January 25, 2026, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Here we are again, only one week later, hearing what sounds like a familiar story: Jesus walking along the shore, calling fishermen, and people leaving their nets to follow him. Last Sunday, we heard this story in John’s Gospel—the careful, almost intimate telling of how Andrew brings his brother Simon to Jesus, how Jesus sees him and gives him a new name. Today, Matthew gives us the same moment from a different angle, and it is worth pausing to notice what has changed.

In John, the call unfolds gradually, through curiosity and relationship. In Matthew, the call comes with startling urgency. “Follow me,” Jesus says, “and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately—Matthew uses that word twice—they leave their nets. Immediately, they leave their father. Immediately, they follow.

This is the second week we have been reflecting on the calling of the disciples, and that repetition is not accidental. The Church, in her wisdom, knows that calling is something we need to hear more than once, because it rarely lands cleanly or comfortably the first time. Calling is not a single moment preserved in amber. It is something we circle around, revisit, wrestle with, and grow into over time.

Matthew sets this calling within a much larger story, one that reaches back into the prophet Isaiah. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light,” Isaiah declares. Matthew quotes this prophecy directly, insisting that what is happening on the shores of the Sea of Galilee is not an isolated event. It is the breaking in of God’s long-promised light into a world that knows darkness all too well.

Isaiah speaks to a people who are weary, afraid, and bruised by history. Zebulun and Naphtali—those northern regions—had been overrun, humiliated, and forgotten. They were places people passed through, not places anyone expected God to begin something new. Yet Isaiah insists that it is precisely there, in the land of deep shadow, that light will dawn. Not in the halls of power. Not in Jerusalem’s temple courts. But in the margins.

Matthew wants us to see that Jesus chooses the same geography. After John the Baptist is arrested, Jesus withdraws to Galilee. This is not a strategic retreat; it is a theological statement. God’s kingdom does not wait for ideal conditions. It does not begin where everything is already in order. It begins in places of vulnerability, uncertainty, and risk. It begins among people whose lives are already shaped by hardship and long days of ordinary labor.

It is in that setting that Jesus begins to proclaim his message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Repentance here is not primarily about guilt or shame. It is about reorientation. It is about turning toward something new that God is doing, even when that new thing disrupts what feels familiar or secure.

Then come the calls themselves. Simon Peter and Andrew are casting their nets. James and John are mending theirs with their father, Zebedee. These are working men, embedded in family businesses, responsible to parents, livelihoods, and community. Matthew does not give us the fine details. We do not hear the conversations that might have happened later that night. We do not hear the questions asked by spouses, the worry in a father’s voice, or the fear of walking away from something known into something utterly uncertain.

But just because Matthew is brief does not mean the choice was easy. Silence is not the same as simplicity. Leaving nets is not merely a symbolic gesture; it is an economic risk. Leaving a father is not just a logistical change; it is an emotional rupture. Discipleship costs something, even when the Gospel does not itemize the price.

That is an important word for us today. We often romanticize the call of the disciples, imagining it as a clean, uncomplicated moment of obedience. But real lives are rarely that neat. Choices that matter are usually layered with love, responsibility, fear, and hope all at once. The call to follow Jesus, then and now, is rarely easy. It is rarely convenient. And it often asks us to trust that God’s promise is larger than what we can currently see.

Jesus does not call these men to admire him, or to agree with him in principle. He calls them to follow. In Matthew’s Gospel, discipleship is active. It involves movement. It means going where Jesus goes, learning not only his words but his way of life. “I will make you fish for people,” Jesus says. This is not a rejection of who they are; it is a transformation of it. Their skills, instincts, and experience are not discarded but redirected toward God’s purposes.

That is another crucial point. Jesus does not call perfect people, nor does he ask people to become someone entirely different before following. He meets them in the midst of their work, their routines, their ordinary days. The call comes not after they have sorted everything out, but in the middle of things—nets half-mended, boats pulled up on the shore, lives in motion.

This pattern continues as Jesus goes throughout Galilee: teaching in synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and sickness among the people. Word spreads. Crowds gather. Hope stirs. But notice that the calling of the disciples comes before the crowds. Before there is momentum or visible success, Jesus gathers companions who will learn what it means to walk with him into places of need and suffering.

For us, the question is not whether we have been called—Scripture is clear that all the baptized are called—but how we respond to that call in the particular shape of our lives. Most of us will not be asked to leave fishing nets behind, but we may be asked to let go of assumptions, habits, or securities that keep us from fully following Jesus. We may be asked to reorder our time, our priorities, or our sense of what counts as success.

And like those first disciples, we often do not get the full picture in advance. Jesus does not offer a detailed itinerary or a five-year plan. He offers a promise: “Follow me.” The clarity comes in the following, not before it. The transformation happens along the way.

Isaiah’s promise of light is not a one-time event. It is a continuing reality. Every time someone responds to Jesus’ call—imperfectly, hesitantly, courageously—that light breaks into another corner of the world. Every act of mercy, every word of truth, every step taken in faith participates in God’s ongoing work of lifting burdens and breaking yokes.

The disciples could not have known where the road would lead: to healings and teachings, yes, but also to misunderstanding, failure, and eventually the cross. Yet they followed. Not because it was easy, but because something in Jesus’ call resonated more deeply than the fear of what they might lose.

As we hear this story again today, we are invited not to admire the disciples from a distance, but to recognize ourselves within it. We stand, like them, on the shoreline between what we know and what God is calling into being. The choice to follow Jesus is rarely simple, but it is always an invitation into life shaped by light rather than darkness.

May we have the courage to hear that call anew, the humility to follow where Christ leads, and the trust to believe that even in the places of deep shadow, God’s great light is already dawning.