Jesus Reverses Human Darkness: The Calling of Two Sets of Brothers
Focus Passage: Matthew 4:18-22
MAIN OBSERVATION: Jesus’s calling two sets of two brothers as his first disciples (Simon + Andrew, James + John) symbolically reverses the Old Testament motif of brother-against-brother betrayal.
Broadly speaking, the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible) is among other things a painful, extended illustration of humanity creating and then being unable to escape its own darkness. From Eden to Exile, the Old Testament spotlights a variety of troubling human cycles and teases them out in its stories as recurring literary motifs, each of which illustrate humanity’s self-induced darkness cycling and recycling itself across generations. Among those troubling Old Testament motifs, family conflict — which frequently manifests in the form of sibling rivalries, violent injustices, and fractured relationships — is a pervasive, heartbreaking cycle out of which the human family never quite escapes.
Family conflict spans the Old Testament, notably bookending its meta-story with two tragic tales of two sets of brothers who through various circumstances come to hate and fight one another: Cain vs. Abel, and Israel vs. Judah. In the beginning, Cain’s jealousy of his brother Abel leads to the first human-on-human violence: fratricide. Motivated by envy, Cain murders Abel, and in doing so triggers what becomes an exhausting pattern of fractured, dysfunctional family relationships that plagues the entire Old Testament storyline. For example, after Cain and Abel set the pattern in place in Genesis 4…
As punishment for dishonoring their father Noah, Ham’s children are cursed to endlessly struggle against their brothers, Shem’s and Japheth’s, children. (Gen. 9:25-27)
To settle their parents’ mistakes, Ishmael is banished from his brother, Isaac. Ishmael’s descendants then live in hostility toward all their brothers from Isaac’s line. (Gen. 21; 25:18)
To steal an inheritance, Jacob deceives his brother Esau, leading to a long and storied dysfunctional relationship between their descendant nations, Israel and Edom. (Gen. 27)
To steal their father’s favor, Joseph’s ten older brothers sell him into slavery. (Gen. 37)
To cut off his brother, Er’s, line, Onan refuses to be the kinsman redeemer for his brother’s widow. (Gen. 38)
To crown himself king, Abimelech murders all but one of his 70 brothers. (Judges 9)
To settle a score, the tribes of Israel nearly exterminate their littlest brother tribe, Benjamin. (Judges 20-21)
To exact revenge for the rape of his sister, Absalom kills his brother Amnon. (2 Sam. 13)
Indeed, outside Jonathan and David — who are not even blood relatives — it is hard to find any peace among siblings in the Old Testament.
Thus, the Cain and Abel pattern festers, growing in scale and intensity with each passing generation until it eventually culminates in the larger scale fracturing of God’s once unified people into the two divergent brother nations, Israel and Judah. As the story goes, following King Solomon’s death, prior unresolved family conflicts in David’s household boil over and, through a series of what should have been easily avoidable events, cause the chosen people to cut ties in an excess of bad blood, splitting them into the two divided nations whose now-separate storylines are poised to end tragically. Estranged and hostile, Israel and Judah are generally found through the ensuing centuries avoiding, antagonizing, or outright warring against one another, until both nations are finally destroyed from the outside because of their rampant corruption on the inside.
The more time one spends reading these stories, the less random and more thematically connected they feel. Seeds sown in Genesis have become orchards in Judges - Kings. In the eyes of the Old Testament, Israel and Judah’s violent, jealousy-fueled division and demise is itself the pattern of Cain vs. Abel traced to climactic fruition. Through the bitter end, the cycle of family conflict endures unbroken and turns viral. While moments of hope periodically punctuate the tale, the expansive outcome is that the children of God and humankind never fully enter into the familial harmony and shared purpose to which they are called and for which they were created. When the Old Testament plays its final note, we are left brokenhearted, holding the shattered pieces of an unresolved drama and grieving what might have been, hoping beyond hope for a Rescuer to step into history and draw the human family away from its own darkness, back toward one another and their Maker.
It is onto this dramatic stage that Jesus steps. And the four gospel writers are intent on helping us notice and appreciate the depth of that historic drama in the way they tell Jesus’s stories.
“When the Old Testament plays its final note, we are left brokenhearted, holding the shattered pieces of an unresolved drama, hoping beyond hope for a Rescuer to step into history.”
Matthew in particular — the gospel writer known by theologians for being the most intentionally and thematically Jewish in his portraiture of Jesus — clearly wants his reader to see Jesus, now come to the foreground of human history, as painted against the backdrop of Israel’s (and more broadly, all of humanity’s) failed history. To accomplish this, Matthew tells Jesus’s story with striking literary allusion to a number of key Hebrew Bible narratives. The intended effect for Matthew is that, while studying the events and details of Jesus’s stories, his reader would often catch themselves thinking, “Hey, that sounds like something that happened in the Old Testament!” This is no accident. It’s Matthew’s masterful Hebrew storytelling, teeming with thematic allusion and symbolism that together make artful, subtle nods toward corresponding OT stories with which Matthew assumes his reader is intimately familiar and equally heartbroken by.
Following these subtle nods through his gospel’s opening chapters, then, it becomes clear that Matthew perceives Jesus’s life and actions to be a divinely orchestrated and richly symbolic rehearsal of Israel’s failed storyline, replaying key scenes with better outcomes. In other words, Jesus’s life is both a rewind and an overdub. Particularly in Matthew’s origin stories (Jesus’s birth and rise to public ministry), for instance, Jesus is depicted experiencing in microcosm as one man what Israel experienced in her massive macro-tale as a whole nation.
Notice how key details in Jesus’s story run parallel to many of Israel’s own key moments.
As a helpless child, Jesus makes a flight into and an exodus out of Egypt under the care of his parents, Mary and Joseph.
As a helpless nation, Israel makes a flight into and an exodus out of Egypt under the care of her parent, Yahweh.
As an adult, Jesus is baptized in the waters of the Jordan River and anointed under an open heaven by his Father and the Spirit who descends like a dove (the dove form perhaps alluding to Noah’s third dove that never returned, suggesting symbolically that God’s promises have failed not and have now come to rest in their fullness upon the shoulders of Jesus).
Similarly, Israel passes through the waters of the Red Sea (and later the Jordan River), a baptism of sorts, to be anointed by Yahweh under an open heaven at Sinai.
Before putting Jesus to work in his anointing, God the Father voices a declaration of Jesus’s preciousness to Him: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus’s anointed purpose is founded upon an identity, which itself is founded upon God’s love.
Before putting Israel to work in her anointing, Yahweh voices a declaration (also, an invitation in Israel’s case) of Israel’s preciousness to Him: “out of all nations, you will be my treasured possession. (Ex. 19:5)” Israel’s anointed purpose, like the Messiah’s, is founded upon an identity, which itself is founded upon God’s love.
Following Jesus’s baptism and anointing, he is then led into a desert wilderness for a testing that lasts 40 days and 40 nights.
Following Israel’s baptism and anointing, she is then led into a wilderness for a testing, which she fails and is thus forced to wander the desert for 40 years.
More details than just these can be pointed out but suffice to say: Matthew’s allusion to parallel Old Testament stories in telling Jesus’s own story is unmistakable.
The difference, of course, is that unlike Israel Jesus passes each of these symbolic checkpoints without faltering or rebelling. In Jesus, Matthew takes us back to the OT moments that most broke God’s heart and most veered his beautiful plan for humanity off course and shows us how things should have gone. Where Israel failed her tests, Jesus perfectly obeys. Where humanity shrunk back from its anointed purpose, Jesus humbly accepts. Thus, in his flawless reenactment of these scenes, Jesus symbolically announces that he has come to be the perfect Child of God the Old Testament could never find, as well as the Rescuer of God’s imperfect children. He has come to reverse each cycle of darkness humanity triggered. He has come to restore humans to their original blessing and purpose, uniting them again with both God and one another in his presence.
“...unlike Israel, Jesus passes each of these symbolic checkpoints without faltering or rebelling...he has come to be the perfect Child of God.”
This brings us to our observation of Matthew 4:18-22. With the whole drama of the Old Testament forming the backdrop to Jesus’s story and charging his actions with symbolic significance, it is both poignant and fitting that one of Jesus’s first ministry actions is to call two sets of two brothers into his fellowship. Is this merely a coincidental detail: two sets of two brothers as Christ’s first disciples? Or is Matthew continuing to nudge us back toward the Old Testament and its dense brokenness, so that we may more powerfully feel in this Messiah’s tale the winds of hope beginning to breathe again across the chaotic waters of darkened humanity?
For the mind steeped in Old Testament storylines, it is difficult to read this detail as stale or haphazard. No, Matthew has been much too intentionally symbolic thus far in his gospel. And, as a master of the Hebrew Bible, Matthew knows our heart has been broken too many times by tragic stories of failed brotherhood in the Old Testament. He is intimately aware that sibling fracture is the resounding, not the occasional, pattern. Thus, it seems at least fair to Matthew’s own writing style and intimate connection to the Old Testament to assume that his depiction of Jesus calling these brothers carries at least some symbolic weight. Could it be then that the Messiah, in calling Simon and Andrew and James and John as his first followers, makes a move against that old pattern of brother-against-brother betrayal? Could it be that, here, Jesus signals a soon-coming end to the Old Testament’s heartbreaking cycle of relational fracture triggered and perpetuated by those other sets of paradigmatic brothers: Cain and Abel, and Israel and Judah?
Reading Matthew 4:18-22 with these allusions in mind, the reader may again see striking connections between Old and New Testament stories.
Interesting, for example, that while Cain murders Abel over a conflict regarding their two separate occupations — farming and herding — Simon and Andrew follow Jesus together, united in leaving their nets, answering the Messiah’s invitation to a new, shared occupation — fishing for people.
Interesting also, that while Israel and Judah divide over who is more perfectly, rightly the son of their father Abraham, James and John leap together as one person out of their boat to follow Jesus who, they sense, will have a legacy greater than that of their father Zebedee.
Noticing these poignant details, the reader’s heart, which was so thoroughly broken by the Old Testament’s constant vortex of sibling violence, begins to hope again for harmony. Where brothers once fought, Jesus unites. Where brothers once betrayed, Jesus bonds. Where brothers once competed, Jesus ties together. The Messiah, I suggest, does not randomly call these brothers. Instead, he uses the moment to signal that the restoring of all human families is now available in his presence. His kingdom is near, and the cycle is ending. He has paved the road to healing. All that remains for human families is to rise together, leap from their boats into the waters of repentance and surrender, leaving behind self-made sufficiency and self-gotten glory, and go after him — the Son in whom God delights, beckoning them to follow.
