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"
Thursday 21 February 2013
Wednesday 20 February 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday 19 February 2013
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.
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.
Monday 18 February 2013
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.
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.
Sunday 17 February 2013
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.
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Kingdom of Heaven
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Our Culture
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Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven
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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
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Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.
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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.
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Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
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Blessed are the pushy for they shall get what they want
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Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they
will be filled
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Don’t try too hard at this God stuff otherwise you will just look
keen.
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Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy
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No mercy. Tough love is the
only language people like that understand.
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Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God
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When was the last time you heard “He’s so innocent” and it was a
positive statement?
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Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God
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Unless we stand up to our enemies and show them how strong we are
then they will walk all over us!
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Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven
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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.
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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.
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What do you mean you aren't going to toe the Evangelical /
Fundamentalist / Denominational / Catholic / High Church / whatever… party
line?
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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
Saturday 16 February 2013
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.
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.
Friday 15 February 2013
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?...
Thursday 14 February 2013
Matthew 2
International Men of Mystery
When you get used to two artists as a famous double-act it can be very odd when you see one of them working on their own. Think of Bert without Ernie, Laurel without Hardy, one Ronnie...
We're used to the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke working as a double-act. We blend the two together to make the nativity story and yet sometimes in doing so we lose the individual flavour of either writer by blending them. There's a reason why single malts are often valued more than even the best blends. The total is not always greater than the sum of its parts.
Reading Matthew without Luke, as his original readers would most likely have done, we are struck by his frankly odd choice of what to prioritise. What we think of as the "nativity story" with angels, shepherds, Mary, Joseph, stables, census, Bethlehem, and so on, is contained in this one phrase, "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea."
He spends much more time looking at our International Men of Mystery, these Magi, "from the East" than he does talking about the details of Jesus birth. This is almost the exact opposite of what we do around Christmas when our "Wise Men" have little more than a walk-on part. But who are they, these strange astrologers from who knows where?
In Christian tradition they go under a variety of different and sometimes contradictory names. They are the Three Wise Men, Astrologers from the East, The Three Kings; they are given individual names in Western Christianity, Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar. In Syrian Christianity they are given the names, Larvandad, Gushnasaph, and Hormisdas, the Ethiopians and Arminians have their own names for them (again widely differing from the Western ones) and in many Eastern traditions there are twelve of them and not three.
Indeed if we were to take one of their traditional titles, The Three Kings and break it down by looking at what the Bible actually says we would discover that we don’t know if there were three (we only say that based on the number of gifts) and they are certainly not kings. The term the Bible uses for them is Magoi, the word that we get our modern word magicians from. It appears in two other places in the Bible. In the Greek Old Testament it is used in Daniel to talk about people who are translated as Enchanters and in Acts where it is used of man described as a “Jewish Sorcerer.”
Our translations therefore get awfully polite (as they often do) when in Matthew they either call them “wise men” or indeed give up on the idea of translating it at all and call them Magi. This seems to be born out of embarrassment, and frankly it is a little embarrassing, that these people, however many there were and wherever they came from, were clearly not Jewish and not followers of the Law of Moses. In that Law in Leviticus 19 we are told not to practice fortune telling or sorcery.
In the book of Isaiah those who predict the future by looking to the stars are ridiculed by the prophet and proclaimed to be people who waste their lives chasing after false hope. Time after time in the Law and Prophets God forbids Israel from practising fortune telling and astrology, he assures them that it is wrong and lets them know that it will lead them to disaster.
Why then, if astrology is so bad, do we have these strange characters turn up within two years of Jesus being born to bring him gifts and cause all sorts of trouble for him with the local authorities? Why does God seem to use the very tools of their religion to help them to find Jesus? It does seem bizarre to say the least that God shows them the way to his son using stars and signs in the heavens. Is this God saying that astrology and horoscopes are great in certain circumstances and bad in others?
One thing he is certainly not condoning here is the notion of, “Oh well, it’s only a bit of fun.” Packing up your whole life and setting out on a four year, very dangerous, journey does not count as just a bit of fun. What these men saw in the heavens changed their lives. Astrology is not seen in the Bible as something merely to be toyed with. It is powerful and only here and only once in the scriptures is it ever noted that its power is good.
Secondly given their behaviour towards Jesus and the gifts that they bring to him they seem to have developed a fairly deep understanding of who it is that they have come to see. They come with a desire to worship him. Now, worshipping kings was normal practice in most cultures in those days with the notable exception of the Jewish world but it is still striking that it is the foreigner and outsider who is the first to recognise the divinity of Jesus.
The gifts they bring speak powerfully of who they expect him to be and grow up to become. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh each have their own meanings behind them that, even with the rich accrual of meanings that they have developed over the years as legend has been added to history they still, in their most basic form carry three simple meanings.
Gold is fairly straightforward; it was as valuable then as it is now. It is not the gift the kind of gift that a visiting dignitary would travel for two years just to bring to anybody. This is someone that they regard as being very, very important. You do not hear of journeys like this being made in antiquity for just any old king. The gold and the journey say that these Magi saw Jesus as a great king.
Frankincense, like gold, is something that we are familiar with. We know the smell of it from using it at home, Roman Catholic Mass, High Anglican Services, etc. From those last two contexts we also have some understanding of its use in antiquity. It was used as part of the rituals of Judaism along with a great many other religions. There was a certain practicality about its use as it covered up a lot of the smells and sights involved in the mass gathering of people and the mass slaughter of animals. The Frankincense therefore carries with it the idea of priesthood and sacrifice. It would not be that odd gift to give to a child born to royal, noble or high ranking parents but to give it to a child so poor that his mother gave birth in a stable would be very peculiar indeed.
The third one is by far the strangest. Myrrh is an odd word at the best of times, just try spelling it to see what I mean but to give it to a newborn baby is just perverse. What do I mean? Myrrh is an oil used in embalming the dead. Not the note you want to strike normally when visiting a new born baby and his parents. It is the equivalent to turning up to visit a newborn at the hospital with a funeral bond or a voucher for a very expensive made to measure coffin. You can just see the look on the faces of Mary and Joseph. Gold comes out - big smiles all round. Frankincense, a very expensive gift - Oh you shouldn't have! Myrrh - No, really, you shouldn't have.
Whilst the gold and the frankincense speak of the special life that this baby will have, the myrrh says that not only his life but his death will also be special. This much we know because we know the story of Jesus from beginning to end. These men did not know the story as we do and yet their guesses seem to be spot on.
They may be foreigners and non-Jews but they seem to have a keener understanding of the Jewish Messiah than most of the Jewish people involved in this story. But having seen this, we are then faced again with the question of why they are here at all and why God allows them to discover Jesus by the means that they do. Why does he use astrology to bring people to Jesus?
I think we need to bring Saint Paul in at this point, in his sermon to the philosophers in Athens Paul talks about how God overlooked the sins of the past before people found out about Jesus. Not only that but Paul himself uses the statues of the gods in Athens to point to Jesus. Because of our sin and our disobedience human beings find themselves in all sorts of bad and ungodly places. God does not stand outside of our sinful situations and shout at us from a safe place. God’s way is that he steps in and meets us where we are. This is, in fact, the whole message of Christmas.
God opens the conversation with the Magi in language that they understand and a religious culture that they feel comfortable with. If I do not know your language and you do not know mine then we attempt to communicate using things that we both know. I could start by pointing to me and saying, “William, my name is William. William is Ainh Dom” or I could hold out a familiar everyday object to you and we could tell each other our names for it.
God is communicating with people who in a very real and spiritual sense are foreigners to him. He speaks to them in words that they will understand. He uses religious imagery from their own home culture. He starts in the dangerous place of astrology where they live and brings them on a huge journey that leads them to the living embodiment of the truth and life. He starts with the stars and through them brings these star gazers to the very person who made the stars.
At the start of our journey with God he does not expect us to have every one of our theological “I”s dotted and our “T”s crossed. He reaches out to us in our weakness, he appears to us in our darkness but he is never happy to leave us there. Just as he took the Magi on a two year journey that, I am sure, was only the start of a lifelong quest, so he comes to meet us where we are and calls us to take the first steps on a journey to where he is.
We each in our own way have to make that journey to Jesus. We each must come to him to bow the knee as the Magi once did, bringing the only gift that he wants and, in fact, the only gift we can bring to him - the gift of ourselves. If you have never made that journey in your heart I urge you strongly to do that this Christmas, turn from your old ways and put your trust in the God who trusted Mary to cradle him, Joseph to bring him up, the untrustworthy shepherds to bring the news of him to the world and these outsiders, these strangers, these Magi who had no share in the physical Israel to be the first of the new Israel made up of people from every tribe and tongue, who have little more than their love of Jesus in common, people like you and me.
When you get used to two artists as a famous double-act it can be very odd when you see one of them working on their own. Think of Bert without Ernie, Laurel without Hardy, one Ronnie...
We're used to the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke working as a double-act. We blend the two together to make the nativity story and yet sometimes in doing so we lose the individual flavour of either writer by blending them. There's a reason why single malts are often valued more than even the best blends. The total is not always greater than the sum of its parts.
Reading Matthew without Luke, as his original readers would most likely have done, we are struck by his frankly odd choice of what to prioritise. What we think of as the "nativity story" with angels, shepherds, Mary, Joseph, stables, census, Bethlehem, and so on, is contained in this one phrase, "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea."
He spends much more time looking at our International Men of Mystery, these Magi, "from the East" than he does talking about the details of Jesus birth. This is almost the exact opposite of what we do around Christmas when our "Wise Men" have little more than a walk-on part. But who are they, these strange astrologers from who knows where?
In Christian tradition they go under a variety of different and sometimes contradictory names. They are the Three Wise Men, Astrologers from the East, The Three Kings; they are given individual names in Western Christianity, Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar. In Syrian Christianity they are given the names, Larvandad, Gushnasaph, and Hormisdas, the Ethiopians and Arminians have their own names for them (again widely differing from the Western ones) and in many Eastern traditions there are twelve of them and not three.
Indeed if we were to take one of their traditional titles, The Three Kings and break it down by looking at what the Bible actually says we would discover that we don’t know if there were three (we only say that based on the number of gifts) and they are certainly not kings. The term the Bible uses for them is Magoi, the word that we get our modern word magicians from. It appears in two other places in the Bible. In the Greek Old Testament it is used in Daniel to talk about people who are translated as Enchanters and in Acts where it is used of man described as a “Jewish Sorcerer.”
Our translations therefore get awfully polite (as they often do) when in Matthew they either call them “wise men” or indeed give up on the idea of translating it at all and call them Magi. This seems to be born out of embarrassment, and frankly it is a little embarrassing, that these people, however many there were and wherever they came from, were clearly not Jewish and not followers of the Law of Moses. In that Law in Leviticus 19 we are told not to practice fortune telling or sorcery.
In the book of Isaiah those who predict the future by looking to the stars are ridiculed by the prophet and proclaimed to be people who waste their lives chasing after false hope. Time after time in the Law and Prophets God forbids Israel from practising fortune telling and astrology, he assures them that it is wrong and lets them know that it will lead them to disaster.
Why then, if astrology is so bad, do we have these strange characters turn up within two years of Jesus being born to bring him gifts and cause all sorts of trouble for him with the local authorities? Why does God seem to use the very tools of their religion to help them to find Jesus? It does seem bizarre to say the least that God shows them the way to his son using stars and signs in the heavens. Is this God saying that astrology and horoscopes are great in certain circumstances and bad in others?
One thing he is certainly not condoning here is the notion of, “Oh well, it’s only a bit of fun.” Packing up your whole life and setting out on a four year, very dangerous, journey does not count as just a bit of fun. What these men saw in the heavens changed their lives. Astrology is not seen in the Bible as something merely to be toyed with. It is powerful and only here and only once in the scriptures is it ever noted that its power is good.
Secondly given their behaviour towards Jesus and the gifts that they bring to him they seem to have developed a fairly deep understanding of who it is that they have come to see. They come with a desire to worship him. Now, worshipping kings was normal practice in most cultures in those days with the notable exception of the Jewish world but it is still striking that it is the foreigner and outsider who is the first to recognise the divinity of Jesus.
The gifts they bring speak powerfully of who they expect him to be and grow up to become. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh each have their own meanings behind them that, even with the rich accrual of meanings that they have developed over the years as legend has been added to history they still, in their most basic form carry three simple meanings.
Gold is fairly straightforward; it was as valuable then as it is now. It is not the gift the kind of gift that a visiting dignitary would travel for two years just to bring to anybody. This is someone that they regard as being very, very important. You do not hear of journeys like this being made in antiquity for just any old king. The gold and the journey say that these Magi saw Jesus as a great king.
Frankincense, like gold, is something that we are familiar with. We know the smell of it from using it at home, Roman Catholic Mass, High Anglican Services, etc. From those last two contexts we also have some understanding of its use in antiquity. It was used as part of the rituals of Judaism along with a great many other religions. There was a certain practicality about its use as it covered up a lot of the smells and sights involved in the mass gathering of people and the mass slaughter of animals. The Frankincense therefore carries with it the idea of priesthood and sacrifice. It would not be that odd gift to give to a child born to royal, noble or high ranking parents but to give it to a child so poor that his mother gave birth in a stable would be very peculiar indeed.
The third one is by far the strangest. Myrrh is an odd word at the best of times, just try spelling it to see what I mean but to give it to a newborn baby is just perverse. What do I mean? Myrrh is an oil used in embalming the dead. Not the note you want to strike normally when visiting a new born baby and his parents. It is the equivalent to turning up to visit a newborn at the hospital with a funeral bond or a voucher for a very expensive made to measure coffin. You can just see the look on the faces of Mary and Joseph. Gold comes out - big smiles all round. Frankincense, a very expensive gift - Oh you shouldn't have! Myrrh - No, really, you shouldn't have.
Whilst the gold and the frankincense speak of the special life that this baby will have, the myrrh says that not only his life but his death will also be special. This much we know because we know the story of Jesus from beginning to end. These men did not know the story as we do and yet their guesses seem to be spot on.
They may be foreigners and non-Jews but they seem to have a keener understanding of the Jewish Messiah than most of the Jewish people involved in this story. But having seen this, we are then faced again with the question of why they are here at all and why God allows them to discover Jesus by the means that they do. Why does he use astrology to bring people to Jesus?
I think we need to bring Saint Paul in at this point, in his sermon to the philosophers in Athens Paul talks about how God overlooked the sins of the past before people found out about Jesus. Not only that but Paul himself uses the statues of the gods in Athens to point to Jesus. Because of our sin and our disobedience human beings find themselves in all sorts of bad and ungodly places. God does not stand outside of our sinful situations and shout at us from a safe place. God’s way is that he steps in and meets us where we are. This is, in fact, the whole message of Christmas.
God opens the conversation with the Magi in language that they understand and a religious culture that they feel comfortable with. If I do not know your language and you do not know mine then we attempt to communicate using things that we both know. I could start by pointing to me and saying, “William, my name is William. William is Ainh Dom” or I could hold out a familiar everyday object to you and we could tell each other our names for it.
God is communicating with people who in a very real and spiritual sense are foreigners to him. He speaks to them in words that they will understand. He uses religious imagery from their own home culture. He starts in the dangerous place of astrology where they live and brings them on a huge journey that leads them to the living embodiment of the truth and life. He starts with the stars and through them brings these star gazers to the very person who made the stars.
At the start of our journey with God he does not expect us to have every one of our theological “I”s dotted and our “T”s crossed. He reaches out to us in our weakness, he appears to us in our darkness but he is never happy to leave us there. Just as he took the Magi on a two year journey that, I am sure, was only the start of a lifelong quest, so he comes to meet us where we are and calls us to take the first steps on a journey to where he is.
We each in our own way have to make that journey to Jesus. We each must come to him to bow the knee as the Magi once did, bringing the only gift that he wants and, in fact, the only gift we can bring to him - the gift of ourselves. If you have never made that journey in your heart I urge you strongly to do that this Christmas, turn from your old ways and put your trust in the God who trusted Mary to cradle him, Joseph to bring him up, the untrustworthy shepherds to bring the news of him to the world and these outsiders, these strangers, these Magi who had no share in the physical Israel to be the first of the new Israel made up of people from every tribe and tongue, who have little more than their love of Jesus in common, people like you and me.
Wednesday 13 February 2013
Matthew 1
Think of all the great opening lines that you know out of all the books that you read or films that you saw -
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife...
Matthew picks a genealogy to start with. Hmmm. Can you imagine a publisher today? "Well Matthew, I like the racy bit with the potential divorce and the stuff with dreams and angels but really, a family tree at the start? We have a man called Luke working on a similar project and he's kept his genealogy but moved it to a later chapter after he has caught the readers attention, would you not think of doing the same?"
So why does Matthew chose to start this way?
There are many different ways of telling a story. You could write a work of prose, straightforward story telling, "One day Mr McCartney got out of bed, had a cup of tea and went out to catch the bus, etc." You could write a poem, "From Morpheus' gentle grip / by caffeine and cold released / to waking land he slipped / etc, ect." You could write a song, "Got up got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head, Found my way downstairs and drank a cup. And looking up, I noticed I was late, etc." They are all different genres and all do different jobs. The Bible also employs different genres, history, letters, proverbs, songs, poetry and, here, genealogy.
One of the most overlooked means of telling a story these days is the family tree. Barack Obama uses it in "Dreams from my Father" but very few other modern writers. This is a shame because genealogy can be a very powerful and very neat storytelling tool. In Matthew 1 we have a genealogy that, amongst many other things, tells the story of God's faithfulness to the person at the start of the genealogy (Abraham) and also very neatly shows the place of one of the most scandalous figures in the early story of Jesus the Messiah, his mother Mary.
It's all to do with making babies
Abraham was promised descendants. He was promised lots and lots and lots of them. So many they would impossible to count. This is one of the reasons that the Bible employs genealogy as such a powerful story telling tool. This dead end couple, Abram and Sarai, become the founders of a family that Matthew proudly lists only one tree of and that continues on to this day with millions of descendants of Abraham in Israel and around the world.
God promised babies to Abraham and here they all are given in their promise fulfilling generations.
Where does Mary fit in to this story then? This genealogy is different from many others in the Bible in that it not only lists the baby boys but also the girls too. Each of the women in this list are marked out by being someone wreathed in some form of scandal. Tamar plays the part of a prostitute to force the men in her society to give her and her dead husband their rights. Rahab is a real prostitute and an outsider to Israel. Ruth is an accursed Moabite who through her loving kindness overturns the laws of Deuteronomy. Bathsheba is the adulteress who becomes involved in a plot that ends in the murder of her husband. God forgives both her and David and allows them to be part of his historical plan for his Messiah.
At the end of this scandalous list Mary's own scandal is laid out for all the world to see. People knew where babies came from in those days and it took angelic intervention for even a righteous man like Joseph to accept that this miracle of virgin birth was the work of God. What happens is scandalous and shocking to the people of Israel but it is no different from how God worked with Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and the many other women of the Bible through whom God fulfilled his promise to Abraham that through him all nations would be blessed.
Next time you see a genealogy in the Bible don't let your eyes glaze over and be tempted to skim it. It might just tell you a powerful story of how God works faithfully with broken and unlikely people.
It's all to do with making babies
Abraham was promised descendants. He was promised lots and lots and lots of them. So many they would impossible to count. This is one of the reasons that the Bible employs genealogy as such a powerful story telling tool. This dead end couple, Abram and Sarai, become the founders of a family that Matthew proudly lists only one tree of and that continues on to this day with millions of descendants of Abraham in Israel and around the world.
God promised babies to Abraham and here they all are given in their promise fulfilling generations.
Where does Mary fit in to this story then? This genealogy is different from many others in the Bible in that it not only lists the baby boys but also the girls too. Each of the women in this list are marked out by being someone wreathed in some form of scandal. Tamar plays the part of a prostitute to force the men in her society to give her and her dead husband their rights. Rahab is a real prostitute and an outsider to Israel. Ruth is an accursed Moabite who through her loving kindness overturns the laws of Deuteronomy. Bathsheba is the adulteress who becomes involved in a plot that ends in the murder of her husband. God forgives both her and David and allows them to be part of his historical plan for his Messiah.
At the end of this scandalous list Mary's own scandal is laid out for all the world to see. People knew where babies came from in those days and it took angelic intervention for even a righteous man like Joseph to accept that this miracle of virgin birth was the work of God. What happens is scandalous and shocking to the people of Israel but it is no different from how God worked with Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and the many other women of the Bible through whom God fulfilled his promise to Abraham that through him all nations would be blessed.
Next time you see a genealogy in the Bible don't let your eyes glaze over and be tempted to skim it. It might just tell you a powerful story of how God works faithfully with broken and unlikely people.
Matthew 1
New International Version (NIV)
The Genealogy of Jesus the Messiah
1 This is the genealogy[a] of Jesus the Messiah[b] the son of David, the son of Abraham:
2 Abraham was the father of Isaac,
Isaac the father of Jacob,
Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,
3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,
Perez the father of Hezron,
Hezron the father of Ram,
4 Ram the father of Amminadab,
Amminadab the father of Nahshon,
Nahshon the father of Salmon,
5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,
Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,
Obed the father of Jesse,
6 and Jesse the father of King David.
David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,
7 Solomon the father of Rehoboam,
Rehoboam the father of Abijah,
Abijah the father of Asa,
8 Asa the father of Jehoshaphat,
Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram,
Jehoram the father of Uzziah,
9 Uzziah the father of Jotham,
Jotham the father of Ahaz,
Ahaz the father of Hezekiah,
10 Hezekiah the father of Manasseh,
Manasseh the father of Amon,
Amon the father of Josiah,
11 and Josiah the father of Jeconiah[c] and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon.
12 After the exile to Babylon:
Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel,
Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel,
13 Zerubbabel the father of Abihud,
Abihud the father of Eliakim,
Eliakim the father of Azor,
14 Azor the father of Zadok,
Zadok the father of Akim,
Akim the father of Elihud,
15 Elihud the father of Eleazar,
Eleazar the father of Matthan,
Matthan the father of Jacob,
16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.
17 Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.
Joseph Accepts Jesus as His Son
18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about[d]: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet[e] did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,[f] because he will save his people from their sins.”
22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”[g] (which means “God with us”).
24 When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25 But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.
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