Tag: Matthew

The Bible in a Year – 29 October

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

29 October. Matthew chapters 13-14

In the first of these chapters, Jesus uses several stories (parables) to try and explain what he called the “kingdom of heaven” – the new way of life with God that he came to bring.  Even his closest disciples did not understand these stories at first telling, so he had to explain the meaning of them.  The parables are intended to be mulled over by the hearer until they make sense in their own situation.  We are expected to ask ourselves, for example, “am I like the seed that is growing among thorns, letting the cares of the world choke the growth of God’s life in me?” (13:22) or “when the time of judgement comes, will I look more like a useful stalk of wheat or a useless weed in God’s kingdom? (12:40-43).

Not all the parables were about farming: others would have made sense to housewives, merchants or fishermen.   Jesus used as many ways as he could to explain his teaching to people from all walks of life.  Yet, in the last section of chapter 13, the very people who knew him best – his immediate family and other families in his home village of Nazareth – rejected him, for they thought they knew him too well.  Instead of being the famous preacher who walked into town one day and started to work miracles, he was to them just Joseph and Mary’s son, who had walked out on his family and now returned.  Unlike the prodigal son of one of his own parables, he was not welcomed back with open arms but with suspicion.

On top of that, in chapter 14 Jesus hears that his relative, the prophet John (“the Baptist”), had been killed by King Herod who now feared that Jesus was the same prophet come back to life.  Clearly Herod had not been paying attention, for John had baptised Jesus, and their approaches to proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven were quite different.    So it is not surprising that Jesus went away by himself, badly in need of solitude to deal with this bereavement, the rejection by his own neighbours and the implied threat to his life.  Yet that is just when he found himself surrounded by crowds desperate for more of his teaching.  Their physical need for food prompted perhaps Jesus’ best known miracle, the feeding of five thousand men and their families with a small quantity of bread and fish.  Other people’s needs always came first for him, however great his own.  Only with that attitude, made possible by the Spirit of God within him, could he face the ultimate test of the Cross.

Going back to Jesus’ family, perhaps the experience of meeting the needs of the crowds with both words and food persuaded him that his ministry to others was more important than his family, for at the end of this chapter he declares in response to the statement that they are wanting to see him, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”  From that declaration we get the idea that all of us who put our trust in Jesus can call ourselves sisters and brothers – not only of each other, but of Jesus the Son of God, thereby claiming the status of children of God for ourselves.  But it is only Jesus’ self-sacrifice that makes that possible.

The Bible in a Year – 28 October

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28 October. Matthew chapters 10-12

In these chapters, we see Jesus offering an intensive training course in evangelism to his disciples; then comparing himself with John the Baptist and with other figures in scripture such as the prophet Jonah (whose three days in a sea monster are seen as a prophecy of Jesus’ three nights in the tomb after Good Friday) and the “suffering servant” of the prophet Isaiah.

Given how much Jesus did and taught, and the relatively short length of each of the Gospels (restricted presumably by the length of the scrolls they were written on), the writers had to be economical with the material available.  So we rarely read of Jesus saying the same thing twice, though no doubt he did – any teaching is learnt best by being repeated several times.  But there is one phrase that occurs both in yesterday’s reading from chapter 9 when Jesus is criticised for eating in the house of a tax collector, and in 12:7 when he is criticised for letting his disciples pluck grain in a field on the Sabbath (and therefore “working” on the day when work was forbidden): “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”.   This is what seems to have angered him most: people who were more concerned with the detailed religious rules that had been developed over the generations, than with the broad sweeping principles on which they were based, of which God’s mercy is the greatest.   St James uses a similar phrase: “mercy triumphs over judgement”.

Just as in yesterday’s reading, we saw that Jesus brought hope to the hopeless as much as healing to the sick, so today the overall message is one of God’s mercy being behind his whole ministry of gathering and sending his disciples.   That may be another reason why he mentioned Jonah, who was angry with God when God was merciful to the people of Nineveh: Jonah would have preferred judgement over mercy, but “something greater than Jonah is here!” (12:41) – it was time for mercy to take its rightful place.

The Bible in a Year – 27 October

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27 October. Matthew chapters 8-9

In these two chapters we see Jesus doing what he was, in his lifetime, best known for – healing people.  In the course of what might have been only a few days, he heals eleven specific people from a range of conditions – leprosy, paralysis, fever, haemorrhage, blindness, dumbness, demon possession and even death (or a death-like trance).  It is clear that there were many more such miracles, too many to be recounted individually.  The impact he had on the towns and villages around the lake of Galilee/Capharnaum must have been tremendous.    These stories of healing also provide the setting for other developments in the story of Jesus told in between them – the calling of disciples (including Matthew himself), stilling the storm on the lake with a spoken word, and at the end of chapter 9, the command to “send labourers into the harvest”, that is to share in his work of bringing good news.

What was the good news, and how did it relate to these physical and spiritual healings?  I have just been reading a newsletter from one of the charities we support – CAP, Christians Against Poverty.  Their work is primarily helping people trapped in unsustainable debt to get out of the hole that they have dug themselves into. Or, in many cases, which has been dug for them – domestic abuse, unemployment, mental health problems or physical handicap is frequently the trigger for a downward spiral that leaves people with not only no money and no means of paying off what they borrow, but also no hope.  So CAP see their ministry as also one of bringing hope.  By acting as agents to negotiating settlements with creditors on their behalf, by challenging unfair benefit decisions by government agencies, by helping people to budget what money they do have, and overall by befriending them and introducing them to the fellowship of the local church. In all these ways, they show people who have lost hope that it is possible to regain it.

Jesus also seems to have been a bringer of hope.  That is why he rarely simply healed a physical illness and moved on, but engaged with people’s deeper need.   The leper and the bleeding woman, outcast from Jewish society, were cleansed and reintroduced to their religious community; the centurion (Roman soldier) was told that he was ahead of the Jews in the queue to meet God; a paralysed man was assured of forgiveness for sin, before being made able to walk again.

When Jesus is criticised for eating and drinking while John the Baptist and the Pharisees were telling their followers to fast, his reply is in the form of a short parable about clothing and wineskins.   He explains, “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?” (9:15).  His ministry was one characterised by activity, joy and hope, and it rubbed off on most of those whom he met.  To those in the darkness of depression, debt or anything else that robs people of hope, Jesus comes to restore it.  The call to labour in his harvest field is also a call to share in this life-changing gift of hope.

The Bible in a Year – 26 October

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26 October. Matthew chapters 5-7

These chapters comprise the “Sermon on the Mount”, the fullest account we have of the direct teaching of Jesus about how to live a holy and fulfilled life.  It is presented as a single set of teachings, although it may actually be a summary of his teachings on many occasions. Any one of the short passages among them would be the basis for a sermon.  Indeed, a couple of years ago I wrote a series of Lent reflections for my London parish just on the Beatitudes (the first eleven verses of chapter 5). So I will revisit the introduction I gave then.

The opening verse of the “sermon” tells us “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them.” That gives us the correct order of things.  First Jesus was present (and people knew it), secondly his disciples made time to come to him, and thirdly he spoke, and they learnt from him.   Learning from Jesus requires these three things us of us: to believe in him, to come to where he is (whether that is in a church meeting, or in our own quiet times at home) and to be ready to listen and learn.  And that means having the humility of the true scholar, of knowing that we have much to learn. In the words of an old hymn –

Come to my heart, O Thou wonderful love, come and abide,
Lifting my life, till it rises above envy and falsehood and pride,
Seeking to be: lowly and humble, a learner of Thee.
Robert Walmsley (1831-1905)

Before we go any further, we need to be clear what we mean by being “blessed”. The word “beatitude” comes from the Latin word for it (beatus).  The original Greek word is “makarios”.  Some modern versions of the Bible translate the word as “happy” but that can sound rather shallow – a feeling of happiness can be easily caused by all sorts of small things in life, and just as easily shattered when bad things happen.

The happiness that Jesus promises is something much more profound, and has little to do with the pleasures of life.  The sort of happiness we are looking at here is not the contentment of having all the material things we need, but the satisfaction of knowing that we are living God’s way and building right relationships with other people.  Turning away from the sort of behaviour that harms oneself or others, and living in a way that builds community.  Being at peace with God because we know we have put things right in some way.

The Bible in a Year – 25 October

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25 October. Matthew chapters 1-4

Well, there’s a surprise! As I have mentioned before, I am following an online Bible reading plan that’s supposed to be in the order the books of the Bible were written.  They don’t tell you in advance what the next day’s reading will be.  Suddenly we have moved from the letters to the Gospels.

But not for the first time, the good folks at Bible Gateway have got it wrong.  Every commentary I have seen or sermon heard that compares the gospels agrees that Mark was the first to be written, and that Matthew and Luke copied most of what Mark wrote, edited it a bit and added their own material.  So why we are getting Matthew first, I don’t know.  But here goes…

Matthew, it is widely believed, belonged to a community of Jewish Christians – those Jews who had accepted that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah or Christ.  Therefore in these opening chapters, and elsewhere in the book, Matthew appeals to the Jewish scriptures for evidence to support this.  To begin with, he produces a genealogy of Jesus that identifies him as the 42nd generation from Abraham in the male line, consisting of 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 generations of kings to Jeconiah, and another 14 after the Babylonian exile.  This is suspiciously neat and symbolic (3 x 2 x 7) and the last third seems to include names not known from other Bible books, but the point is made: Jesus (or rather his father Joseph, for it is Matthew who gives us the legend of the virgin birth) is a direct descendant in the royal line.

Matthew it is who also gives us the stories of the Magi, Flight to Egypt and Massacre of the Holy Innocents, the stories we hear at Christmas time. At the end of this, we find Joseph, Mary and Jesus settling as returning refugees in Nazareth in Galilee without any suggestion that they had originally come from there. They would have had to make a new home and establish a place in a community.  Maybe that is why it was another 30 years or so before Jesus felt called to start his ministry, as he had to be accepted among the people before he could bring God’s word and power to them.

What is the application of that?  When I felt called to be a Reader (lay minister) in a church in London, I was fairly new to that community.  The Rector (parish priest) warned me that it would take ten years before the congregation fully accepted me as one of their leaders.  As it was, I moved to Yorkshire five years later, and after two years getting to know the congregation in a church here, I was licensed by the Bishop of Leeds as a Reader here.  Not quite the same as seeing the heavens opened and hearing the voice of God, but then Jesus was unique.    Will it take ten years for people to accept me as a leader?  Hopefully not – I think the priest in London was exaggerating – but even in the three years of Jesus’ amazing ministry of preaching and healing, after nearly thirty years living in Galilee, he met with opposition as much as praise.  I am aware that not everything I say will please all the people all the time, but I do try to listen to what God is saying, and pass that on.