“Caught in the Net of Divine Love” - Isaiah 9:1-4 Psalm 27:1, 4-9 Matthew 4:12-23
Sometimes there are phrases in the Bible that one can overlook for years and then suddenly one sees it and after that you can’t unsee it… and sometimes they contain a world of meaning. This happened to me this week in preparing for today’s sermon. It is a little phrase tucked away in our reading from Matthew that when one pauses with it, it opens up a whole treasure trove of meaning. It comes from Isaiah and is quoted by Matthew almost in passing: “The Way of the Sea.”
For now, I want to leave that phrase hanging in the air. We will come back to it.
This year in the revised common lectionary we are following Matthew’s Gospel, and it is important to remember that Matthew has a very particular way of telling the story of Jesus.
Matthew is the most Jewish of the Gospels. He is writing primarily for a Jewish audience, and his aim is clear: to show that Jesus is not a break from Israel’s story, but is its fulfilment. Jesus embodies the hopes, longings, and promises of Israel, and brings them to completion, showing what it truly means to be Israel.
In the opening chapters of Matthew, Jesus relives Israel’s story: Like Israel, he goes down into Egypt and is called out again. He passes through the waters of baptism, echoing both the crossing of the Red Sea and the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land. He spends forty days and nights in the wilderness, echoing Israel’s forty years of testing and formation. But where Israel faltered, Jesus remains faithful. He lives Israel’s vocation as it was always meant to be lived.
And Matthew wants us to see that Jesus fulfils this calling particularly through the Servant passages of Isaiah. According to these servant passages, Israel’s redemption does not come through conquest or domination, but through a servant who brings justice to the nations by walking a path of gentleness, integrity, faithfulness, and self-giving love (We touched on that two weeks ago – quoting Isaiah 42). And these themes continue directly into our passage today.
The reading opens with troubling news: John the Baptist has been arrested. This is the second major warning in Matthew’s Gospel that the way of Jesus has political consequences. John has not been imprisoned for violence or insurrection, but for truth-telling - for naming injustice - for speaking truth to power.
Matthew is already preparing us for an uncomfortable truth: the way of Jesus unsettles the power structures of this world. Integrity challenges systems built on exploitation. Justice threatens those who benefit from and are comfortable with the status quo. His radical love threatens those who want to draw neat boundaries between who is in and who is out.
And so the path Jesus walks is not the way to the top of the political system. It is not the way of securing political power, but the way of exposing it – and bearing the consequences of this. And Matthew wants us to know this from the outset. John is arrested… anticipating Jesus arrest later on in the story.
Next in our passage, Matthew tells us something that may sound like a simple change of address:
Jesus leaves his hometown of Nazareth and settles in Capernaum, a lakeside town, on the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali. But for Matthew, geography is theology. This move allows him to quote the prophet Isaiah, showing once again his conviction that Jesus is fulfilling Israel’s story and Israel’s hope. And it brings us back to that phrase I asked you to hold onto: “The Way of the Sea.”
“Land of Zebulun and Naphtali, Way of the Sea on the far side of the Jordan, Galilee of the nations...”
In Isaiah, this phrase refers to a real road, an ancient international highway later known as the Via Maris. It ran from Egypt in the south, along the Mediterranean coast, through Gaza, Galilee, and up toward Syria and Mesopotamia.
This was a road of trade, traffic, and troops. Empires marched along it. Armies invaded along it. Cultures mixed along it. It was not a quiet backwater, it was the in a very real sense the highway of history.
Because of this road, the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali in Israel’s history were the first to be invaded, the first to be occupied, the first to suffer exile and devastation by the great Assyrian Empire.
When Isaiah speaks of darkness and the shadow of death, he is naming a lived experience: trauma, loss, and humiliation at the hands of empire. And yet, this is the astonishing claim, this is where the light dawns.
The road that once carried domination becomes the place of revelation. The region most exposed becomes the region most illumined. The land first to fall is the land first to see hope.
Matthew wants us to see that Jesus does not begin his ministry at the centre of religious and political power in Jerusalem, but on the margins. Isaiah describes it as Galilee of the Gentiles, Galilee of the Nations. Jesus begins his ministry not in the Jewish heartland to preserve and shore up the ethnic identity of his people, he deliberately chooses to begin his ministry in an ethnically mixed area on the road that leads to the nations (which interestingly is where the Gospel ends… with the Risen Christ in Galilee instructing the disciples to God to all nations, teaching his Way). Jesus is not interested in rebuilding an ethnic Jewish heartland, or a geographic, political Kingdom of Israel. He seeks to restore Israel’s spiritual vocation to be a light to the nations… to be an outwardly focused people with a mission to shine the light of God’s Love, Goodness and Justice in the world.
And so it is here, on this road, that Jesus begins to preach:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Matthew deliberately changes Mark’s phrase “kingdom of God” to “Kingdom of Heaven”, out of Jewish reverence for the Divine Name. But this does not mean the kingdom belongs only to the afterlife.
At Jesus’ baptism, the heavens have already symbolically been opened. The boundary between heaven and earth has been breached. Jesus comes to show us that the kingdom of heaven is not far away—it is close at hand, present, pressing in, here and now, available, to anyone who has the eyes to see it and hearts open to participate in it.
For Jesus in Matthew, the message of the Kingdom of Heaven was about proclaiming a new, heaven inspired way of living in this world.
And how do we become open to this Kingdom?
The word Jesus uses is ‘Repent’. This is not to be confused with grovelling in shame or moral self-flagellation. The word means: change your mind.
Reorient your thinking. Open yourself to a larger truth. Meta-noia – speaks of a movement into a greater mind, a wider awareness, a deeper way of seeing reality: finding a new perspective.
Light has dawned. Therefore, ‘see differently’ is the invitation of Jesus.
The passage ends with Jesus calling his first disciples, again, not from the centres of power, but from the margins: fishermen, ordinary people, working by the sea. Jesus invites them to become learners of his way, disciples. To take on his yoke (Matthew 11:29), to share his vocation as Isaiah’s Servant of God.
And that vocation begins where Jesus’ own began, in belovedness. “You are my beloved,” spoken at the baptism, now becomes a life to be lived and shared. As they follow Jesus, they will discover their own belovedness, and learn to live from that place.
At the time of Jesus, Israel was under a brutal Roman occupation. Life was hard, People were poor. Much of their wealth was heavily taxed by Rome to entrench their authority and power by feeding their troops. Disease was rife as well as mental health issues often inflicted from the trauma of Roman brutality. And in this situation there were three, maybe four responses from the people (four ways of being Israel in the world). The first was the response of the zealots (resistance fighters – what Romans would have called terrorists): take up arms and resist the occupation in guerrilla attacks that were brutally squashed. The second response was that of the Pharisees: bury yourself in your religious piety aiming to keep yourself religiously pure at all costs, observing the minutiae of the law in the hope that being good and pure, winning God’s favour so that God would somehow intervene. The third option was collaboration with the occupying Empire often at the expense of your own people: This was the path of the Sadducees and the Temple priests and also Herod who ruled as Rome’s puppet king for a while. A fourth response was to retreat into the desert living in secluded semi-monastic religious communities. When Jesus invited his first disciples, saying come follow me. He was inviting them into a 5th way: Not the way of religious purity and law keeping, not the way of collaboration, not the way of violent resistance, not the way of withdrawal into the desert… He was inviting them to walk a new way of loving integrity in the world, discovering one’s belovedness and living that out as salt and light in the world.
And living from beloved-ness is the servant way of Isaiah: not the way of domination and violence, but the way of gentleness, integrity, faithful and costly love. For Matthew, this is the way Jesus will renew Israel’s true vocation in the world as a light to the nations. This is how the world is changed, not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Through ordinary people who have discovered their beloved-ness in God and invite people of all nations and all ethnicities to discover their beloved-ness too. Ordinary people whose lives become places where heaven touches earth. Or, as Jesus will later teach them to pray in this same Gospel: “May your kingdom come on earth.”
And it begins on the borderlands, in Galilee of the Nations, on the Way of the Sea, the road that connects us with the world, and people of all nations, as Jesus says, ‘Come, follow me and I will teach you how to catch people in the net of Divine Love’. The rest of Matthew’s Gospel uncovers what that means.
Sometimes there are phrases in the Bible that one can overlook for years and then suddenly one sees it and after that you can’t unsee it… and sometimes they contain a world of meaning. This happened to me this week in preparing for today’s sermon. It is a little phrase tucked away in our reading from Matthew that when one pauses with it, it opens up a whole treasure trove of meaning. It comes from Isaiah and is quoted by Matthew almost in passing: “The Way of the Sea.”
For now, I want to leave that phrase hanging in the air. We will come back to it.
This year in the revised common lectionary we are following Matthew’s Gospel, and it is important to remember that Matthew has a very particular way of telling the story of Jesus.
Matthew is the most Jewish of the Gospels. He is writing primarily for a Jewish audience, and his aim is clear: to show that Jesus is not a break from Israel’s story, but is its fulfilment. Jesus embodies the hopes, longings, and promises of Israel, and brings them to completion, showing what it truly means to be Israel.
In the opening chapters of Matthew, Jesus relives Israel’s story: Like Israel, he goes down into Egypt and is called out again. He passes through the waters of baptism, echoing both the crossing of the Red Sea and the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land. He spends forty days and nights in the wilderness, echoing Israel’s forty years of testing and formation. But where Israel faltered, Jesus remains faithful. He lives Israel’s vocation as it was always meant to be lived.
And Matthew wants us to see that Jesus fulfils this calling particularly through the Servant passages of Isaiah. According to these servant passages, Israel’s redemption does not come through conquest or domination, but through a servant who brings justice to the nations by walking a path of gentleness, integrity, faithfulness, and self-giving love (We touched on that two weeks ago – quoting Isaiah 42). And these themes continue directly into our passage today.
The reading opens with troubling news: John the Baptist has been arrested. This is the second major warning in Matthew’s Gospel that the way of Jesus has political consequences. John has not been imprisoned for violence or insurrection, but for truth-telling - for naming injustice - for speaking truth to power.
Matthew is already preparing us for an uncomfortable truth: the way of Jesus unsettles the power structures of this world. Integrity challenges systems built on exploitation. Justice threatens those who benefit from and are comfortable with the status quo. His radical love threatens those who want to draw neat boundaries between who is in and who is out.
And so the path Jesus walks is not the way to the top of the political system. It is not the way of securing political power, but the way of exposing it – and bearing the consequences of this. And Matthew wants us to know this from the outset. John is arrested… anticipating Jesus arrest later on in the story.
Next in our passage, Matthew tells us something that may sound like a simple change of address:
Jesus leaves his hometown of Nazareth and settles in Capernaum, a lakeside town, on the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali. But for Matthew, geography is theology. This move allows him to quote the prophet Isaiah, showing once again his conviction that Jesus is fulfilling Israel’s story and Israel’s hope. And it brings us back to that phrase I asked you to hold onto: “The Way of the Sea.”
“Land of Zebulun and Naphtali, Way of the Sea on the far side of the Jordan, Galilee of the nations...”
In Isaiah, this phrase refers to a real road, an ancient international highway later known as the Via Maris. It ran from Egypt in the south, along the Mediterranean coast, through Gaza, Galilee, and up toward Syria and Mesopotamia.
This was a road of trade, traffic, and troops. Empires marched along it. Armies invaded along it. Cultures mixed along it. It was not a quiet backwater, it was the in a very real sense the highway of history.
Because of this road, the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali in Israel’s history were the first to be invaded, the first to be occupied, the first to suffer exile and devastation by the great Assyrian Empire.
When Isaiah speaks of darkness and the shadow of death, he is naming a lived experience: trauma, loss, and humiliation at the hands of empire. And yet, this is the astonishing claim, this is where the light dawns.
The road that once carried domination becomes the place of revelation. The region most exposed becomes the region most illumined. The land first to fall is the land first to see hope.
Matthew wants us to see that Jesus does not begin his ministry at the centre of religious and political power in Jerusalem, but on the margins. Isaiah describes it as Galilee of the Gentiles, Galilee of the Nations. Jesus begins his ministry not in the Jewish heartland to preserve and shore up the ethnic identity of his people, he deliberately chooses to begin his ministry in an ethnically mixed area on the road that leads to the nations (which interestingly is where the Gospel ends… with the Risen Christ in Galilee instructing the disciples to God to all nations, teaching his Way). Jesus is not interested in rebuilding an ethnic Jewish heartland, or a geographic, political Kingdom of Israel. He seeks to restore Israel’s spiritual vocation to be a light to the nations… to be an outwardly focused people with a mission to shine the light of God’s Love, Goodness and Justice in the world.
And so it is here, on this road, that Jesus begins to preach:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Matthew deliberately changes Mark’s phrase “kingdom of God” to “Kingdom of Heaven”, out of Jewish reverence for the Divine Name. But this does not mean the kingdom belongs only to the afterlife.
At Jesus’ baptism, the heavens have already symbolically been opened. The boundary between heaven and earth has been breached. Jesus comes to show us that the kingdom of heaven is not far away—it is close at hand, present, pressing in, here and now, available, to anyone who has the eyes to see it and hearts open to participate in it.
For Jesus in Matthew, the message of the Kingdom of Heaven was about proclaiming a new, heaven inspired way of living in this world.
And how do we become open to this Kingdom?
The word Jesus uses is ‘Repent’. This is not to be confused with grovelling in shame or moral self-flagellation. The word means: change your mind.
Reorient your thinking. Open yourself to a larger truth. Meta-noia – speaks of a movement into a greater mind, a wider awareness, a deeper way of seeing reality: finding a new perspective.
Light has dawned. Therefore, ‘see differently’ is the invitation of Jesus.
The passage ends with Jesus calling his first disciples, again, not from the centres of power, but from the margins: fishermen, ordinary people, working by the sea. Jesus invites them to become learners of his way, disciples. To take on his yoke (Matthew 11:29), to share his vocation as Isaiah’s Servant of God.
And that vocation begins where Jesus’ own began, in belovedness. “You are my beloved,” spoken at the baptism, now becomes a life to be lived and shared. As they follow Jesus, they will discover their own belovedness, and learn to live from that place.
At the time of Jesus, Israel was under a brutal Roman occupation. Life was hard, People were poor. Much of their wealth was heavily taxed by Rome to entrench their authority and power by feeding their troops. Disease was rife as well as mental health issues often inflicted from the trauma of Roman brutality. And in this situation there were three, maybe four responses from the people (four ways of being Israel in the world). The first was the response of the zealots (resistance fighters – what Romans would have called terrorists): take up arms and resist the occupation in guerrilla attacks that were brutally squashed. The second response was that of the Pharisees: bury yourself in your religious piety aiming to keep yourself religiously pure at all costs, observing the minutiae of the law in the hope that being good and pure, winning God’s favour so that God would somehow intervene. The third option was collaboration with the occupying Empire often at the expense of your own people: This was the path of the Sadducees and the Temple priests and also Herod who ruled as Rome’s puppet king for a while. A fourth response was to retreat into the desert living in secluded semi-monastic religious communities. When Jesus invited his first disciples, saying come follow me. He was inviting them into a 5th way: Not the way of religious purity and law keeping, not the way of collaboration, not the way of violent resistance, not the way of withdrawal into the desert… He was inviting them to walk a new way of loving integrity in the world, discovering one’s belovedness and living that out as salt and light in the world.
And living from beloved-ness is the servant way of Isaiah: not the way of domination and violence, but the way of gentleness, integrity, faithful and costly love. For Matthew, this is the way Jesus will renew Israel’s true vocation in the world as a light to the nations. This is how the world is changed, not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Through ordinary people who have discovered their beloved-ness in God and invite people of all nations and all ethnicities to discover their beloved-ness too. Ordinary people whose lives become places where heaven touches earth. Or, as Jesus will later teach them to pray in this same Gospel: “May your kingdom come on earth.”
And it begins on the borderlands, in Galilee of the Nations, on the Way of the Sea, the road that connects us with the world, and people of all nations, as Jesus says, ‘Come, follow me and I will teach you how to catch people in the net of Divine Love’. The rest of Matthew’s Gospel uncovers what that means.
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