Psalm 27:1, 4-9 | Matthew 4:12-23
Jeremy Richards
A few weeks ago, we heard the beautiful, mystical opening of John’s Gospel, when the Word, who was with God and was God, the Word who all things came into being through, came and dwelt among us. While John does take some pains in his prologue to ground this mystical idea in concrete reality, it remains pretty abstract. It’s almost like poetry. It’s beautiful, it’s full of meaning, but it creates in us more a sense of wonder than a logical conclusion. It’s a passage that washes over us, one that is felt more than comprehended.
But in our reading from Matthew this morning, the abstract has found its footing in the tangible. The Word takes form in the body of a 1st century Palestinian Jew. The psalmist in our psalm this morning proclaims that he will seek God’s face, and the Gospels collectively proclaim that the face of God is the face of Jesus. God’s life mingles with the lives of humanity. God’s body can be found among human bodies.
Our reading from Matthew begins not with poetry but with something like a news report. John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin who baptized him, has been arrested, and Jesus leaves Nazareth and makes his home in a new place, a new community: Capernaum by the sea. If Jesus were to live today, maybe Matthew would write, “When Jesus heard that the impeachment trial had begun…” or when “Jesus learned that a new, deadly virus arose in China…” or “As the brush fires raged in Australia…Jesus left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea.”
The everyday-ness of this statement is shocking when placed alongside John 1. The eternal Word, the second person of the Triune God, the Christ, packed up his few boxes and moved to a new place. He changed addresses, as so many of us have done.
I’ve moved a number of times. I’ve moved from my home in New Meadows, ID to go to college in Portland, OR. I made the permanent move from New Meadows to Portland after I graduated college. Then I moved from Portland to Durham and back again. But the most significant move I ever did was when I was 8 and I moved with my family from New Meadows to Bouake, Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. When I arrived in Cote d’Ivoire, the smells were different, the language was different, the food was different, even the humid air felt different.
To move somewhere, especially somewhere you plan to live permanently, is quite a transition. It takes time to acclimate. Every place has its own culture, its own politics, its own priorities, its own climate, its own grocery stores and restaurants…
This culture shock is what chain business and much of suburbia is trying to overcome. Starbucks, fast food chains, and strip malls are meant to give us a sense of the familiar, no matter where we go. They’re meant to make you feel at home whether you’re in Idaho or Iowa, South Dakota or South Carolina, New York or New Mexico. That’s why we love them and hate them. If we’re traveling in an unknown place, they give us a sense of the familiar. Before we go into a McDonalds or a Chipotle or a Starbucks, we know what we’re going to order, because the menu doesn’t change. But often when these very same businesses move in near us, we hate it. We want to support the local coffee shop, the family restaurant, the business that feels unique to us and our community. When an acquaintance contacts you and says they’re going to be in Portland for a couple of days, where should they go, you don’t tell them to check out Ikea and Target and then grab some dinner at Denny’s. You tell them to go to the places that are “so Portland.”
I remember once, when I was in high school, I was busing tables at this fancy restaurant in McCall, ID and one of the tables asked me if there was anything cool to do in Boise. I hadn’t spent much time outside Idaho at that time, and Boise was the epitome of cool in my mind. I was like, “Yeah! There’s lots of cool stuff!” and I immediately started telling them about the mall. The server heard me, and ran over and told me to get more bread or something so she could tell them what was actually cool about Boise, which inevitably would’ve been those things that are unique to Boise, things that can’t be found elsewhere.
When Jesus moves to Capernaum, he moves to a place that is different than Nazareth. It probably wasn’t like suburbia, he couldn’t just go to his favorite chain restaurants, grocery stores, and clothing shops that were the same in Capernaum as Nazareth. He had to find a new place to get his groceries. He had to figure out how the city was laid out, so that he could get around. He had to find the popular spots, so he could meet people and make friends (or in Jesus’ case, tell people to repent and follow him, which, I guess, was Jesus’ way of making friends).
One of the things that made Capernaum unique, which is stated in our reading today, is that Capernaum is by the sea, so it’s no wonder that almost immediately Jesus goes and walks along the sea, just as we all do when we visit Cannon Beach or Seaside or Newport. In the same way that when I first came to Portland I immediately went to Voodoo Donuts and got an inappropriately named donut because that’s what you do, or at least did in 2006, so Jesus, as soon as he arrives in Capernaum, unpacks his bags and immediately heads to the beach. As the Geico commercials says, “It’s what you do.”
And while he walks along the beach, Jesus sees Peter, Andrew, James, and John fishing and he calls to them. “Follow me,” he says. And they do. And in following Jesus, it’s as if they also move to a new place with new language and a new way of thinking. In Jesus they encounter the familiar in the midst of the unfamiliar, like hearing your own language in a new accent. They sense that this is the one their heart has always known, always longed for, wrapped up in the body of a stranger. The “face of God” that the psalmist sought after is the ordinary face of a man walking along the beach – holes in his tunic, maybe some crumbs in his beard, maybe those white crusties we sometimes get in the corners of our mouth because he’s been walking along the sea for a while without any water. Maybe his breath stunk, but maybe, also, his eyes shone with a compassion that was itself unique only to this person, Jesus. Maybe, at the young age of 30, he already had crow’s feet from the warm smile that always rested on his face. Maybe he looked ordinary, like everyone else in the world, but maybe he also was utterly unique, just like everyone else in the world. Just as we are all, in one sense very ordinary people, and at the same time, each of us is utterly unique.
Just as Capernaum is its own place with its own people, it’s specific location in relation to a specific sea, the sea of Galilee, so Jesus is not an abstract concept, not an unknown, ethereal movement of the Divine. He is a person defined by particulars. Just as there is no one like you – there is no other Janis, Malachi, Josh, Lily, or Dave – so there is no other Jesus. When referring to Jesus, this has come to be called, “the scandal of the particular.”
The first scandal is that the eternal Word would become something so finite, so knowable, so particular: Jesus with his holey tunic, his messy hair, crumbs in his beard. The second scandal is that through this one particular person – and his life, death, and resurrection – God has reconciled all things to God (2 Cor. 5:19) and that Jesus is the Savior not of the select few, but of all people (1 Cor. 15:22) and not only of people, but of the whole world, the whole cosmos (1 John 4:14). Christianity is particular all the way down and at the same time it makes bold, universal claims.
In Jesus, God has an address. God moves to Capernaum by the sea. The eternal breaks into the historical, the Spirit is mediated through the material, the One in whom all of creation is held together is held, himself, within a human body. The universal calls to us across time and space through the particular voice of a 1st century Jew saying, “Come and follow me.”
In the season of Epiphany we celebrate the Gospel’s shocking, inclusive, universal scope. It isn’t just for the Jews, but for all people, and all of creation, not for just a brief moment in history but for all of eternity. Jesus doesn’t call just Peter and Andrew and James and John, but Jesus calls each of us. If God moved to Capernaum by the sea, then God has also moved to Portland along the Columbia. Jesus calls to each of us in our own particularity, to follow him in our own context, to bring the eternal love of the cosmic Christ to our own specific communities.
I’ve been thinking lately about Jesus’ shocking claim that he had to go away so that the Holy Spirit would come, and that, through the Holy Spirit we would do greater things than Jesus did. That seems unbelievable, almost blasphemous. But I’ve come to see that of course it’s true. Because Jesus couldn’t be fully human without being a particular human – there’s no way to be a human without being a specific human – and if he was particular he would be limited in what he could do and who he could reach. He could only speak to his particular people, in a particular time, and that’s what he did: he called to Peter, Andrew, James, and John, (and later Mary Magdalene, the sisters Mary and Martha, the other 12 disciples, and others). Then they went and told their communities, as the Samaritan woman at the well went and told her community. And that’s how the Good News spread: particular people in particular contexts sharing a Gospel that transcends all particularities.
Just as Jesus reached out to those in his new home of Capernaum, so he calls us to reach out to those in our unique contexts. Through the Holy Spirit, the Word becomes flesh again and again and again in us, the Church, present in the world. The Good News is universal, cosmic in scope, and yet it’s always made known through the concrete, the tangible, the immediate. It’s always situated in time and space. It becomes real in the specifics of our lives. It doesn’t exist out there. It exists in here. Because the Word became flesh and dwelled among us. Because Jesus moved to Capernaum and walked along the seashore. Because Christ has called out to each of us across the centuries, in a voice we could recognize, “Come and follow me.” Amen.