First Reading · Romans
The chain, walked backwards
Where we are
Romans 9-11 is Paul's long argument about Israel, and chapter 10 is its middle. He has just said that Israel has a zeal for Theos ou kat' epignōsin, not according to knowledge, and today's passage is his account of how anyone comes to call on a name at all.
What happens
"If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is master and believe in your heart that Theos raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved … For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek … For 'everyone who calls on the name of the master will be saved.' But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can people preach unless they are sent? As it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news!' … Thus faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. But I ask, did they not hear? Certainly they did; for 'Their voice has gone forth to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.'"
What to notice
The opening pair is a chiasm and the order reverses. Verse 9 says mouth then heart: homologēsēs en tō stomati … kai pisteusēs en tē kardia. Verse 10 says heart then mouth: kardia gar pisteuetai eis dikaiosynēn, stomati de homologeitai eis sōtērian. Neither order is the logical one twice, and the crossing is deliberate — Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 30:14 a few verses earlier, the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart, and the two halves of that verse are what he is unpacking.
Homologeō is a public verb. Homo-logeō, to say the same thing — to agree, to acknowledge, and in legal and commercial Greek to state something on the record. It is not an inward assent said out loud; it is going on record with the same words as everyone else who has.
Then the four questions, and their direction is the point. Pōs oun epikalesōntai … pōs de pisteusōsin … pōs de akousōsin … pōs de kēryxōsin ean mē apostalōsin? — call on / trust / hear / proclaim / be sent. Paul walks the chain backwards, from the person calling out to the person who sent the preacher, and each link is a question rather than an assertion. The rhetorical effect is that by the end you are standing at the beginning of the process, looking at whoever did the sending.
And the last verb closes the chain onto a single word. Ean mē apostalōsin — "unless they are sent." Apostellō is the verb from which apostolos is formed. On the feast of an apostle, the reading traces the whole chain of trust back to the word that names him.
The Isaiah quotation is a foot-quotation. Hōs hōraioi hoi podes tōn euangelizomenōn — "how timely the feet of those announcing good news" — Isaiah 52:7. Hōraios is from hōra, the hour or season — it means in season, ripe, and then by extension beautiful, the way we call something timely and mean welcome. The feet are praised for arriving at the right moment, and Isaiah's context is a runner coming over the hills to a besieged city with news that the siege is lifted.
Ara hē pistis ex akoēs, hē de akoē dia rhēmatos Christou. Akoē means both the hearing and the thing heard — the faculty and the report. The sentence works either way and probably means both: trust comes from hearing, and the hearing comes through a spoken word.
And the closing quotation is the one that ties the day together. Eis pasan tēn gēn exēlthen ho phthongos autōn — "into all the earth their sound has gone out" — which is Psalm 19:4, about the heavens. Phthongos is a musical note, a tone. Paul has taken a verse about the silent testimony of the sky and applied it to preachers.
Responsorial Psalm
Six names for one thing, and what each does
Where we are
Psalm 19 has two halves that read like different poems — the first about the sky, the second about the Torah — and generations of scholars have argued about whether they were ever one composition. Paul quotes the first half in today's first reading. The assembly answers with the second. Both halves are in the room, in different roles, and neither is the other's proof text.
The selected verses
Psalm 19:8. "The law of Yahweh is perfect, refreshing the soul; the decree of Yahweh is trustworthy, giving wisdom to the simple."
Psalm 19:9. "The precepts of Yahweh are right, rejoicing the heart; the command of Yahweh is clear, enlightening the eye."
Psalm 19:10. "The fear of Yahweh is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of Yahweh are true, all of them just."
Psalm 19:11. "They are more precious than gold, than a heap of purest gold; sweeter also than syrup or honey from the comb."
What to notice
These four verses are six lines built to one specification, and the specification is the point. Each line names the Torah with a different noun, attaches an adjective, and then a participle saying what it does to a person: torah temimah, meshivat nafesh — instruction, whole, restoring the life; edut ne'emanah, machkimat peti — testimony, reliable, making the simple wise; piqqudim yesharim, mesammechei-lev — precepts, straight, gladdening the heart; mitzvah barah, me'irat einayim — command, clear, lighting the eyes. Six synonyms and six effects, and not one of the effects is obedience. The list is about what the words do to the person who takes them in.
The fifth item is the strange one. Yir'at YHWH tehorah — the fear of Yahweh, pure — sits in a list of documents. Torah, testimony, precepts, command, ordinances are all things you could hold; "fear" is a posture, and the psalm files it among them without comment, as though a disposition belonged on a shelf beside a scroll. Whatever the psalm thinks Torah is, it is not only text.
And meshivat nafesh is worth slowing over. Shuv is to turn or bring back, and nefesh is the throat, the appetite, the life — so the phrase is bringing a life back, the same idiom used of food in Ruth 4:15 and of what the enemy withholds in Lamentations 1:11+16. The first thing this list claims for the Torah is not that it instructs but that it feeds, which is why verse 11 ends on honey rather than on gold.
The refrain is taken from verse 10 — the ordinances of the Lord are true, all of them just — with John 6:63 offered as an alternate: your words, Lord, are Spirit and life. On the feast of a man called with four words, the assembly is given a response about words.
Gospel · Matthew
A cast-net, and two men mending
Where we are
The very beginning of the ministry. John has been arrested, Jesus has withdrawn to Capernaum, and the first thing he does after beginning to preach is collect four people off a beach.
What happens
"As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen. He said to them, 'Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.' At once they left their nets and followed him. He walked along from there and saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him."
What to notice
Matthew names the gear precisely, and the two pairs are using different equipment. Simon and Andrew are ballontas amphiblēstron — throwing an amphiblēstron, a cast-net. That is a circular net, weighted around the rim, thrown by hand from the shore or from shallow water, and it drops over a school and closes as it sinks. It is one man's tool. James and John are in a boat katartizontas ta diktya — mending the diktya, the general word for nets, and the larger dragnets worked from boats.
Katartizontas is a good word. Katartizō is to put back in order, to restore, to set a bone, to mend a tear — the verb behind katartismos in Ephesians 4:12, where it describes what the gifts are for. Its first appearance in Matthew is two men with needles.
The call is an adverb. Deute opisō mou — "come, behind me." Deute is not a verb at all; it is an adverb of place used as a plural imperative, roughly this way. And opisō mou, behind me, is the ordinary phrase for a disciple's position — walking after a teacher, literally.
The metaphor is not a compliment in its Hebrew background. Halieis anthrōpōn — fishers of people. Wherever the Hebrew Bible fishes for human beings, it is bad news: Jeremiah 16:16 sends fishers and hunters to catch Israel for judgement, Amos 4:2 promises the women of Samaria will be taken away with hooks, and Habakkuk 1:14-15 complains that the enemy hauls people up in a net. Jesus takes a judgement image and hands it to four men as a job description, and nothing in Matthew explains the reversal.
The speed is stated twice and the second cost is higher. Eutheōs aphentes ta diktya — immediately leaving the nets. Then, for the second pair, eutheōs aphentes to ploion kai ton patera autōn — immediately leaving the boat and their father. Matthew's list grows: gear, then capital, then family. Zebedee is left sitting in his own boat, and the Gospel says nothing further about him.
And a word about Andrew, since it is his day. Andreas is a Greek name — from anēr, andros, a man — borne by a Jewish fisherman from Bethsaida, which tells you something about how Greek the Galilee of the period was. In Matthew he is ton adelphon autou, the brother of Simon, and that is nearly all he is. John's Gospel gives him more: John 1:40-42 has Andrew hear John the Baptist first, follow, and then go and find his brother — so that the man Matthew introduces as Simon's brother is, in John, the reason Simon is there at all. And in John 12:20-22, when some Greeks ask to see Jesus, they approach Philip, who tells Andrew — the two disciples with Greek names, handling the Greek enquiry.
Today's readings are a feast-day argument about how anything gets from one place to another, and they answer it three incompatible ways.
Romans gives the mechanism as a chain, and walks it backwards. How can they call on one they have not trusted? How trust one they have not heard? How hear without a preacher? How preach unless sent? — four questions that step from the person crying out to the person who did the sending, and the last verb is apostalōsin, be sent, the root of apostolos. On the feast of an apostle, the reading ends the chain at the word that names him.
Then Paul closes with a quotation that undoes his own mechanism. Eis pasan tēn gēn exēlthen ho phthongos autōn — their sound has gone out into all the earth — which is Psalm 19, and Psalm 19 is about the sky. The chapter that has just insisted nobody hears without a preacher proves its point with a verse about the heavens, who have no preacher and no words at all.
And then the day does something the first reading did not ask for: it answers Paul's quotation with the rest of the psalm he was quoting. Paul takes Psalm 19:5, from the half about the sky — the testimony with no vocabulary. The responsorial is Psalm 19:8-11, the half about the Torah — six names for words, each with a verb for what it does to a person. So one psalm is in the room twice, and its two halves are on opposite sides of Paul's question. How shall they hear without a preacher? — the sky manages it with nothing to say, and the Torah manages it by saying six things at once and doing something to the hearer each time. Neither is preaching. The psalm the chapter leans on turns out to contain both of the answers the chapter is not giving.
The word Paul quotes is itself a translation accident, and a beautiful one. The Hebrew says qavvam, their line — a surveyor's measuring cord. The Septuagint gives phthongos, a musical note. Somewhere between Jerusalem and Alexandria, a taut string stopped being something you measure with and became something that sounds — and that is the version in Paul's Bible, and so the version underneath today's feast.
Then Matthew, where the whole apparatus reduces to four men on a beach. Simon and Andrew are throwing an amphiblēstron, a hand-cast net; James and John are katartizontas, mending. The call is deute opisō mou, this way, behind me — an adverb doing the work of a verb. And the promise is halieis anthrōpōn, fishers of people, which in Jeremiah and Amos and Habakkuk is a threat, handed over here without comment as a career.
What connects the three is that none of them describes persuasion. The heavens use no words, and the Torah's words do not argue — they refresh, gladden and enlighten, which are things done TO someone, not cases made to them. The heavens use no words. The apostles are sent before they are heard. And the fishermen are not argued with — eutheōs aphentes ta diktya, immediately leaving the nets, and then the second pair leaving the boat and their father. The chain Paul builds has a preacher in it and the Gospel does not show one preaching. It shows someone walking past and four people putting down their equipment.
A Question to Sit With
Paul builds an airtight chain — nobody calls without
trusting, nobody trusts without hearing, nobody hears without a preacher, nobody preaches unsent — and then proves it worked by quoting a psalm about the sky, which has no preacher, no words, and no voice, and has still reached the end of the world. He does not seem troubled by the mismatch. Perhaps because both are true: someone has to be sent, and something is already
being said everywhere without anyone saying it. Andrew's whole recorded
life is the first
kind — a man who kept fetching people and introducing them. What have I heard that had no words attached, and whom am I the link to?