Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
25^th of January 2026

Matthew 4:12-24
Isaiah 9:1-4

Why are we here this morning? Why did we not sleep in, or enjoy a leisurely Sunday brunch? I imagine that our attendance here is the result of a mixture of all sorts of things: the way we were brought up, our connection to community, our need for comfort in a quickly changing and sometimes frightening world, or our need to be challenged in a culture that tries to make us all self-centred. But one reason that we are all here is that we have heard the call of God and coming to church is part of the way we answer that call. These weeks that we have between Christmas and Lent are dedicated to the question of call. We have seen Jesus’ call to begin his public ministry in his baptism, when the Holy Spirit descended on him and God announced that Jesus was his Beloved Son. And both last week and this week we see the calling of Jesus’ first disciples, those who will form the nucleus of the new community to which all of us now belong through our own baptism.

If you can remember last week’s reading from the Gospel according to John, you might be a little puzzled at the differences between that description of the call of Jesus’ first disciples and the one we hear today. John tells us that Andrew and another disciple were initially disciples of John the baptiser, and that it was John’s recognition of Jesus as the Lamb of God that led to the disciples seeking Jesus out. It was only after spending time with Jesus, responding to his invitation to ‘come and see,’ that the disciples recognised Jesus as the Messiah. Then Andrew sought out his brother Simon, whom Jesus renamed Peter. (John 1:29-42) John’s story would have made sense to a Jewish audience, used to disciples seeking out their own rabbi.

Today’s story from the Gospel according to Matthew, which tells the calling of those same disciples, is very different. The author of the Gospel according to John wanted us to think about the relationship between Jesus and John the baptiser, so he shows us that the one coming after John is the one who preceded him, and that the one who was baptised was greater than the one doing the baptising.

Matthew has a different focus and tells a different story. While John talks about the disciples needing to ‘come and see’, to make the decision to experience Jesus for themselves, Matthew tells us how overwhelming it is to be called by Jesus. We are at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He has been baptised by John, and tempted in the desert, but has performed no miracles nor started teaching. Jesus is proclaiming the same message that John proclaimed, ‘repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’, but unlike John he is not baptising those who repent. Now he calls four disciples. Matthew describes the response of Simon and Andrew to Jesus’ call: ‘Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him’.

Jesus calls, and immediately Simon, Andrew, James and John leave everything they are doing and follow him. We do not know whether they had already heard Jesus’ proclamation of the coming of the kingdom of heaven. If they had, that would have been all they knew of Jesus, that here was someone with the same message that John had preached, a message that had got John arrested. But Simon and Andrew leave their nets, and John and James their boats and their father, and follow. They leave behind relatively secure and stable lives as fishermen, lives that in the case of John and James included their father, and yet when Jesus calls, they follow immediately. With just a few words, the men are his. One commentator describes this scene by saying that ‘Jesus summons with irresistible authority and the men respond with radical obedience’.

The way the disciples answer Jesus’ call – immediately – is contrary to most of the call narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures. In most stories of call, the first thing the person called by God tries to do is get out of it. Moses reminded God that he stammered; Jeremiah said that he was only a boy; when God told Jonah to go to Ninevah in the East, Jonah instead fled to Tarshish, the furthest known point in the West. Very few people called in the Hebrew Scriptures respond to the call with Elijah’s: ‘here I am, Lord, send me’. But in today’s story, Jesus’ future disciples answer the call without question or argument. Matthew’s version of their calling shows something fascinating – according to Matthew’s telling, the disciples do not choose Jesus. Jesus chooses them. The same thing is true of us. We do not choose Jesus. Jesus chooses us.

That is a very strange thing to say in our world of choice. After all, we have all chosen to be here at church this morning; we are no longer even culturally mandated to attend. We have all made our own decision to follow Jesus. But just as the author of the ‘First Letter of John’ reminds his readers that we love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19), so we have chosen Christ because he first chose us. This is one of the reasons that the Uniting Church joyfully baptises babies. Babies have not made their own decision to join the church and follow Christ; we baptise them because we believe that the initiative in baptism comes from God. Our society values individual choice and the choice to follow Jesus is an important part of our faith journey. But it does not start that journey. The initiative belongs to God.

However we respond to the call from Jesus, whether with radical and immediate obedience or more slowly and reluctantly, the first response to that call does not end the matter. We know that Simon Peter, James and John, for all their enthusiasm in today’s story, were not perfect followers. We know that Peter later denied Christ (Matt 26:69-75); that the mother of James and John asked that they sit on the right and left hand of Jesus in his kingdom (Matt 20:20-28); and that all three of them slept when Jesus needed them in Gethsemane (Matt 26:36-46). I find that extremely reassuring. The first disciples, those personally called by Jesus, those who responded immediately, stuffed up. Just as it is strange that we worship a God who became human and a crucified Messiah, so it is strange that Jesus’ first disciples, those called by him by name, could be such failures in their discipleship. But then another thing that Matthew is revealing in today’s story is the unexpectedness of Jesus’ choice of followers.

At the beginning of today’s story, we are told that Jesus withdraws to ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, a place with a mixed population of Jews and Gentiles, a place where Isaiah promised light would shine on Jews and Gentiles alike. Here at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, we see a hint of the way the Gospel according to Matthew will end, with the great commandment to make disciples of all nations, which I have been referring to over the past few weeks as the call to create an inclusive Israel. The community born when Jesus calls the fishermen from their nets will become an international community. It will reach throughout the world and throughout time and will come to include us. It is a strange community, this community of Christ, including all sorts of people. Its inclusiveness was so surprising for the Jewish Christians who made up Matthew’s community that Matthew has to repeatedly indicate when Jesus’ actions fulfil the Hebrew Scriptures in justification. In today’s story, he quotes Isaiah to explain Jesus beginning his ministry far from the religious centre of Jerusalem, and calling Galilean fishermen as his first disciples, rather than well-educated religious students.

Today’s passage ends with one of Matthew’s summary statements of Jesus’ ministry: ‘Jesus went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.’ The good news of the kingdom is that it is at hand; God is reclaiming the world from the powers of darkness and death. Jesus’ curing of every disease and every sickness is a foretaste of a kingdom that has not yet fully appeared. But by repenting, turning to God, humans can already enter it.

It is as citizens of the kingdom that Jesus’ disciples will be enabled to live in the way that he will outline in the great block of teaching that we call the Sermon on the Mount, to which we will listen over the next eight weeks. Its insistence on a perfection that is greater than that of the scribes and Pharisees seems so extreme to some Christians that they argue that the impossibility is intentional, that our failure to live according to Jesus’ teaching is meant to show us the necessity of God’s grace. That is not true. In Jesus, the kingdom of heaven has come, and with its dawn has come a new relationship with God for those whose lives Jesus has touched. The Sermon on the Mount tells those who have been so irresistibly called by Jesus that they have immediately left everything behind, how they are now to live in the kingdom to which he has called them.

Like Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, like James son of Zebedee and his brother John, we too have been called by Jesus. We may have answered immediately, or it may have taken us some time. After answering the call, we may find it easy to live as Jesus’ followers, obeying Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, or we may find it difficult. I, for one, continually struggle with Jesus’ teachings about not being angry and about loving my enemy, while, on the other hand, I find it very easy to give to everyone who begs from me. As we listen to the Sermon over the next eight weeks, I am sure there will be instructions in it you will find easy to follow, and others that you will find impossible. That is why it is so encouraging that the very first disciple Jesus calls in the Gospel according to Matthew is Simon Peter.

For today, just remember that Jesus has called us. He wants every single one of us. No matter how that call came, no matter how long we take to answer it, no matter how often we fail to live up to the full responsibility of it, that is something we can celebrate. Amen.