Matthew 8

Over the last few chapters of Matthew we have heard Jesus spell out his "manifesto" for the Kingdom of Heaven.  He has told us in his own words what his Kingdom will be like.  In chapter 8 he moves beyond words and we see the Kingdom in action.

The Kingdom of Heaven carries the purity of God and brings it to earth.

In Matthew's Gospel the purity of Jesus is infectious.  In the Old Testament ritual impurity was something that transferred from the impure thing to an otherwise clean person.  With Jesus it is completely different, he touches a leper and far from the ritual uncleanness of the leper infecting Jesus the leper is made well.  The same is true with the centurion.  Jesus offers to break the religious taboos of his day by going to the unclean house of an unclean enemy of the people of Israel.

I'm not as sure on this one but I think because of the context the same is probably true of his healing of Peter's mother-in-law (and yes, that's Peter "the first Pope"'s Mother-in-law. I don't suppose he was the first man in history to be unfortunate enough to have a mother-in-law but no wife?).  First Century Rabbinic attitudes toward women were pretty severe.  Jesus by contrast is very comfortable around women.

The final group of unclean people that Jesus draws close to with his infectious purity are those who are demon possessed.  In the Old Testament demons are normally referred to as "unclean spirits."  Despite what many people would say the Bible draws a distinction between people who are physically ill and people who are suffering from demon possession.  Every illness in Biblical times was not explained in terms of demons or possession.

Already then in the space of just 17 verses Jesus shows his Kingdom at work in the lives of the physically unclean, those who were foreign and therefore seen as unclean, those who were unclean because of their gender and the spiritually unclean as well .  "Blessed are the poor in spirit" he said in his manifesto, "for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven"

Matthew 7

In the Old Testament there is a scene where the young king Josiah is handed a book that one of the priests found during a refurbishment of the Jerusalem temple.   It's contents horrify the king as he realises that what he reads does not match how his people have lived.  He gives these orders to the priests and his attendants,  “Go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord’s anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us.”

When you read through the Sermon on the Mount you can't help but get the same feeling as Josiah.  That, "Hang on a minute, when did we get it all the wrong way round?" feeling when you realise that the most judgemental people that you will meet can be found in the buildings of churches.  We seem to get the old cliché of "hate the sin and love the sinner" completely the wrong way round, loving the details of people's sin and hating them at the same time.

Listen out for how much of the preaching that you hear, especially the famous-TV/Radio-preacher variety, that is "attack preaching."  By that I mean preaching that points out the danger of someone else's thinking, writing, music or behaviour.  Then compare that to that famous tirade of Jesus against the tax collectors and sinners, the idol worshippers and prostitutes of his day.  What do you mean you can't find it?  It must be in the Gospels somewhere...

Instead of lashing out at sinners Jesus tells his disciples to have a healthy sense that they too are men and women who fall short of God's glory.  There is a wonderful sense of slapstick in his imagery of a person with a plank trying to get dust out of a friend's eye.  I'm sure the crowds were laughing at this.  Did he act it out do you think?

There is also a delicious irony in his use of language in verse six.  Don't go doling out your pearls of wisdom here there and everywhere.  You might be incredibly wise and able to advise even the dimmest sinner or the wisest saint but, you know, they might not always appreciate your wisdom when you have that plank sticking out of your eye.  They might trample it underfoot and knock you down in the process!

The need to knock

I think this need to knock others, the need to talk down like someone giving out pearls of wisdom comes from a real sense of insecurity.  This is why Jesus emphasises again the goodness of Our Father in Heaven in verses nine to twelve.  Sometimes the church behaves like a political party that has run out of positive things to say and simply puts out attack adverts.  But we do have something amazingly positive.  We know that God loves us, that he looks favourably upon us and when we ask he responds with generosity beyond what we deserve.  Isn't that a good enough message to shout without knocking other people in the process?

This brings Jesus on to a warning about false prophets and false teachers.  In true Jesus style he does not give a long and complicated set of ways for knowing who is true and who is false.  Instead he simply tells us, "By their fruit you will recognise them."

In other words do they make the world around them look more and more like the Kingdom of Heaven?  Do they prize the values of the beatitudes?  What do they think of people who are meek?  Do they make peace or start fights?  Do they increase love or decrease it?

Note that Jesus explicitly warns us not to ask "Do they perform miracles or make great prophecies?" but rather, "What fruit grows out of the tree of their ministry?"  Is it bitter or wholesome?

Two final thoughts

1) I should have split chapter 7 into two like I did with chapter 5!

2) Do you notice how Jesus-focussed Jesus own teaching is at the end of this sermon?  He does not say, "everyone who hears the words of God and puts them into practice is like a wise man."  He says, "Everyone who hears these words of mine."  Jesus is strongly conscious of his unique relationship with God the Father.  He is aware that he is the king in this Kingdom of Heaven and it is with him and his teaching that we must reckon, not with thoughts and ideas but with this very real, very present person - Jesus the Christ.

Matthew 6 - It's about persons, not things

In one of the companies I worked for before I started training to be a minister the boss was, how can I put it, not likely to win the "Nice Person of the Year Award."  One particular incident among many stands out in my mind.  He and his brother were talking on one side of the office while I made them coffee.  The coffee machine broke and spilt all over me, scalding me.  I was in agony and I'm really not the stoic type so I was showing that I was in agony.  I yelled in pain at one point trying to get some of my scalding hot layers off me and the two men looked round at me and then calmly resumed their conversation.  The coldness of their response shocked me.  If they had even laughed or jeered it would have felt better.

To them I simply did not exist as a person.

For many people God is like that.  We do things in his presence, think things or say things that we simply would not do if we took on board the fact that he is a person.  Throughout chapter 6 of Matthew Jesus labours the point that God is a person, not a thing.  The Kingdom of Heaven is about a person, not activities and objects.

Jesus language throughout chapter 6 is striking.  The name "God" is only used twice, in verses 24 and 30 but twelve times Jesus refers to God as "Your Father" or "Our Father."  In each teaching section or sermon point Jesus moves the listener from thinking about an activity to thinking about the person behind that activity.  He moves them from thinking about an abstract idea such as religion or God to being aware of the existence of a person, our Father.

God can be a very abstract idea.
Do you believe in God?  Yeah.
Does it make a difference?  Ummm....

Jesus replaces this abstract idea with a person.  Do you do good things in the name of Christianity?  Who for?  You?  Your religion?  God?  Do it not as a performance for yourself or others Jesus says, but a single-person-audience performance for Your Father.

Do you pray?  Who to?

This seems an odd idea but so often, especially with public prayer, it can be a performance, and not for God. Are you praying or talking to yourself?  Do you pray to a person who hears you and is real or just stress out inwardly?

The same with fasting or engaging in any other "religious" practice.  Who is it for?  Are you aware that there is a person there?  A person who calls himself your Heavenly Father?

This is why Jesus speaks so confidently about not storing up treasure on earth and leaving aside our worries.

When we are dealing with an abstract concept of God, that far off impersonal being, dealing with our lives then maybe some prudent investment in the things of this world is called for.  As the last few years of financial  collapses have told us it is unwise to bank on an abstract notion.  But to Jesus God is not some abstract being, out there somewhere, he is our close and loving Father.  Always there, always near, always in charge and always loving.

Everything we do is done in the presence of this loving Father.  Religious things, non-religious things and irreligious things.  He is a person and when we realise that we discover that we have no choice but to respond to him.

Matthew 5 - Part 2

Onwards and upwards!

I was travelling a lot yesterday and rushed to close off chapter 5.  I felt quite bad about this and then realised that the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a whole book on the sermon on the mount and that made me feel much better!

What I have found most difficult in reading through chapter 5 is my realisation that I don't practice most of it. In yesterdays post I contrasted our society's values with the values of the Kingdom of Heaven as shown by Jesus in the Beatitudes. The problem for me is that as I examine my own conscience I realise that my own personal values are much more that of "modern western civilisation" than those of Jesus.

I get angry and that's as good as murder. I lust and that's as good as adultery.  I hate my enemies and therefore show that I am just as bad as everyone else.  Does this then lead us to deep, dark introspection and gloom at the fact that we cannot keep the heart of God's law even if we outwardly keep the letter of it?  I don't think that's what Jesus is about here.

Life with Jesus is a journey.  We are called to follow him, to be continually on the move with him.  The enemy of this movement is a settled contentment in who we are, a sense that somehow, religiously or morally, we have arrived.  Later in Matthew's Gospel Jesus revisits this list of commandments in his encounter with a rich man who asks him what he must do to have eternal life.

In that encounter he tells the rich man to do two things, give the wealth that weighs him down and has become an idol to the poor and then follow Jesus.  The rich man thought that he had done enough by outwardly keeping the commands, "What then do I lack?" he asks Jesus as though somehow eternal life could be added to a household inventory alongside his nice car and new iPad (or nice horse and household musicians).  Jesus replies by telling him that the Kingdom is a journey not a destination.  Give up your stuff and start moving again with God.

If righteousness was about being able to tick off a list then maybe, just maybe, some really strong and dedicated people could make themselves right according to God's law but what Jesus is saying here is not a finger wagging rant of "You'll never be good enough for me!" but rather a call to keep moving rather than sitting still.

Managed not to murder anyone today? (despite it being a Monday!) Good!  Then let's go past that milestone and head on past anger next.  Kept yourself out of bed with your neighbour's wife or husband despite your stunning good looks?  Great!  Now let's keep going and move past seeing other people as objects!  Managed to love those close to you or people that you get things from?  Excellent!  Now let's go for those further hills of living our enemies.

As he says in verse 17 the fulfilment of the law is in Jesus.  The closer we get to him and the nearer we follow him the less satisfied we will be with our own goodness and the more we will crave his perfection.  To slightly change verse 6, the more we hunger for him and his righteousness the more we will be filled.  CS Lewis sums it up well at the end of his final book in the Narnia series, "The Last Battle" when Aslan encourages the children and their entourage to go further up and further in.  The Christian life is not static, this is why the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place but a people.  The joy is in the journey, not the arriving.

Matthew 5

One of our university lecturers used to live in a Middle Eastern country where they had just replaced one dictator for another.  He learnt about this not on the news or from watching events unfold outside his door but rather when he turned up to work one day.  They worked in an out of the way place far from the capital and every day they would go through the obligatory loyalty ritual in front of a tacky looking photo of the dictator.

He turned up to work to find everyone carrying out the same ritual but this time in front of a photo of the new guy.  During the long and involved series of gestures of abeisance he looked to his colleagues in an effort to ask, "Who's this? What happened to the old guy?" without drawing too much attention to himself.  They simply shrugged their shoulders in the universal language of "I don't know!" and carried on as before.

This is the way of human kingdoms and earthly empires.  Outward loyalty is everything but often what goes on in your head is something completely different.  When we had finished Chapter 4 Jesus sat enthroned amongst the poor, the sick, the possessed and the dispossessed.  His kingdom stood in stark contrast to the one offered him by Satan.  The people who surrounded him were certainly not big fish, they were not even the small fry of the Roman Empire, they were merely the detritus washed upon its shores.

It is upon these people, the non-citizens, the people who were less than nothing, that Jesus begins to pronounce a series of blessings.  They are the antithesis of the Roman vision and in many ways they are the antithesis of our own culture.  Maybe it is easiest to understand just how radical they are by reversing them and showing our own culture's values.

Kingdom of Heaven	Our Culture
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven	Being poor in anything means you are bad or a failure.  For many Conservative Evangelicals poverty is increasingly seen as a sign of immorality and God’s displeasure
Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.	Mourning is something that should be done out of sight in our pleasure driven culture.  In church we worry that if we cry we will be seen as odd.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.	Blessed are the pushy for they shall get what they want
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled	Don’t try too hard at this God stuff otherwise you will just look keen.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy	No mercy.  Tough love is the only language people like that understand.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God	When was the last time you heard “He’s so innocent” and it was a positive statement?
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God	Unless we stand up to our enemies and show them how strong we are then they will walk all over us!
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven	Success is everything.  Unless you are growing in your ministry and being praised by all the right magazines and pundits then there is something really wrong.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.	What do you mean you aren't going to toe the Evangelical / Fundamentalist / Denominational / Catholic / High Church / whatever… party line?

The next set of teachings moves between telling the people in front of Jesus just how valuable they are in the work of God and pointing out to them that being part of this movement, being part of this kingdom is not like the story above where lip service is shown to the king but people's hearts just aren't in it.  They're righteousness has to exceed the outward and legalistic righteousness of the religious people of the day.  By righteousness Jesus does not simply mean good behaviour but righteousness is something like "right relationship with" ie you could legalistically keep all the rules but it would be just like the people going through the motions for the new dictator.  There would be no inward change.

What this is not is a form of internalising that says something like, "As long as you feel all lovey towards God on the inside then whatever you do on the outside does not matter."  This is not a case of making the law some kind of inward psychological checklist.  Rather it is about saying that Kingdom of God is about the outside and the inside in equal measure.  In other words becoming a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven is an inward change that has a strong outward effect

Matthew 4 - A Discourse on Method

We've started the Community Bible Project in church and one of the things it emphasises is using the "natural" breaks in scripture to guide your reading and understanding rather than the "artificial" breaks of chapters and inserted headings.  This has made me more than a little self conscious of my chosen method of commenting on a chapter at a time and wondering if this method creates unnatural links between sections of the Gospel that might not have any more in common than their proximity to one another.

Having said that this chapter, when taken as a whole, creates some interesting connections between parts of the life of Jesus that I would never have made taking the "story at a time" approach.  Had I used that method I would probably have looked at the temptation of Jesus on its own and maybe wrote about how the church has fallen for each of the temptations facing Jesus.  The temptation to take the path of least resistance and avoid suffering.  The temptation to power at any cost, even denying God himself.  The temptation to misuse scripture and make a show of things.  History and the news show us that Christians fall for these, hook line and sinker all the time.

But on it's own that would simply be a complaint and not the whole picture.  After surviving the temptation in the wilderness intact (and probably a lot slimmer!) Jesus goes on to show a very different way of being God's chosen king.  The language is fascinating.  He "withdraws" to Galilee after the arrest of John.This is not an earthly battle of Kingdoms.  He does not lead a march on Herod's palace to free him.  He does not call down fire from heaven to smite this pretender king.  He withdraws to the darkness to bring light to those in the land of the shadow of death.

He continues this setting out of a radical new agenda by picking disciples from among fishermen, men who would have dropped out of school early to follow their father's business and not "graduated" to the level normally required to be the disciple of a rabbi.  The chapter closes with him in the middle of this dark land surrounded not by courtiers and servants but with the unclean, the diseased, the demon possessed.  Jesus rejects Satan's plan of showy ease and replaces it with a powerful lived out call to preaching and service among people walking in darkness.

Matthew 3

John the Bridge

John the Baptist sits oddly at the start of the Gospels like some strange figure from a bygone era walking in the present day.  Imagine going down the street and seeing someone dressed as a Roman or a Celt, as Abraham Lincoln or Charles Dickens.  He is a vivid and living piece of the Old Testament at the start of the New.

John carries many of the hallmarks of an Old Testament prophet.  He speaks to the people a message of repentance and holiness.  He speaks with a harshness and fierceness that we would expect from the likes of Ezekiel or Isaiah, comparing the religious leaders to a brood of vipers.  He also operates within the political sphere of Israel in much the same way that Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah would have done.  He speaks boldly to the king about his own moral and religious failings and, like Jeremiah before him, ends up in prison for it.

Indeed Jesus himself compares him with Elijah and says later in Matthew, “He is the Elijah who was to 

come.”  The comparison with Old Testament prophets only goes so far however as there is a marked difference between the direction of their message and the direction of John’s.  Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel all called God’s people back to the Law of Moses.  They saw the new and dangerous paths down which Israel was walking and called them to repentance and a turning back to the trustworthy and fruitful paths of God’s covenant.

John’s direction is radically different.  He calls Israel to repentance just like an Old Testament prophet but he then points Israel forward to something new that is to come.  He points them forward to Jesus.  He acts as a bridge between the Old and the New.  Jesus says as much when he tells the crowds, “For all the Prophets and the Law (what we would now call the Old Testament) prophesied until John.”  The era of the Old Covenant and the era of the New meet in John and Jesus as John, at Jesus baptism, hands over the baton to Jesus.

All very fine and historical but despite his strangeness there is something of our everyday experience in the work of John.  In a very real sense we all work as spiritual bridges bringing our everyday working and resting lives to Jesus.  John brought the history and traditions of his people and points them towards Jesus.  This is something that we should be doing all the time.  The Bible describes followers of Jesus as a Kingdom of Priests.  The old Latin word for priest (handily enough) is bridge or bridge builder, one who connects the ordinary world of us here and now with the supernatural and ultra-real world of God. 

So whilst we know him more often as John the Baptist, John the Bridge would also be a suitable title. 

Is it a suitable one for you?  Kieran the Bridge?  James the Bridge?  Mary the Bridge?...