Monday, January 17, 2011

Matthew 4:12-23

How Easy It Is To Walk Away

Stories make it so easy to walk away. In just a few words published in a nice Ariel font it's done: they've left their nets and followed him. Listeners get the same smooth ride in the recitation. That's because a story can take us directly to the right time for something to happen without quibbling. Instead of marveling at the near-impossible faith of the Galilean fishermen who abandon their occupation at the drop of a hat (and families, friends, social safety net, etc.), we might think about what the right time is. 

In the movie “Sabah: a Love Story” a middle-age Syrian-Canadian woman walks away from the Muslim household that she loves that is controlled by a domineering patriarchal brother. She walks away because she has fallen in love with a “foreigner” - a non-Muslim Canadian man. The events that led up to her walking out were agonizing, for she loved her family deeply. The final confrontation with her brother was hard and heated. But the actual moment of walking away was easy. It just happened. There was no other real option, for love and happiness awaited Sabah on the other side of the break. It was simply the right time. To have remained in the family would have meant forfeiting her life to a dysfunctional ideological template. As it turned out, her walking away prompted a catharsis that resulted in reconciliation and acceptance in her family. But that kind of ending is never guaranteed. 

We can never know what prompted the sons of Zebedee to abandon their nets. We can only speculate. Maybe they, like Joseph, had had dreams. Maybe Tyre was outsourcing its fisheries to cheaper markets. Or the fish just weren't there anymore. Perhaps the household of Zebedee, for whatever reason, had come to a dead end. Things happen, and the stability we long for proves illusive. The time comes, in any number of ways, that we cannot remain. 

When the right time comes (kairos), walking away is not running away. To remain would be, effectively, to run away. To flee God's purpose. Jesus has a way of knowing about these things. Through him, so do we. 

Here's the deal: one reader-response to this text might be, instead of marveling at the near-impossible faith of those men who left their old life, which might lead us to (ho hum) another fruitless, paralyzing guilt-trip about our little faith (“I don't think I could ever do that.”) - let's acknowledge how easily they did it! We should celebrate it. It was the right time. It was neither rocket science nor heroic faith – we know from the gospel they had neither. 

With a little less guilt and a little more attention to the “times” of our personal and corporate existence, we, too, might recognize the right time to walk away. To walk forward. That trajectory, signed in death itself, is burned into the very mystery of our baptism. It is the only way to life. The Holy Spirit does not leave us desolate in that regard: we are told when our present circumstances have played themselves out. Or, from a different perspective, been fulfilled, perhaps providentially, beyond our awareness.

We can deny our circumstances, of course. We can deny God's providence, too. But those choices are so terribly exhausting to maintain. So fear-laden. It is all, to use a new parlance, “so over”. You walk. It's a God thing. That's why it's so easy. After all, the call to the fishermen came at the very moment that Jesus himself had walked away from Herod's dominion of darkness so that a new light might break out on Galilee through an ancient promise. We are synched with the story.

© '2011' Andy Gay