The father that this man wants to bury before following Jesus probably isn’t dead. He might not even be ill. This man is mostly just saying that he is not willing to do something his father will disprove of while his father is still alive but that he will be free to do as he pleases once his father is dead.

Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”

Matthew 8:21-22 (NIV) Full Text Matthew 8:14-22

This interpretation is not unique to me, I’ve heard it elsewhere, but this time, Wilda Gafney’s Woman’s Lectionary expands the passage to show us what came before.

So now I’m wondering what Peter’s mother-in-law thinks of this.

When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him.

Matthew 8:14-15 (NIV) Full Text Matthew 8:14-22

Apparently Peter’s mother-in-law lives with him. In my understanding of household formation in this time period, this suggests to me that she is widowed and doesn’t have any sons.

This is Peter’s house after all, not his father-in-law’s house, and she apparently lives here, she’s participating in the work of welcoming guests in a way I wouldn’t expect if she were a guest herself. If she had a husband or a son to support her, wouldn’t she be living in their household?

Perhaps I’m making to much of her presence here, but this suggests a precarious situation to me. If Peter fails to support her, and his wife for that matter, do they have anyone to fall back on?

How does Jesus’ call to let the dead bury their own dead in the second half of this week’s passage sound to this woman?

She’s a recent recipient of a miraculous healing, but still desperately dependent on others for her every day survival. How does it sound to her to hear Jesus instructing his followers to abandon their elderly parents in order to follow? And in fact, her son-in-law has walked away from his job and his family to follow this teacher. Not that it was a great job.

Jesus clearly cares for her, and all of those coming to him to be healed, but I’m finding a contradiction here in the way he cares for the hurting and the marginalized while at the same time calling away the people supporting the hurting and the marginalized.

In this version of the story of Jesus calling his disciples, he tells them that he will send them out to fish for people. That’s kind of an ominous metaphor. Fishing doesn’t usually turn out that well for the fish after all. They get lured in or entrapped and then scooped out of the water that sustains them and turned in to dinner.

This metaphor is usually understood to have something to do with evangelism. It conjures images of missionary trips to far away countries and street corner preachers talking about the end of the world. You don’t have to follow those threads very far before you get to forced and coerced conversions, and uncomfortable questions about the destruction of cultures. The exploitative nature of fishing starts to seem like an appropriate part of the metaphor.

Wait a minute though. I see fishing as an exploitative process of resource extraction because I live in a time and culture where that’s the prevailing narrative. Fishing and fish processing is big business. Multiple fisheries have collapsed due to overfishing and habitat destroying practices. Is that how a fisherman in first century Galilee would have understood fishing? Probably not.

I wonder if there’s a connection between a resource extraction conception of fishing with the more unsavory kinds of evangelism through this metaphor. That’s probably a stretch, but it’s an interesting idea.

The text itself doesn’t explain the metaphor, but it does show what Jesus did after calling his disciples this way.

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him.

Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

Matthew 4:18-23 (NIV)

He went out bringing good news and healing for people. If this is the text explaining the fishing metaphor for us, it must be a different view of fishing.

I find the connection between Jesus’ ministry and John’s to be really intriguing. That’s partially because it’s something I’ve only noticed relatively recently. John is often just a footnote in the story of Jesus. He’s just this weird guy out by the river dressing funny, insulting people, and preparing the way. I always got the impression that John and Jesus had only this fleeting connection. Like they meet briefly during Jesus’ baptism and then go their separate ways. It’s part of a view that sees Jesus as disconnected from the religious landscape of his time. This idea of Jesus sees his message as entirely new and his ministry as entirely his own.

But when I go back and actually read these passages, that’s not true. Not at all.

John and Jesus knew each other well. Of course they did, they were family. But more than that, it seems that Jesus ministry was, in very important ways, a continuation of John’s. Look at what the author of Matthew does in this week’s reading.

When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali— to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:

“Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
    the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan,
    Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people living in darkness
    have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
    a light has dawned.”

From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Matthew 4:12-17 (NIV)

And previously, taking about John

 In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Matthew 3:1-2 (NIV)

That repetition is no mistake. Whether or not these two men actually had the same message, the author of Matthew wants us to notice the connection. We’re supposed to read Jesus’ preaching as a continuation of John’s ministry. I’ve got some wild speculation that I’ll get to shortly, but I’m trying to focus here. Why is it so important to the author of Matthew, and all the other Gospels for that matter, that Jesus is placed in the context of John and his thing by the Jordan? And on the flip side of that question: What are we missing when we see Jesus as disconnected this way?

It occurs to me that minimizing Jesus’ connection to John might be a function of the society that I live in. We expect everyone to stand alone and be judged on their own merits. It’s not supposed to matter who your family is or who your teachers were. Your ideas are supposed to be unique, developed independently of anyone else. That’s an interesting idea that I might have to keep mulling over.

Ok. Wild speculation time. It looks to me like Jesus was a part of John’s ministry. Perhaps the plan was that it would not be a one person act, but a two person act. John and Jesus, repentance, miraculous healing, God drawing near to God’s people, the whole thing, all there in that significant place by the Jordan River. But then John is arrested, and ultimately executed and the plan changes. Jesus is going it alone and the whole thing ends up traveling around Galilee. Also, seeing John’s arrest and execution, Jesus knows exactly where he’s heading and chooses that path deliberately. Even all the way back here at the beginning.