Gonna Change My Way of Thinking

I can think back to a time when times were really bad for me. My wife had asked me to leave my home and kids and I found myself living in a tiny trailer in Hawthorne, and not the nice part of Hawthorne either. I was still disabled and living on California Disability Insurance. My employer had fired me because my back was hurt and they didn’t want the potential insurance claims from a re-injury. I was broke all the time. I had bills to pay. I was fat because I was not able to get out and get any exercise, and because I was so damn depressed. I had lost everything. I really only had one friend who came by regularly. That was Paul. I can honestly say that I really, really wanted to just die. Perhaps, if I weren’t such a coward, I might have caused myself some harm.

But then, one day, I got tired of being down. I was slowly getting better. I got up and started taking walks every day. I started back to school. I was looking for something new in my life. I started a diet. I began to lose weight. My disability ran out, but instead of getting more depressed, I went out and got a job as a bank teller even though I was still in pain. I learned to live with the pain. It was only pain. I developed a new way of thinking. So what if you have a little pain. At least when you’re in pain you know you’re alive. I had developed a new way of thinking.

That is what Jesus had to offer the world, a new way of thinking. After he had been baptized by John the Baptist, he went off into the wilderness to fast and pray. During that time, he suffered temptations to walk away from his mission, but he overcame them. And after forty days, he walked out of the wilderness. The story, according to Matthew continues like this:

“When he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, that what had been said through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled: ‘Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen.’ From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’

As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen. He said to them, ‘Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.’

At once they left their nets and followed him.” (Matthew 4:12-20, NOT the Big Daddy Translation)

I wanted to use the traditional translation here to point out a couple of differences between the original Greek and the English. One of the problems with translating anything is that there is a fundamental dilemma facing the translator. Do you translate literally, or do you translate for meaning? If you choose to translate for meaning, how can you be sure you have the right meaning and you’re not infusing some of your own meaning into the translation? The New Testament, that is, the writings about Jesus, were written in Greek. Greek was the lengua Franca of the world in those days. Everybody spoke Greek. When it was translated into English, many times the translators chose to translate the words in such a way as to agree with their own view of Christian teachings.

When the reading says that Jesus “withdrew” to Gallilee, the Greek word actually translates as “sought refuge in”. So this means that when Jesus saw the John was arrested, he got his ass out of town before something like that happened to him. Obviously, he was not ready to be martyred just yet, or perhaps did not even see that as part of his mission. The reference to the prophet Isaiah is, again, to provide proof to Matthew’s Jewish audience that Jesus is the awaited Messiah. The Sea of Galilee was also known as Lake Genesserat (site of another famous miracle involving demonic possession) and is also known today as Lake Kinneret. It is Israel’s largest freshwater lake at 53 miles in diameter. It has always been known for its rich fish stocks.

Jesus repeats the message of John. Repent. This is a very charged word today. We are all tired as hell of television evangelists calling upon us to repent and follow Jesus, excuse me, JAAAAYSUS! But the Greek word translated as “repent” literally means to “change your way of thinking”. Jesus is telling people to change their way of thinking, change their way of looking at the world. Repent does not mean to turn your back on your life. It means to change your way of thinking. Wow. That’s what I did when times were bad. I changed my way of thinking and things started to turn up. I quit thinking that I couldn’t and started thinking that I could. Jesus came and told people that following God didn’t mean repeating a bunch of rituals and traditions, but serving one another in a spirit of love and faith.

Being a Christian is to be a new creation. That is the symbolism of baptism. Saint Paul, the Apostle, in his letter told the first century followers of Jesus that being a new creation in Christ had nothing to do with circumcision or uncircumcision. That is, it has nothing to do with being Jewish or Gentile. It has nothing to do with following ritual, or deliberately not following ritual, which is a type of ritual in itself. You become new. You reconcile yourself to God, get rid of all the anger, and rise up as a new person. You don’t follow a set of rules.

That’s what the people of first century Judea were doing. They were living lives governed by ritual and religious law. The message wasn’t about life after death. Most people already believed in a life after death. Most of the people in those days believed there was a resurrection. All the Pharisees believed in a resurrection. The death that Jesus came to overcome was the spiritual death of following a set of rules blindly, rigidly, without thought or understanding. To live an unthinking, unfeeling, unexamined life, that is the true culture of death, not the crap that some of the people who call themselves born agains are always preaching about.

Jesus came to change their way of thinking. The Royal Power of Heaven was approaching (literally). Jesus was the power of Heaven. We all are. We all have the power to do the work of God here on earth. Don’t expect some God up in the sky to fix everything here in your world. You are the power of heaven. You fix things. It’s your world. It was Jesus when the disciples came to him asking him how to feed the multitudes, who said, “You feed them.” You can perform miracles if you change your way of thinking.

It is then that Jesus sees Simon, the one called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting nets into the sea. Although the movies always show them on shore, I would have to guess they were on a boat, because the original Greek refers to them not as fishermen, but as sailors. That they were casting nets would imply they were fishermen. Were they not in a boat, it would be odd to refer to them as sailors. One would just call them fishermen. Besides, you don’t cast a net on shore into the surf. You cast a net from a boat. There is probably no more powerful phrase spoken by Jesus than what follows, “Come along back with me. I will make you sailors (fishers) of humankind.” (literal translation). So these two guys dropped everything and followed him.

It is a common misconception to think that these guys spent the next three years glued to Jesus’ side, listening to everything he said. But they had families and jobs. They were not the poor fisherman we think they were. They owned boats. They had nets. That made them middle class at least. The guys who worked for them were the poor ones. No, these guys followed Jesus for a while and then went home for a while. Then they would follow Jesus some more and then go home some more. They were just like me and you. Nobody is calling on you to walk away from your life and give up everything to do the work of God. You do the work of God in everything you do, everywhere you are.

Later on, these guys would think the message of Christ was important enough to travel throughout the known world to the very frontiers and most of them would lose their lives in very unpleasant ways for the message. That’s some message. What would it take to get you to do that? Something pretty damn important, I bet.

It is interesting to consider that Jesus chose to select common people like you and me to teach and to spread his message. It would almost have made more sense, if you had a message from God, to go through the religious elite, the priests of the temple, if you wanted to spread the message to the people. Perhaps Jesus understood that those guys were too wrapped up in their lives to change their way of thinking. They had no reason to change their way of thinking. Life was good for them. They were rich. They were respected. They were priests of the temple, but it was no mission for them. It was their job.

Moreover, Jesus knew that if the work of God were to be done, if people were to be comforted and fed, it wouldn’t be done by the religious establishment. It would be done by the everyday, common people like you and me. We reach out to others because we understand. We have felt pain. We have known hardship. We understand loneliness and grief. Sailors do more than fish. Sailors also take people across stormy seas to a new place. We can all do that. We can take ourselves and others to a new place. We can lift them out of suffering and hardship. We can ease their loads. We can take the world to paradise. We can become that new creation. We just have to change our way of thinking.