When the Messiah, the Son of God, begins his ministry who does he go to first? Who does he call? Let’s consider the candidates. First of all, there were the Sadducees, the ruling Priestly class. The High Priest was the most influential person in Judea at the time. To many, that would have been an obvious place to go. But he doesn’t go to them. The most popular contenders would have been the Pharisees. They were the elders and ‘rabbis,’ the pious religious people of the day. But Jesus didn’t call them. My choice would have been the Essenes, a monastic community of devoted followers of Yahweh who lived in the desert at Qumran next to the Dead Sea. They were waiting for the Messiah to come and in the meantime observed a rigorous life of austerity and spiritual discipline. When I read their writings (in the Dead Sea scrolls) I couldn’t help but feel that they should have at least got a visit from Jesus, but we have no mention of them in the Gospels. The other likely candidates would be the poor peasants, given God’s expressed concern for the poor, but it wasn’t even the peasants that Jesus went to. So, who did he call? According to Matthew 4:13 Jesus went to Capernaum, a city that was far from being a hub of Jewish piety, and there he first called some fishermen to be his disciples. Not poor, not rich, just ‘middle-of-the-road’ fishermen. The significant thing about this choice is the seeming insignificance of the people Jesus chose. God loves to do extra-ordinary things through ordinary people!
Give thanks to God that he still calls ordinary people today and works in and through our lives.
Read Matthew 4:18-25
