Travelling Light

Reading: MATTHEW 4: 12-23


Jesus begins his work. And how does he begin? By announcement, “The Kingdom of God is here.” Then by invitation, “Come, follow me.”

In today's gospel we have four men who leave the security of their jobs, homes and families to follow a travelling teacher.

 
So when the man from Nazareth came walking by the lakeside that day and said to them, "Follow me and I will show you how to fish for people," why did they go with Him? The Bible doesn't tell us. It provides no clues about why they went with Him.

Unanswered questions. Why did Andrew and Peter, why did John and James, follow Jesus that day? Did they have any idea that following Him would mean a radical change in their lives? Maybe they thought "follow me" simply meant "you deserve a break today." Maybe they figured they deserved a holiday and tomorrow they'd be back to fishing again. Surely they couldn't have guessed what lay ahead for them.

All Matthew's gospel says about Peter and Andrew is this: "Immediately they left their nets and followed him." All Matthew's gospel says about James and John is this: "immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him."

The point is that they didn't and couldn't know, anymore than you and I can know all that following Jesus will mean for us. There is always risk involved.

Jump forward three years from this point. Immediately after Jesus’ death; ask yourself how did these disciples feel? Might they have experienced some ambivalence at the way things had turned out? They never wanted him crucified of course but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance of the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen which they knew how to do rather than fishers of men which they didn’t.

The resurrection was perhaps yet another disruption, yet another invitation to hit the road.
We can’t ‘follow’ by staying where we are. ‘Following’ was a euphemism for faith in the time of Matthew; but in the scene on the lake shore before us it is a literal calling to hit the road. You can’t follow Jesus without moving from your position. Things are going to get left behind. There will be unanswered questions. You will not be the same person at the end of the road as you were at the start.

Take a look at the verse in the middle of our passage (v 17). Matthew sets that out like a backdrop to a stage. The fishermen know who Jesus is and they know what he is preaching. Repentance. The way Matthew puts it together, this is clearly the context for what happens.

So when the fishermen heard the call of Jesus and left everything that they had to follow him, the gospel writer is showing us a picture of repentance. The Greek for 'repent', 'metanoia' literally means a 'change of mind'. Changing your mind means you have to change the way you think, the way you see things. You want to see something differently – you need to look at it from different angles – which means you have to move

A faith without repentance is no faith at all. And repentance means getting up and getting out there.
There is a journey to be made.

I got hooked on The Long Way Down. It was on after Top Gear. To me, Top Gear is grindingly boring and when it’s not it’s being irritating in the way that overgrown schoolboys will be. Please give me a gentle ‘Li-iz’ if I start to rant because it’s not nice or appropriate to stand up in church and be rude about people you haven’t even met.

But…..feel free to reign me in. Top Gear often make epic journeys too. The last one I watched they were seeing if you could drive a four by four to the North Pole and forgo all that explorer-type hardship and reduce it to a sort of run out in the country.

Now In fact there were 3 four by fours because two were back-up vehicles packed to the gunnels with burly arctic-hardened Norwegians and every bit of equipment you could think of. Thus backed up to the very hilt; James May and Clarkson gallantly led the way in a vehicle packed with nothing but a stash of chocolate bars and gin and tonic.

Whenever adversity struck the Norwegians were on hand to save the day. Despite appearances; it was pretty risk free or you’d imagine the BBC and their wives would have never let these overgrown schoolboys wander out of the home counties without an army of minders. It’s not that they need protecting from the dangers of the ice shelf – they need protecting from themselves.

And I know it was meant to be provocative in a sort of ‘where’s your sense of humour’ way; but frankly their was something just boring about watching middle-aged men continuing to obsess about horsepower and torque in the midst of that beautiful and fearsome wilderness.

To be fair, at one point Clarkson was reduced to tears of amazement and joy – it was when James May produced a bottle of sauvignon blanc at dinner as a respite from the gin.

And if I managed to get through that without choking on my own bile there was Long Way Down. Euan McGregor and Charlie Borman. Which was bliss. John O Groats to Cape Town by motorbike. I’m not any more interested in motorbikes than I am in cars, but I loved it.

In the same way as Top Gear, it wasn’t a travelogue it was more about travelling itself. Again, there were back-up vehicles and a schedule to be followed and a huge amount of planning and a team of people – mechanics, a doctor etc; but it was a very different kind of journey. It wasn’t meant to be a wheeze and an excuse to legally drink and drive. This was a journey, an adventure that was calling them.

It had some vital lessons for would be travellers. Like, however hard you plan for every eventuality you just cannot take all that stuff you bought to deal with them. Pare it down or you’ll never get out of the garage.

Like, how hard it is to say goodbye to loved ones, especially when you know that it is because of your choice to go that they are weeping and waving.

Like how hard it is to concentrate for hours driving on strange and unmade roads. The difficulties of crossing borders – having all their belongings checked and their papers

But the real magic were the times when for one reason or another the back-up vehicles were held up or diverted and they were on their own. They were taking a bit more risk, but you could see that this was what they really came to find. Or when they camped in villages they passed through and accepted the hospitality of very poor people, graciously offering the best of what they had to strangers.
We all have a world view. A way of seeing the world. A way of understanding who we are and where we fit in to the big picture. If you never move your position or if you decide that you have reached your destination and settle down you will only ever have one view of reality. If you never get up and follow Jesus when he calls you; all you will see is salvation disappearing into the distance; over the horizon in a cloud of dust; because he is always on the move.

Repentance is not just to say sorry and try a bit harder. It is to undertake a journey which will change you forever, change your mindset, your view of the world, until you actually start to glimpse through the veil, the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Deathbed conversions used to be favoured, still are. You can live your life just how you want and then repent on your deathbed. There were even traditions where people would repent and be baptised on behalf of relatives who had already died. The worldly understanding is that it’s about what you can get away with.

Attractive, I suppose, because in our wider culture, we think repentance is going to be about denial and getting beaten up for the totally rubbish person you are and suddenly becoming all tweedy and prudish. But the Kingdom is about discovering the entirely unexpected. It starts with a judgment but it turns out to be about freedom and a road stretching southwards and ‘what are you waiting for’?
We have this massive hangover in our culture of heavy Victorian moralistic ‘religion’ which, to the outsider, looks and sounds like just another set of chains – and eternal ones at that! You’d need the fires of hell at your back before you would be tempted to answer that call.

There is no faith without repentance, but read the scriptures. What does repentance look like? It looks like movement, change, uncertainty, struggle, love, self-sacrifice, yes: but not how you think.

What does judgement look like? It looks like the kind of love that lays down its life suffers horrible brutal torture just to get your damn attention long enough to see what is really going on here. It is always completely unexpected, tangentially different. Another country; a parallel universe.

Like a heart beat or breathing. One heart beat is no good to anyone. What you need is a rhythm; steady and strong, automatic, constant movement. To form a backdrop of our lives. That’s what repentance is like.

Repentance properly understood is an "I can't" experience rather than an "I can" experience. If repentance is promising God, "I can do better," then we are trying to keep ourselves in control of our lives. If we can do better, we don't need a gracious God, only a patient One, who will wait long enough for us to do better. When we come before God confessing, "I can't do better," then we are taking a risk. We are giving up control of our lives. We are inviting God to do what we can't do ourselves -- namely to raise the dead -- to change and recreate us.

When Christ calls, he beckons us beyond the point of familiarity, asking us to risk doing something we don’t know how to do, to become someone we’re not yet sure we know how to be.

His call comes not just once in your life, but many times. There are calls to a vocation, or to change vocations. There are calls to a particular place, to a specific faith community. There are calls to a task, and there are calls to stop what you are doing and find refreshment for your tired spirit. There are calls into and out of relationships. There are calls to regret what you have done, to repent and make amends for your wrongdoing. And there are calls to stop regretting, to accept the fact that you are forgiven and get on with your life.

So what should we pack? A map? A compass? Navman? Several burly Norwegians? The entire contents of Millets perhaps? But you can’t do this with a back up vehicle and a infinite supply of chocolate bars or whatever your crutch happens to be. Traveling light is the order of the day. A journey (even to the North Pole) on the inside of a warm 4X4 is not really living. Faith without repentance; the kind of repentance the disciples were called to live out; is not the new Life we have been promised.

What to pack? A small bag is all you need. A longing for truth; a commitment to Christ (as Richard set out for us): and repentance as it is understood in the Kingdom of Heaven; the kind that keeps you putting one foot in front of the other day after day. After all the Kingdom is not ‘here’ it is ‘near’ and the only way to get it nearer is to get moving in its direction.

Amen