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.