Epiphany 3: Change your mind

 Isaiah 9.1-4, Matthew 4.12-23

About a hundred years before Jesus was born a great victory was won by a man you may never have heard of called Aristobulus I.  He was the king of Judea, the territory around Jerusalem – he had seized power for himself after a family feud. If that wasn’t enough, he was also high priest.  

Aristobulus wasn’t content with the power he had though. He wanted more. He had his eyes on the lands to the north of Judea, the ancient tribal lands of Zebulun and Naphtali, which had once been part of Israel, but had been conquered 600 years before by the Assyrians. Their population had been scattered around their vast empire, and the lands resettled with people from other countries and faiths. It had become a ragbag of nationalities, cultures and backgrounds. That was why the prophet Isaiah called it Galilee of the nations, or Galilee of the Gentiles, a place associated with defeat and humiliation. Aristobulus wanted to change all that. He wanted to make Israel great again – sounds familiar? So he marched north with his armies and, after a bitter war he imposed his rule on this land, forcibly converting many of its people. He saw himself as the living embodiment of Isaiah’s prophecy. He, Aristobulus had “made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.”

But it didn’t last. He’d hardly had a chance to enjoy his triumph when he died, and about 40 years later, the Romans conquered not only Galilee, but Judea too, and parcelled up his kingdom among puppet kings like Herod. His mighty conquest had been no more than a flash in the pan. 

So, when Matthew quotes that very same passage from Isaiah, and applies it to Jesus, he is being much more provocative than we think. This was all very recent history to the people of Jesus’ time. We often tend to read the Gospels in a very individualistic, spiritual way, but at the time they were political bombshells, full of subversive messages. 

Right from the start of his Gospel, Matthew sets us up to hear a story that is going to be about power and how it is used, kingdoms and how they are built and ruled. Jesus’ birth is told through the lens of the visit of the Magi to King Herod, and all the horror that unleashes, and throughout his ministry Jesus challenges, implicitly and explicitly, the power of Jewish and Roman leaders. But in doing that, he has hard choices to make. What kind of leader will he be? One like Aristobulus, and King Herod, leading by force, ambitious for worldly acclaim and wealth? Of something completely different?

And that’s where today’s Gospel begins. Jesus comes out of the desert, where he has been pondering that question, and hears that John the Baptist has been arrested by Herod , but instead of being scared off by that, he steps straight into the space John has prepared for him, and begins to preach the same message, exactly the same message, in the same words. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. Jesus knows that he will face the same corrupt political forces as John, and so will those who follow him, fishermen like Simon and Andrew, James and John, but he carries on preaching anyway. Repent!

Repentance often gets a bad press these days; sackcloth and ashes are rather out of fashion nowadays. But properly understood, repentance not about guilt and punishment. The Greek word metanoia, means to change your mind. Repentance is about finding a new outlook on life. Understood that way, Jesus’ message is just as compelling today as it was then.  

Do we look at the world with cynicism and despair? “Change your mind,” says Jesus, “learn to see the hope God has for you.” That’s repentance. Do we feel that our lives are pointless, that we are just on an endless treadmill? “Change your mind” says Jesus, “you matter, your life has a purpose, God is at work in you”. That’s repentance too. Do we look at the forces, political, personal, ranged against us and think, “what chance have I got against all that”? “Change your mind,” says Jesus, “God’s light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.“  That’s what repentance looks like in practice. It’s not about despair or misery; it’s about hope. 

Perhaps it’s not so surprising then that these fishermen leapt up and followed Jesus. They had sat too long already in the darkness of oppression, injustice and hopelessness, but now the light had dawned. “The kingdom of heaven has come near” Jesus said to them. “God is here. He’s at work in the world, at work in you, if only you open your eyes – change your minds - and see it.” They weren’t especially strong, or wise, or religiously observant or good - there was nothing about them that singled them out as special - but that, in a way, was the point. God called them and God used them just as they were. And he calls us too, in the ordinariness of our lives. He calls us to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, to love those others have no time for, to learn to react with mercy and forgiveness, not fear and hatred to those who hurt us. To build bridges rather than walls, to seek and to find God in the stranger, and even in the enemy, as well as in the friend.

But if we are going to do that, and keep doing that, in a world where that seems as counter-cultural now as it did in Jesus’ day, we will need to change our minds, probably on a daily basis – maybe about others, maybe about God, but first of all about ourselves, so that we can learn to see ourselves and others as God sees us, as people who are full of promise, full of hope, chosen and called, people who matter. “Repent – change your mind – for the kingdom of God has come near.”

Amen