Second Sunday of Matthew
Scripture: Matthew 4:18-23
Oops!
In a recent edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tyler Jagt made a passionate argument for changing the way our schools teach kids how to read. He had assigned a 20-page article to his students as homework. When it came time to discuss the article, he discovered that not a single student had finished it. A decade ago, a 20-page article wasn’t a problem. So what changed?
Part of the answer has to do with smartphones. Jagt cites research showing that the mere presence of a smartphone — face down, powered off, across the room, even out of sight — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence. The largest effects fall on the most phone-dependent users. So when a student says they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, they may be describing an actual neurological condition.
But smartphones aren’t the only culprit. Researchers studying AI use found that students who relied on ChatGPT showed up to 55 percent reduced brain connectivity compared to those who didn’t, and they consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. Perhaps most troubling: when the AI-dependent group was forced to write without AI, their brain activity did not return to baseline. The researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for that lingering deficit.
It doesn’t look good. What does this mean for our future doctors, surgeons, politicians, or even our future priests?
Ugh!
The core of our faith, the foundation of our tradition, is the revelation of Jesus Christ — recorded in a book. A book, I might add, that is considerably longer than 20 pages.
But my concern isn’t only whether we can read the Bible. My deeper concern is whether we are able to truly understand it.
The Bible, like all great literature, is something to be engaged with, wrestled with. Only in that struggle does meaning emerge — and it is meaning, not information, that changes lives. It is meaning that introduces us to Christ.
Today’s Gospel, on the surface, looks like a historical footnote. Jesus calls his first disciples. They happen to be fishermen. They answer dramatically. Most of us read it the way we read a book about World War II or a gardening manual — scanning for facts, for “what happened.” But facts that give us knowledge don’t change lives. Trivia doesn’t produce saints who transform the world.
So what do we do?
Aha!
Jagt’s answer to the reading crisis is to treat it as a structural problem and to start asking better questions. With the right questions, we can locate where comprehension breaks down — and make the needed corrections.
To truly understand Scripture — to receive not just information but truth — we follow a similar path. With a little effort and the right questions, we are drawn into the text. We begin to wrestle with it. And through that wrestling, we find the hidden treasure.
Origen, the great second-century theologian of Alexandria, described how divine wisdom embedded stumbling blocks in the text — moments where the plain historical reading falters, where something seems odd or incomplete — precisely so the reader would be forced off the easy road and onto a narrower, more demanding path. It is on that path, he says, that “the immense breadth of divine wisdom” opens before us.
Today’s passage has just such a stumbling block. Read as mere history, it is a dull passage — names, occupations, a quick exchange, a departure. But the moment we ask better questions, everything changes.
Whee!
Here is what the text gives us, and here are the questions it invites:
Jesus comes to Simon Peter and Andrew while they are casting their nets. He calls them, and they leave everything to follow. He finds James and John mending their nets with their father. He calls them too, and they leave — nets, boat, and father — and follow.
Now ask: If this isn’t just information, what is Matthew trying to tell us? Are Peter, Andrew, James, and John meant to be examples — not just historical figures, but a pattern? If they are examples, then is Jesus still calling? Is he calling us?
Notice that the disciples were found doing ordinary things. Not praying in the Temple. Not fasting in the desert. They were working — mending nets, casting lines, smelling of fish. Jesus meets them exactly where they are.
So: Where does Jesus find us? What occupies our days — our work, our scrolling, our worry, our routine? And if Jesus is calling out to us in the midst of all of it, what is he asking us to set down?
The nets are not evil. The boat is not a sin. But they held the disciples’ identity, their security, their livelihood. To follow Jesus, they had to loosen their grip on the life they already knew.
And then look at what follows the calling: the lame walk, the sick are healed, the demonized are set free. The Kingdom breaks through. Which leads to the most urgent question of all: What might the Kingdom accomplish if we, too, respond to the voice of Christ?
Yeah!
Here is the Gospel— and it is very good news: Jesus has not stopped walking along the shore.
He is still passing by. He is still calling. And he is not waiting for you to have your life sorted out first, your doubts resolved, your nets neatly folded. He called fishermen mid-cast. He called men mid-mend. He calls us mid-scroll, mid-worry, mid-meeting, mid-life.
The invitation of this Gospel is not to admire the disciples from a distance. It is to recognize yourself in them — ordinary people, absorbed in ordinary things — and to hear your own name in that call.
So this week, take this passage with you. Don’t read it for facts. Read it as a letter addressed to you. Ask the questions: What net am I holding? What is Jesus asking me to set down — not forever, perhaps, but for now, to follow him more freely?
The disciples couldn’t have imagined, standing knee-deep in the Sea of Galilee, what saying yes would mean. They couldn’t have known they were about to participate in the healing of the world.
Neither can we.
But they said yes anyway.
And the Kingdom came.
Amen.