of the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God is a time of transformation and fruition. Good news!
A command follows this pronouncement: Follow me. I suspect it was more than a command — it was also an invitation, a reassurance, a promise of protection. Follow me, and you will be safe. Follow me, and you’ll know that you are on the right track. Follow me, and even when it is hard and you are tempted to look back on the remembered security of the past, you won’t get lost. You’ll be OK. Just let me take the lead. Follow me!
The story moves fast: Peter, Andrew, James and John leave their nets and follow Jesus. What are their nets? Literal tools, of course, their means of livelihood, but, I am convinced, much, much more. The nets were everything that held them to their old life with its limited purpose and vision. Basically useful, but ultimately they are only tools — to be used, to be torn, to be mended, to be discarded, to be replaced. What, I wonder, are our nets? We can get carried away mending them. We can get entangled in them, tripped up by them. We can accord them more importance than they merit.
For decades I missed the point of this story. I saw it as a story of leaving behind, of renunciation, of giving up. Even of shirking responsibilities. But now I see it clearly as a story of moving forward, of letting go of impediments, of finding that ultimate freedom in following Jesus, of letting him call the shots.
I confess, my friends, that I often find it easy to see myself as Jesus’ capable, highly efficient administrative assistant. Jesus is kind, Jesus is infinitely forgiving, Jesus loves all the children, Jesus shared bread with everybody, including the unacceptable — but can he possibly run a church? Maybe you’ve felt that way too, sometimes... His generous, all-embracing love is a fine ideal, of course, but surely he needs clearheaded practical folk to keep track of details, to decide who is in and who is out, where lines should be drawn and where they should be erased.
But wait! We’ve been doing this for a long time, close to 2000 years — in our personal lives, in our communities, in God’s church. And the kingdom of heaven still isn’t quite here. So Jesus commands: Repent! At least look around if you can’t manage to turn completely around! Find your true direction. Don’t worry so much about your nets. Toss them aside and follow me.
This is a story about commitment, single-mindedness, the bottom line, the ultimate value, the ultimate truth, what really matters — in our life as a community, in our own small lives as people of faith who yearn, who seek to follow Jesus. Who seek the one true good. Who have heard the call: turn around, let go of useful but secondary things — tangible and intangible — and follow him.
All of us here have, at least symbolically, left our nets to redirect our steps, to follow Jesus. For many of us that deep commitment began when we were infants, when, in our baptism, solemn vows were made on our behalf. For some, a mature decision to die to the old self and — again through baptism — to live a new life. We leave our nets in our regular renewing of our baptismal vows (which we do every time there is a baptism at St. C’s). We leave our nets when together we recite the creed every Sunday. Maybe we say these words mindlessly, automatically; after all, we say them “all the time”–they are part of the spiritual furniture. But when we profess our faith, we are renewing our promise to redirect our steps, to leave our nets behind, and to follow the one who promises that the kingdom of heaven has come near. We as little people, in this small but lovely corner of God’s vineyard are really bit players. And we can lose sight of the big picture! We can get tangled in those nets which were never really discarded.
The bottom line: these few verses in Matthew’s Gospel are a compelling story about total commitment, about redirection of our steps and our lives.
Our brother and teacher Paul knew a lot about faithful people who sought earnestly to follow Jesus and to do the right thing. From his letters we know that he somehow managed to be loving and pretty tough all at the same time. I’m sure he loved the Corinthians, bright, sophisticated, complex, sometimes self-indulgent people — new Christians who lived near a center of Roman power (Corinthians and Columbans have an awfully lot in common — even if we would rather not acknowledge it). His letters to them are candid, affectionate, and very direct. In today’s passage he says, essentially, “Don’t let yourselves be distracted. Remember who and whose you are.” I’m not sure who Chloe was or who her people might have been — but, as my mother would say, they surely mean well. Yet they had taken word to Paul that those lovable, difficult, sophisticated, usually well-meaning Corinthians had got tangled up in their nets. They were missing the point. They had forgotten whom they were following. They had lost sight of their essential identity.
“To whom do you belong?” Paul asks. “Has Christ been divided? The message of the cross might be foolishness to those who are perishing, to those who are being saved it is the power of God.”
The answer to Paul’s question was true nearly two thousand years ago in Corinth. It is still true. The kingdom of heaven has come near to us. The path we must follow is clear. We are not sitting in darkness — we have seen the great light. The true path is hard to miss: just put down the nets — the distractions and petty things that can seem so important, that can distract us from our true purpose and our true, deepest identity, just leave the nets behind, look up into the light. Quiet all the inner noises so that you can hear his invitation and command: Follow me. You won’t get lost. We won’t get lost. Amen.