Walk This Way – 2/25/24

Have you seen this bit ever?

“Let’s go. Allow me, master.” “Oh, thanks very much.” “Walk this way. This way.”

That’s an old gag. It gets repeated over and over and over again: Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, more than a couple of Mel Brooks movies, Gilligan’s Island, M.A.S.H. That joke even has its own Wikipedia page. But it makes me think: doesn’t Jesus ask us to “walk this way?” What does that look like? Do we get it wrong sometimes? How do we know what walking his way looks like? That’s what Matthew is all about: walking like Jesus.

These two paragraphs at the end of Matthew 4 sound a little like “throw away lines.” What they’re saying is so familiar to us that we can easily zip past them to get to the good stuff. Yeah, sure. Okay. Jesus called his disciples. He healed a lot of people. I know. Yada, yada, yada. But Matthew doesn’t toss these paragraphs in here casually like a couple of miscellaneous details at the end of his introduction. He has a purpose for telling us this here. He wants to tell us something important.

He’s showing us what it looks like to follow Jesus. He’s telling us to “walk this way.” So, let’s look at these two simple paragraphs and see how they teach us to “walk his way.”

To understand the significance of what’s going on here, we need to think first about the choices that Matthew makes when he’s telling us this story. Think about what a gospel is. It’s not just a simple biography or a Wikipedia page for Jesus that explains his life and work. It’s a selective biography, or better yet, it’s a biographical sermon.

When a preacher puts a sermon together, he makes choices about what things to include, how to arrange them, and how to describe them so he can get the right response from the congregation. For all the things that Matthew could say about Jesus, he chooses those things that he should say to point us in the right direction. That’s why we have four gospels. Even though there are a lot of things in common across the four, they are, in effect, four different sermons to emphasize different facets of Jesus’ life and ministry.

Matthew chooses those things that emphasize the kingdom of God and the fulfillment of God’s promise in the Old Testament, and he organizes his gospel sermon by alternating between what Jesus did and what Jesus said: his works and his words. Chapter 4 is the first “what Jesus did” section. Then starting in chapter 5, we have the Sermon on the Mount, which is the first “what Jesus said” section.

Think about the sweep of events that Matthew puts together to bring us where we are: Jesus’ baptism confirms that he is the Son of God, Jesus’ temptation shows his authority and purpose, Jesus’ preaching connects him to the Old Testament promise of a King. With this kind of introduction, Matthew leaves us wanting to know more about Jesus’ works and words, but he chooses to add two more short paragraphs here to show how to walk like Jesus. Let’s look at the first one of these, starting in Matthew 4:18.

“While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.”

Obviously, if you’re going to tell the story of Jesus ministry, you need to talk about the disciples. All of the gospel writers include this in some way, but each author’s account differs slightly in what they emphasize. Let’s look at some important details here that Matthew chooses to include.

First of all, who calls whom? In other words, who initiates the relationship? Who gets this going? Typically, a would-be follower would approach the teacher or rabbi. But here, the teacher calls the student. God initiates the relationship with his disciples. And this is no ordinary teacher walking down the shore because Matthew’s already told us a lot about Jesus through the story of his birth, baptism, temptation, and initial ministry. This is the King calling, with all his authority and sovereignty behind that call. There’s also grace in this call. It’s a gift. Remember back in 1 John 4:19, John says,

“we love because he first loved us.”

Whom did Jesus call? What kind of people? If you imagine a king selecting people for his court, you’d figure that he would probably pick people who were wealthy, powerful, and wise. But King Jesus calls the simple, the common, the unremarkable. Paul reminds the Corinthians of this in 1 Corinthians.

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”

What did Jesus call them to do? He didn’t call them just to hang out and be in his entourage. He didn’t call them to be his attendants or to meet his needs. He didn’t call them to spend all the time singing his praises or to build him a palace. He called them to “follow me,” to walk his way.

A lot of times the New Testament uses this word “follow,” “following” to mean literal following, but in the gospels especially, it means something a lot more. Following equals discipleship. The two words are almost the same thing. This word for “following” is used that way (as discipleship) is used only that way in the gospels, except for one other place in Revelation 14, written by John, who uses it there the same way the gospels use it. This is when John is describing his vision of those “who had [the Lamb’s] name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads,” who “were singing a new song before the throne.” Revelation 14:4-5 says, “It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as first-fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless.” These are those who are called by the King to walk his way.

A few things that are important here about following Jesus. It means not only following his teaching, but his example. Remember how Matthew organizes his gospel: what Jesus did and what Jesus said. We need to follow both his deeds and his words. And following requires a break with the past and a new set of priorities. They left their nets and their boat, and even their father. It means following Jesus all the way to the cross. Matthew will talk more about this later in his gospel when he records Jesus saying, “whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38).

So, the king calls common people to walk his way, but what specific new job does Jesus give them? He promises to make them “fishers of men.” That’s another expression that’s so familiar to us we may miss its power. Jesus is obviously making a play on words here because the men whom he calls were literal fishermen. As Luke puts it in his gospel,

“from now on you will be catching men” (Luke 5:10).

So, when Jesus calls them to this new kind of fishing, he’s calling them to work for the King to show people the kingdom. Jesus isn’t calling them to attend to his needs, but to the needs of everyone around them. Walking his way means caring for others and telling them the good news of the kingdom. So, these common people were called by the King to become fishers of men.

So, did Jesus just leave them there to figure it all out on their own? No. He gives them a call with a promise. He says,

“I will make you fishers of men.”

That word “make” means to craft or fashion. It implies a creative act. Paul uses a form of this word in Ephesians 2:10 when he says that

“we are his workmanship.”

Jesus calls them to walk his way, and “their obedience is followed by the promise of provision,” as one commentary says. That promise never ends. Matthew ends his gospel sermon with the same promise:

“I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Jesus himself initiates the call to all people to follow him and to introduce people to the kingdom. But there’s one more important point here in the way Matthew specifically tells this story.

Even though he tells it almost exactly the same way Mark does—he even borrows Mark’s favorite word “immediately”—Matthew makes some subtle choices in his account, I think really, to include us who are reading his gospel here, 2,000 years later. Matthew makes a point of making the call to these two pairs of brothers virtually identical. Mark’s is similar, but Matthew makes the parallelism conspicuous.

Think about it: he saw two brothers; he saw two other brothers. Simon and Andrew, James and John. Casting a net into the sea in the boat, mending their nets with their father. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” and he called them. Basically, “ditto.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him, immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.

Matthew sets up a repeating pattern here, a rhythm, like a call and response. Jesus saw them, and he called them, and they followed. Jesus saw them, and he called them, and they followed. This pattern repeats two times here, but if you read through Matthew’s gospel, you see that he really likes to say things in threes. So why only two here? It feels like there ought to be more. It feels like the pattern’s supposed to keep repeating.

I think it’s supposed to keep repeating with us. Jesus saw me, and he called me, and I followed. Jesus saw you, and he called you, and you followed. Jesus sees us, and he calls us, and we follow. We fill out the pattern. We keep the rhythm going. Just like that old “walk this way” gag keeps getting repeated over and over again, we repeat something much more precious: the response to the King’s gracious call and his invitation to the kingdom.

This call is a model for all those called to walk his way. Jesus calls us all regardless of our wealth or influence or education or age or sex or weakness. He calls us not only to adore him, but to follow him, to walk the way he walked through rejection and suffering and even death, to leave whatever we’d been following before and set out in a new direction. Even if we stay in the same place doing the same job, now we do it for different reasons. And he calls us not simply to himself, but to others— to repeat the message of his salvation with every breath and to invite others into the Kingdom. And he promises to make us what we should be— to equip us with all that we need along the way.

Matthew tells this story this way because he wants us to know that Jesus calls people today, just as he called those first disciples. He wants us to walk Jesus’ way.

To make that point even more clear, Matthew then goes on in the next paragraph to include a brief but sweeping picture of what it looks like to follow Jesus. He’s going to add more detail to this picture in the rest of the book, but here he gives a summary. It’s important for us to recognize some key points in that summary so we know what it looks like to walk his way.

In each one of these three verses, there are really three lists of things that fit together to make the whole picture of Jesus’ ministry. In verse 23, he lists what Jesus did in his ministry.

“And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.”

The word “proclaiming” is the word for “preaching.” So, Jesus spent his time teaching, preaching, and healing.

Think about those activities. Teaching and preaching are what Jesus said. Healing is what he did. That’s that same basic outline that Matthew uses for his gospel— Jesus’ words and his works. In a sense, everything in the rest of this book is an expansion of the activities we see here. And if we’re going to walk his way, we’re going to need to do what he did: preach, teach, and heal.

All three of these activities are bound up together: giving the good news of the kingdom is the foundation of teaching and healing. This is what the Old Testament prophets said the Messiah would do: declare the kingdom of God, who can

“bear our griefs and carry our sorrows” (Isa 53:4).

After listing what Jesus did, Matthew tells us about those who received his healing. Verse 24,

“So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures, and paralytics, and he healed them.”

Healing is particularly important for Matthew. He uses this word more than any other New Testament book. He records at least 15 individual instances of healing, and seven times he gives a broad summary of multitudes who came to Jesus and were healed. Leprosy, paralysis, fever, demon possession, hemorrhaging, withered limbs, the lame, the crippled, the blind, the deaf, the mute, the harassed, and helpless. Even the dead are brought back to life. Matthew wants us to know that this healing proves that Jesus is the promised Messiah. He’ll make that point later in the book, too. These healings show Jesus’ authority over evil and even death itself. There are distinctive marks of the kingdom of God and are central to walking his way.

Then, verse 25, Matthew tells us where these people came from. He starts with what Jesus did, then for whom, and then where these people came from.

“And great crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis, and from Jerusalem and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.”

If you plot that out, that’s an area with about a 100-mile radius. Around here, that would stretch to the other side of Charlotte and Columbia and almost all the way to Atlanta and Knoxville.

Even though Matthew does list the specific regions, his point is to be broad and inclusive. People came from all of Galilee and all of Syria. People from everywhere came to Jesus and he healed them. Likewise, Matthew isn’t trying to give a limited list of the ailments that Jesus will cure. He’s using this list to show that Jesus can cure every disease and every affliction: physical, spiritual, emotional, any pain or weakness. He cares for the poor and the hungry and the meek that he’ll talk about in the Beatitudes coming up in chapter five. It’s as if Matthew is singing along with that old hymn,

“Come, you disconsolate, where’er you languish; / Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel. / Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; / Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal.”

By giving us this sweeping summary of what Jesus did, for whom he did it, and where they came from, Matthew sketches an outline of what it looks like to walk Jesus’ way. So, how do we walk his way? It’s not always easy. Sometimes we may think we’re walking his way, but what we’re really doing looks pretty odd, may even be the opposite of the way Jesus walked.

For example, have you ever seen something like this? Now that looks just like a $20 bill that someone left as a generous tip at a diner. But actually, when you unfold it, you see that it’s a gospel tract. Now look, there’s nothing wrong with using a track to preach the gospel. But when you do it this way, I don’t think you’re walking his way. You can find stories online of wait staff who’ve gotten one of these things thinking that it was a good tip when it was really just a trick. Jesus didn’t play tricks on people. He healed them.

My wife gave me another example that’s more upsetting than this one. Years ago, when she was a nurse on a critical care floor, she was taking care of an older patient whom the doctors had just given a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer. The man was alone and clearly frightened. Two men came into his room. My wife guessed that they were preachers, but it seemed like they didn’t know the dying patient. From the hall, my wife could hear them preaching loudly, even aggressively, telling this frightened, lonely man that unless he accepted Jesus immediately, he would die and go to hell. The man started talking back loudly. The preachers got even louder until they were all just yelling at each other. Finally, the man demanded that they leave his room and not come back. My wife never knew for sure what happened to that patient, but he probably died without ever meeting Jesus.

Those are a couple of egregious examples of not walking Jesus’ way, even though we may think we are. But there are more subtle ways we may miss the mark. What if someone walks into one of our services here at North Hills and leaves unknown, without anyone meeting them or learning their name. I know that doesn’t happen all the time, and I know a lot of you are committed to making sure it doesn’t happen, but it does happen more than it should. It’s far too easy to be anonymous here at North Hills. I say this not to scold but to point to a few opportunities right here in front of us.

Think of the beauty and joy and hope that Jesus brought to all those people who came to him. When people come to us, we can show them that same beauty, joy, and hope with a simple welcome, sharing your name, and getting to know them so that every person in our community feels welcomed and known.

I remember back when I was going into 10th grade, my family had moved from Indiana to Oklahoma. We went to this church, and I knew nobody. I didn’t know a thing. I was this nerd who just didn’t feel at home. But this guy—I remember his name, Lee Gowans—he came up to me, he put his arm around me, he didn’t treat me like a nerd. I thought, man, you didn’t get the memo. You’re not supposed to talk to me like this. But he welcomed me, he sat down with me next to me in the service. Suddenly, despite my best efforts to feel awkward, I felt at home.

I heard a recent story about a young man here who came into a meeting here at North Hills without knowing anyone or anything about the church. He just felt like he needed to go to a church, and he ended up here. Someone noticed that he looked out of place and introduced himself and made a connection. That young man felt welcomed and known. And he’ll come back. We can all do that same thing. Just go up to someone you don’t recognize and introduce yourself.

Now, listen, I know if you’re like me, you may hesitate to do that because you figure that person that you don’t recognize over there is probably somebody that’s been going here longer than I have, or I’ve already met them, and I just forgot their names. I don’t want to go over there because I’m going to look stupid. Listen, okay. Help me out and all the people like me. Can we right now resolve to declare this a “no-fault greeting zone” and hereby pardon any past or future greeting misdemeanors? Do I hear a second? Yeah. There we go. So let the minutes reflect that the resolution was passed by unanimous consent.

Now, since we can no longer be held liable for a greeting mishap, just go up to someone and introduce yourself. Not just with the usual “what’s your name and what do you do” but also “what has God done for you this week?” Or “what’s on your heart?” “Is there any way I can pray for you?” And if you’re here with something on your heart, maybe a burden or sorrow or worry that you struggle to bear yourself, come. The last couple of weeks, we’ve had people up here during the songs at the end of the service who are eager to hear what’s on your heart and come to God’s mercy seat with you in prayer. Come. And if you don’t feel comfortable coming up here, just find someone near you. Just don’t neglect the nudge of the Spirit. Like Melissa was talking about when it came to working in the nursery, don’t neglect that. Come today. Receive what the Spirit longs to give you. We want this to be a place of welcome and healing because that’s what the kingdom looks like.

There’s one more thing that you can do if you want to walk his way: be a student of his words and works. We’re going to spend several weeks in the book of Matthew, and we’ll see how Matthew fills in the details that he only sketches here. Listen carefully because it’s not always what people expect. It’s easy to walk down the wrong path. The true path is narrow and hard. Matthew will reset your values and change your direction. It will turn your world upside down. Things that most people think are weak and worthless, Jesus says are blessed. Secret sins, the sins of your heart are more lethal than the sins we can see. Acts of worship done in secret mean more than those done in public. The unclean and the outcast, whom others will not touch, Jesus embraces and heals. The storms and demons that frighten and repel us, Jesus commands and calms. Those who can kill your body deserve your fear far less than he who can destroy your soul. Though God’s word appears weak, it is strong. Though small, it is great. Though lost, it is found. Though old, it is new. Though hidden, it is priceless. If you save your life, you’ll lose it. If you lose your life, you’ll find it.

After plotting our unlikely kingdom path, Matthew sends us off to walk that path by repeating Jesus’ call, a call that grows to a command with authority and promise. At the very end of his gospel, Matthew records that Jesus came and said to them,

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

To follow this command, to walk his way, we do not need to be mighty or powerful. In fact, we need to be poor and weak. Jesus has the power. To walk his way, we do not need great resolve or skill. We only need to answer his call and follow him. Jesus knows the way. To walk his way, we do not need supernatural gifts of healing. We simply need to use whatever gifts we have to comfort, welcome, and encourage. Jesus does the healing. To walk his way, we do not need to travel across the globe to unreached people, though some may do just that. We simply need to reach across the aisle to the people right beside us. Jesus sees you, and he calls you. Follow him. Walk his way.