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MATTHEW, 18: PEOPLE ARE BREAKING INTO THE KINGDOM (11:1-15)

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Setting the scene: where have the Twelve disappeared to? It appears that they’re off on the mission that Jesus instructed and commissioned them for. And Matthew, unlike Mark (6:30), never tells us specifically when they return. Instead, he has Jesus turn to a different audience.
And what audience is that?
He was teaching and proclaiming “in their cities.”
Okay. Who are “they”?
At first it sounds as if Matthew is talking about the cities where the Twelve are also working, but, since they never show up in what follows, it’s more helpful if we go back to the last similarly vague reference to “them”—”their synagogues.” (10:17) That seemed to refer to synagogues in which the scribes and the Pharisees were the principal authorities, as was probably the general picture throughout the larger towns in Galilee. Not everyone in these towns was opposed to Jesus; but the authorities, increasingly, were. “Their cities,” in other words, are the places where this conflict will develop further.
But the first person who turns up (indirectly, through his own disciples) is John the Baptist—who’s now in prison (when and how did that happen?) and whom we haven’t heard a thing about since he baptized Jesus back in chapter 3!
For some reason, Matthew delays the story about John’s arrest till chapter 14. At this point, it’s enough for him to remind us that being an independent preacher like John or Jesus could be dangerous work. There were many ways to run afoul of the authorities.
By the way, if you’re thinking “Herod was the secular authority, not the religious,” think again. In the first century everything was religious. There was no neat dividing line between “church” and “state.” It was all mixed up together.
You may remember that John was expecting someone “more powerful than” he to succeed him (3:11-12). Being in prison has made him all the more anxious as to whether Jesus was really living up to that prediction.
And Jesus doesn’t really give him a “yes” or a “no.”
Right. He just says, “Well, your disciples can tell you what they see. You decide.” And that makes sense because, for Jesus, everything in his ministry is an expression of the love of God. Words can easily be distorted, but what he does is clear. It’s the same principle he applied earlier to the identification of true prophets: “By their fruits you will know them” (7:20).
It’s interesting, too, that some of the language in his response to John is lifted right out of Isaiah: “the blind receive their sight,” “the deaf hear,” “the dead are raised up” (e.g., Isa. 26:19; 29:18-19; 35:5; 42:7 & 18). Matthew doesn’t remind us this time that this is all fulfillment of prophecy. But he probably didn’t need to for his ancient audience. They would recognize it.
Most of these “proofs” seem pretty clear, but the last one there in vs. 6 seems oddly flat: “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” Is this such a big deal?
I’m not so sure myself. At least “anyone who takes no offense” at Jesus would stand in contrast to the devout folk who are turning against him. Still, “blessed” is a pretty strong word, as we saw back in chapter 5 at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. It speaks of a full, rich, deeply flourishing human existence. Perhaps it’s a bit like what we saw in 10:40-42, where all you have to do to participate in the rewards of the righteous is to show a bit of kindness to a righteous person. You don’t have to be one of Jesus’ ardent followers; you need only acknowledge the life-giving quality of his teaching. If that sounds too easy to us, it might be a sign that we’re edging in the direction of the devout who want everything in its place and get upset at those who are less devout than they!
In any case, John’s disciples go off to relay Jesus’ message to their teacher, and Jesus turns to the other people around him and starts to joke with them.
Is that what this is? It does seem a bit pointless otherwise.
It starts with a little friendly joking, but then turns serious. Asking them if they went out to the wilderness along the Jordan River to watch the wind blow the reeds can only have elicited a laugh. The second question, whether they went there to see someone dressed in the height of fashion, is equally absurd. The third question—did they go out to see a prophet—touches on the real point. They may not have been certain that John was a prophet, but they suspected he was.
Then Jesus springs his punch line. Not a comic punch line, but one that pushes their understanding of John and his importance a step further: he wasn’t just a prophet, but the harbinger of a new age.
Is that what the quotation in vs. 10 is about? Where does it come from?
The quotation is from Malachi 3:1, but with an alteration: the original speaks of “my way” rather than “your way.” Jesus says that John has been sent by God to prepare someone else’s way. (The “your” here is specifically singular in Greek, not plural.) John is a transitional figure. Verse 11 makes the same point in another way: John is the greatest of human beings up to this point in time, but in the new age, the kingdom of the heavens, even the least person will be greater than John.
Yet another way of talking about this is found in vs. 13: “All the prophets and the law prophesied until John came.” The implication is that he represents the climax and conclusion of that process.
Wait up. What is this about “the law” prophesying? I thought the law was the law and the prophets were the prophets.
People did draw a distinction between different kinds of literature in the scriptures. But early Christians believed that prophecy might be found anywhere in them. To them, all the scriptures were full of mysteries—mysteries that would only come clear at the appropriate time or to the appropriate reader. Later on, for example, we’ll find Matthew treating a Psalm text as a prophecy.
But that’s not the whole story here. What about verse 14?
It’s another way of making the distinction between one age and the other. Elijah was generally thought of as the greatest of all prophets—a great miracle-worker and intransigent opponent of wrong-doing. And there was a possibility that Elijah might return. After all, according to 2 Kings 2, God took Elijah up into heaven in a fiery chariot. Since he never died, he could conceivably return if the need for him was great enough.
There’s a prediction of exactly that in the last two verses of Malachi: “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.” Jesus admits that identifying John with “Elijah to come” will be controversial—”if you’re willing to accept it,” he says. But he does seem to affirm it. And that, in turn, implies that the Day of the Lord, the great turning point is about to occur. After that the era of prophecy will be over.
You skipped something! What does vs. 12 have to do with all this?
Yes, I did. And since we’re trying to read carefully here, I’d better have a good explanation! In fact, I’ve kept it for separate discussion because it’s obscure and, lately, controversial among interpreters. What’s clear is that it’s part of Jesus’ interpretation of John as the transitional figure, the turning point. Some great change began to happen in “the time of John”—the time when he was actively preaching, before he was imprisoned. Since then, “the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” What could Jesus possibly mean?
John, of course, is suffering violence himself at the hands of Herod. But Jesus has already said that the kingdom of heaven is greater than John. So that isn’t the point. Some recent interpreters take the reference to violence literally and refer it to the increasing number of Jewish guerrillas who were resisting the Roman Empire in Judea and Galilee. They argue that Jesus intended to encourage armed rebellion; and they note that he was, after all, executed by the Romans in precisely the way they reserved for such rebels.
There are major problems with such an interpretation of Jesus. One is the assumption that the indictment, trial, and execution of Jesus were accurate responses to the specific realities of his ministry. We have no evidence that that was the case; in fact, the gospels all insist it wasn’t. And a broad knowledge of Roman courts suggests that one could not count on strict attention to justice, particularly in remote provinces. Roman legal theories were good. But the courts themselves were heavily influenced by social status, political connections, and the rhetorical skill of prosecutors or defenders. Most important, there was no real separation between the courts and the rest of government. A courtroom trial before Pontius Pilate was inevitably just as much a matter of public policy and governance as it was a matter of justice.
Furthermore, the notion that Jesus was a kind of first-century Che Guevara inevitably runs up against the fact that the vast majority of his teachings never suggest anything remotely resembling political revolution. Some have dismissed this vast array of teachings as having been created by later disciples to cover up their revolutionary past. If it was the case, we would have to believe that those disciples were much real religious geniuses, not Jesus. And, frankly, none of them cuts the kind of figure that would encourage any such idea.
So, if the violence here isn’t literal, what is it about?
I see two possibilities, which actually work together here. The first is that Jesus is simply making an observation about the degree of turmoil within Jewish life and faith in his time. There were several prominent, organized groups of devout people with quite different understandings of their common religion: Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots, Essenes, the followers of John, Jesus’ own followers. In addition, practical religious authority was divided between the priestly families who controlled the Temple and the Scribes who served as local authorities on religion in most other places. The members of the Pharisee party also had a popular reputation for religious expertise and were often consulted. In other words, Jesus is saying that kingdom of heaven is a subject of serious contention—something every one could see.
The other possibility is that Jesus is noting a tendency in John’s and his own ministry to open up Jewish religion more fully to people without a high level of expertise or who were unable to embrace the strictness of the other parties. They placed other concerns ahead of some of the details of the Law. We have seen this, for example, in Jesus’ sabbath healings, and in his relative lack of concern about purity. John, for his part, clashed with the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to him for baptism (3:7-10). From the perspective of the more established devout, they must have seemed like brash revolutionaries who were “breaking into” the religious sphere.
Then who are “the violent” who are actually taking the kingdom by force?
If I’m right in what I’ve just said, these “violent” people are the folk who came to John for baptism in order to get a new start with God and the folk who come to Jesus and feel themselves closer to God through his words and actions than through the specifics of their religion as defined by the religious authorities and the particularly pious. They form a kind of mob of irregulars doing the shared Jewish faith their own way—barging their way in, as it were..

Next up: JESUS DEFINES HIS TRUE AUDIENCE (11:16-30)

MUCH FROM LITTLE

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Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Church, Berkeley, June 17, 2018
Proper 6B: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (11-13)14-17; Mark 4:26-34

We’ll be reading from the books of Samuel and Kings all summer this year. And they’re full of great stories. Admittedly, we’ll be getting a carefully pruned selection of them, made suitable for delicate ears on Sunday mornings. If you want the whole raw (and occasionally appalling) narrative, I’m afraid you’ll just have to read it in the Bible.
Now, today’s story didn’t need any cleaning up, but you need to know a bit about the political realities of the tenth century B.C. in order to understand exactly what’s going on here. The Middle East of the prophet Samuel’s day was a bit like the chaotic state of Syria and northern Iraq right now Every group in the population was engaged in an ongoing struggle with its neighbors—a struggle for power and sometimes a struggle for survival.
The Israelites were a loose coalition of tribes in the hill country of Palestine, under pressure from their richer and better organized neighbors, the Philistines, who had a group of city states on the coast. (The most important of their cities was Gaza—still a place of contention to this day.)
The Israelites were having a hard time defending themselves and finally admitted that they needed stronger leadership. They went to the prophet Samuel, their most widely respected leader, and demanded a king. Samuel thought it was a bad idea, but he finally gave way. And the lot for kingship fell on a warrior named Saul, who also happened to be the tallest and strongest man among the Israelites. But it wasn’t long before Saul did something that made Samuel so furious that he disowned him. (We won’t go into the details. It’s one of those stories that’s been edited out of Sunday readings—probably for good reason.)
But if Saul had lost divine approval, who was going to replace him? And how was that going to play out? God told Samuel that a replacement was already chosen and directed him to go anoint him as the next king. Samuel, of course, understood the risk. “Saul will kill me,” he says. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. This was a bloody era.
So off Samuel goes to Bethlehem. And you will have noticed what kind of reception he got there: “The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, ‘Do you come peaceably?'” Everybody had to be suspicious of everybody else. There were foes without and enemies within. And Samuel was powerful enough to make people very nervous.

But Samuel announces that he’s only come to make a sacrifice—which normally meant that there would be a feast. (Only certain parts of the animal, you see, would be burnt on the altar. The rest would be roasted to provide a sacred banquet.) And he invites the elders of the city to the feast, making a special point to include Jesse and his sons. And everything is proceeding as expected until Samuel starts making his way through the list of sons, starting with the eldest, Eliab, who made a very good impression. But, no, God wasn’t interested. And so on and so on, until he’s run out of sons. What sort of trick is God playing on him?
So he turns to Jesse and says, “Is this really all your sons?” And, no, it’s not! Even though the terrifying Samuel had specifically invited “Jesse and his sons” to the feast, Jesse hadn’t seen any reason to send for David, his youngest—just a boy, not old enough for important public gatherings. So who gets anointed as the next king of Israel? Some little shrimp who isn’t big enough to wield a sword, much less wage war on two fronts, one with the current king, the other with the Philistines! Really?
In the rest of the 1st Book of Samuel we got lots of stories about David’s adventures and misadventures between the time when Samuel anointed him as king and the time, years later, when he actually began to rule. There was danger. There was bloodshed. There was flight and periods in hiding. Would the shepherd boy have agreed to it all if Samuel had given him a choice? Maybe not. Jon and I were pondering the story this week, and he wondered how the older brothers felt about being passed over. Maybe relieved, actually.

Now, I’ve spent quite bit of time on this story—partly just because I think it’s very interesting. But also because there’s a connection with our other readings this morning—more of a connection than we have any reason to expect given that we’re actually just reading our way through each of these books—1 Samuel, 2 Corinthians, Mark’s Gospel—at this time of year. The people who created the lectionary made no effort to coordinate the readings with each other.
But just look what crops up in Mark’s Gospel! Jesus tells us that the reign of God is like a mustard seed. It was the smallest of all garden seeds, but it produces the biggest plant in the garden—big enough for birds to nest under it. And you think of that pipsqueak shepherd boy named David and how he changed the whole political climate of the area and even achieved a degree of peace and quiet that hadn’t been seen there for centuries—a shelter where the people could make themselves at home.
Or the other parable Jesus told: the reign of God is like someone who sows a field and then goes about the business of every day life until, lo! it’s ready for harvest. And you think of Samuel, probably shaking his head over the choice of David, but doing his job and leaving the rest to God.
We have a built-in human prejudice, I suppose, in favor of people who project strength and ability, even if, like Saul, they may not have all that much of either. And we want to see things changing visibly—dramatically even—and immediately. We live in an age where people have fallen in love with a picture of the reign of God as arriving with a thunderclap, a catastrophe, a sudden rapturing of the good and punishment of the evil. How odd to hear Jesus saying here, “You sow the seeds yourself—and then maybe you should take a nap and get on with your other chores.” I love the name that’s been bestowed in this parable: The Seed Growing Secretly. It’s not the less powerful just because it doesn’t make the front page. God’s methods are more subtle—and I dare say more lasting—than those of Mr. Trump.

And St. Paul offered us a key reminder into what all of this means for our own lives: “We walk by faith, not by sight.” Actually, of course, the truth is more like “We walk primarily by faith, not by sight.” Sight is important, too, and Paul was never one to ignore the realities around him. But the direction of our walk, the steadiness with which we take our steps, the central values that guide us in understanding and dealing with the world around us—these come from faith, from our basic sense of what life in this world is really about.
Some people don’t like this talk about “faith.” They would like to think that everything can be based on knowledge. But they actually have a faith, too—the faith that they can in fact see and know everything of importance. The older I get, the more improbable that seems. It stretches credulity. It would be truer, I think, simply to admit that everybody walks by faith—by a kind of broad sense of what the world is like, a big picture into which we fit what we can actually see at the moment. Sometimes, of course, what we see refuses to fit and then we may have to rethink our faith. But, for the most part it’s our faith that guides us and helps us interpret what we are seeing.
And faith makes an enormous difference, as the story of David shows. David eventually did become king and reigned for many years. He did it by becoming a hard-edged politician and guerrilla fighter—a master of what could be seen—but he also hung onto a larger sense of vocation that was connected to God. His faith helped him, unlike most hard-edged politicians and guerrilla fighters, to turn the corner when the right time came. He graduated from being a leader of insurrection to being, for the most part, a generous, just, peaceful monarch. Not many people since him have been able to make that transition.

We, too, can follow on the same path. Not the path of civil war, I mean. God spare us all that! But the faith that God’s love is the true shaping force in our world, the shaping form of true human lives, of lives worth living. And we all have parts to play as we walk in that faith—parts large or small, it makes no difference. After all, the smallest seed can produce the biggest plant. And we don’t even have to make it all happen. But we do need to plant the seed and tend it and rejoice in its growth.

MATTHEW, 17: JESUS’ MESSAGE WILL PROVE DEEPLY DIVISIVE (10:16-42)

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This passage looks really distressing, particularly the part about family members betraying one another. Why does Jesus have such a dark view of the future? Is this all he had to offer his followers?
Matthew has already shown us what lies behind it—the increasingly bitter resentment and antagonism toward Jesus and the good news of God’s love that he preaches and practices. When the very devout begin claiming that he is in league with the “ruler of the demons” (9:34), that can lead rather easily to judicial and physical violence.
Jesus frames his warnings in language drawn from the apocalyptic writings of his time (the Biblical books of Daniel or Revelation are examples). Such writings tended to predict an imminent period of overwhelming disaster for humanity, including the breakdown of human relationships and a great increase in injustice and violence. This disastrous time would also turn out to be a judgement since it would highlight the divide between the good and the evil.
But this time of evils was expected to give way to a new and better world. This is why Jesus says, “The one who endures to the end will be saved” (10:22). There is hope beyond the suffering of the present.
Does that mean Jesus is advocating martyrdom?
He doesn’t recommend it as such, just acknowledges it as a possibility in any true and faithful human life—as, for that matter, it has always been and still is. People have always been at risk of suffering for their principles. But Jesus recommends caution: “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (10:16). The snake is capable of slipping away quickly and inconspicuously from what looks like a dangerous situation. Doves generally behave peaceably with one another. “Wise” and “harmless”—it translates to something like “Give people no occasion to be threatened by you, but keep your eyes open and don’t throw your life away carelessly.” After all, he says, there will always be another town that needs to hear your message (10:23).
Of course, we already know that, in the end, Jesus didn’t fully follow his own advice. His harmlessness looked extremely threatening to the power brokers of his day, and he made no effort to escape those who would kill him.
But why does he tell them not to formulate a defense? Wouldn’t it be a wise thing to think your case through carefully—maybe even find a good lawyer?
They already have their defense. It’s the good news of God’s love that they’re being sent out to proclaim. He doesn’t want them to lose that center of focus. They’re the bearers of God’s love and they have no plan or purpose other than that. Jesus would doubtless have been appalled by the church’s repeated immersing of itself in the politics of one age or another, including many American Evangelicals’ wedding of themselves to the Republican Party and a profane president.
At the same time, he admits that the disciples may often find themselves condemned in advance. After all, the devout are starting to identify Jesus with the demonic Lord “Beelzebul”—an ancient deity of the city of Ekron regarded, by Jesus’ time, as a demon. If Jesus is Beelzebul, then his disciples must be on the side of the demons.
So he tells them that there’s a lot to be afraid of and then says, “So have no fear of them”? (vs. 26)
Yes, just like Jesus, isn’t it? He never smooths over the realities. He just tells us to get a different perspective on them. In the big picture, he insists, it all looks very different. Truth will eventually emerge; so stay on the side of light, the side of the good news. Don’t even be afraid of people who are about to kill you.
But apparently there is somebody worth fearing, the one “who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Who is that? The devil? (vs. 28)
We’ve inherited a mental and visual image of demons poking the damned with their pitchforks. So that’s probably the first thought for most of us. We could also wonder whether this being is God, who has final power to judge and punish. But I suspect that it’s neither. I think Jesus is telling us about ourselves. If someone threatens to destroy either your life, that’s one thing. If they threaten to destroy your integrity, your sense of what is true and meaningful, beautiful and good—all that is most profoundly important to you—they can succeed only if you let it happen. Martyrs for all kinds of truth over the ages have drawn the conclusion that if they must sacrifice either their lives (their “bodies”) or their connection with what is true and good (their “souls”) it was better to give up their life than to surrender their deep commitment to what is true and good. You, then, are the only one who has the power to destroy your soul. Only you can betray your deepest sense of what is true and right. And you may be tempted to do it if you begin to fear the one who can destroy only your body.
That helps make sense of the saying about the sparrows and the hairs of your head that follows.
Yes. God loves all human beings and desires only life for us. We are the ones that get in the way of that.
That sounds comforting, but what follows it doesn’t!
Yes again. We have some either/or sayings not unlike those in the Sermon on the Mount. “Either acknowledge me and I will acknowledge you before God, or deny me and I will deny you.” (10:32-33) “Do not think I’ve come to bring peace; I’ve come to sharpen all your conflicts.” (10:34-36)
If you save your life by giving up all that gives your life meaning and hope, you will, in reality, lose it. (10:39) It’s particularly shocking for Jesus to say “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me,” for there has been no talk of crosses up to this point, not even a prediction that Jesus would wind up on one.
He seems to be focusing more on himself here than he usually does, doesn’t he?
It does sound that way, and people have misread vss. 32-33 as saying that you have to be Christian or God will reject you. In the context of Matthew’s Gospel, that seems very unlikely. Everybody in this book is either Jewish or Gentile. There is no separate “Christian” religion yet. Acknowledging Jesus, then, means affirming the good news he teaches and practices; denying him means the rejection or betrayal of that good news.
But then why does Matthew wind the discourse up with another of his whiplash effects? Is there any connection between all these threats and the last three verses of chapter 10, which sound almost cheerful?
Jesus has been completely frank here about the dangers of being a serious follower of his. It would be easy to lose sight, in this discourse to the Twelve, of why anybody would want to risk it at all. So it’s important that he concludes by reminding them of the heart of his message, the thing that makes it worthwhile. The message is about God’s love—love so powerful and pervasive that it overflows anybody who has received it and spills out onto anyone who treats them with even common human decency. You don’t even have to be a disciple, just recognize and welcome the message they carry, just offer a cup of cold water.
It’s love that makes Jesus overflow with healing, that makes his goodness overpower and counteract the contagiousness of impurity. And it can grasp people and fill them with a new sense of hope and possibility.

Next up: PEOPLE ARE BREAKING INTO THE KINGDOM (11:1-15)

HOW CAN WE THINK ABOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT?

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A Sermon preached on the FEAST OF PENTECOST, May 20, 2018, at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California
Scripture readings (Year B): Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27 & 16:4b-15.

The Holy Spirit has to be one of the most difficult topics any one can talk about—right up there with quantum physics, it seems to me. In fact, it may be worse.
Why? Well, think about the word “spirit.” What is “spirit”? At its most basic level, it’s a breath of air: inspiration, expiration. Put more force behind it and it becomes a breeze, then a wind, then a storm. Think of it more metaphorically and it’s something we prefer to talk about in French—esprit—the quality of that enables an individual or a group to focus and summon energy for something and work effectively. Turn it back into English and it can be a indeterminate but powerful force for good or ill—a spirit of generosity, a spirit of malevolence. Give it yet a different turn and it becomes something that seems real, but also seems evanescent, unclear, uncertain—a ghost, maybe, or an apparition.
When we speak of God in terms of “Creator,” “Redeemer,” “Father,” “Son,” “Lover”, “Beloved”, we at least have a metaphor to work with. When we speak of God as “Spirit,” even the metaphor is something that you can’t pin down. You can’t form a picture of it, can’t get any sort of firm grip on.

And that’s just the way it ought to be. Because every time we Christians start to embrace the silly notion that we know all about God, that there is nothing more to understand, that the church as we know it is the final word, all we need to cure that attack of arrogance is to try thinking about the Holy Spirit.
To be sure, we’ve tried bottling the Spirit up in convenient packages called the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Sacraments. And that’s not untrue. The Spirit graciously consents to meet us in those places. The Spirit, after all, is God. And God is all for grace—grace, generosity, forgiveness, all the manifestations of that boundless love by which God created the universe and us in it, that love by which God still comes seeking us in season and out of season.
The only mistake here is if we begin to think that that’s all there is to the Spirit, as if the Spirit were very busy at baptisms and confirmations and ordinations and Eucharists—but spent most of her time (in Hebrew and Aramaic, Jesus’ native languages, “spirit” is a feminine noun, not masculine as in Latin) . . . . spent most of her time relaxing on the beach. No, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breath, the Holy Wind blows around us all the time, everywhere we go, however little we may notice it.

Think of our first reading this morning, the famous story of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. Have you ever wondered where all those bones came from? People of Ezekiel’s time would have known at once. In times of peace, the dead get properly buried. A whole valley full of bones could have only one explanation: war. These are the remains of an army so utterly defeated, a people so ground down by disaster, that there was no one left to bury them. It was a good image for how the people of Israel were feeling in Ezekiel’s day. God even says as much to Ezekiel, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.'” In modern slang, “We’re dead.” And God tells Ezekiel to speak to the breath, the wind, the Spirit—it’s all the same word in Hebrew—and the Spirit will give this people new life.
What was the point of this vision? It’s to tell the people, “You are forgetting about God the Spirit, God the unknowable, God the unpredictable, God the Lover who is never ultimately defeated.” “I will put my breath, my spirit within you,” God says to the people, “and you shall live. . . . ”

But working with the Spirit is never a simple, straightforward matter. Jesus once said, “The Spirit/wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (John 3:8) Sometimes the Spirit may even seem to disappear just when we most need or want or expect her. Our Psalm this morning reminded us of this:
All [creatures] look to you *
to give them their food in due season.
You give it to them; they gather it; *
you open your hand, and they are filled with good things.
You hide your face, and they are terrified; *
you take away their breath,
and they die and return to their dust.
You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; *
and so you renew the face of the earth. (Ps.104:28-31, BCP translation)
So many great saints have spoken about this reality. St. John of the Cross even gave it a name, “The Dark Night of the Soul.” There are apt to be times in any life when we feel that God has abandoned us, that the Spirit has gone missing. The challenge then is to remember that the love of God remains constant, even when we cannot sense it in the present moment. God does send the Spirit. God does renew the face of the earth.

And sometimes, when the Spirit makes her presence known, she takes us by surprise and launches us off in an unpredictable direction. That’s the story we heard from Acts about the feast of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter, when Jesus’s followers were slowly pulling themselves together after Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension and trying to figure out what they needed to be doing. “And they were all together in one place”—all of them, not just the Twelve, but everybody. “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
Storm and lightning! The Spirit created a commotion. She effectively forced the disciples into talking with other people about Jesus and who he was and what he taught and what it meant for them. And the people who heard them were caught by surprise, too, and stuck around to listen. They heard that Jesus represented God’s great love for God’s people and that his resurrection foreshadowed God’s ultimate victory over sin and hatred and all kinds of human violence.
The Spirit can whisper quietly when she wants to. But she can also make a loud noise when that appeals to her. And she made a very loud noise that day.

So we can’t expect to pin the Spirit down once for all. We can’t limit her. We can’t channel her in the directions we would prefer. We can’t even imagine predicting her. And that’s scary, isn’t it? What if she goes away, and we are left feeling like those ancient Israelites: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost”? Or it can be scary in another way. It’s easy for individuals to claim that the spirit is leading them in new ways. But sometimes you wonder. After all, how can we tell when the Holy Spirit is at work and when it’s some other spirit? the spirit of jealousy, say, or the spirit of competition or the spirit of deceit or pride or selfishness?
The earliest Christians had problems with that because a lot of people claimed to be speaking for the Spirit and they were contradicting one another and splitting the church. There’s a lot about that in the writings of Paul. And John was also conscious of it and gives us some help with it in our Gospel reading today. Jesus, at the Last Supper, is bidding his disciples farewell. He understands their grief, but he promises them that they will receive, in his place, the Advocate, the Helper, whom we sometimes call, using the ancient Greek word, the “Paraclete.” This Paraclete, he says, is “the Spirit of truth.”
And this Spirit, he promises, will guide us “into all truth.” “Well, thank you,” we might say, “but isn’t that just the problem? How do we tell which Spirit is the true one?” Well, earlier on in this discourse, Jesus said, “the Holy Spirit . . . will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” That’s the key. The Spirit who calls to mind what Jesus told us is the true Spirit.
And what did Jesus speak of? Love. God’s love for us. Our love for God. Our love for one another and for all the world and all the people God loves. When the Spirit speaks to us about that kind of love, we know we are hearing the true Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God.

This feast day, then, gives us news of great joy. Jesus has ascended, but God is still here with us every bit as much as when Jesus walked the roads of Palestine, as much as when God promised, though Ezekiel to revive the people of Israel after their crushing defeat, as much as when God called into being this whole wonderful world around us. The Spirit can never be pinned down; she may make her presence known at unexpected moments and in surprising ways. But we can count on her to proclaim to us again and again the good news of God’s love and to prompt us into living that good news and sharing it with thanksgiving.

MATTHEW, 16: PREPARING THE INNER CIRCLE OF DISCIPLES (9:35-10:16)

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Matthew makes a transition to this segment of his book by telling how Jesus is hard at work in all the cities and villages teaching, proclaiming good news, and healing. Yet, there is far more to do than he can possibly get to by himself. He needs “laborers for the harvest” and finds—or creates—them in his inner circle of twelve disciples.
So we suddenly have precisely twelve disciples? That seems abrupt. We heard about the calling of Peter, Andrew, James and John back in chapter 4, just before the Sermon on the Mount. And we met Matthew in 9:9. But who are these others? The story makes it sound as if there’s been a clear organization here for some time.
Yes, and, interestingly, the parallels to this passage in Mark 3 and Luke 6 make a smoother transition by treating this as the moment when Jesus actually picks the Twelve out of a larger community of disciples. But it’s not altogether clear how well organized this group was during jesus’ ministry. There’s some confusion of names in the lists we have. For example. Matthew and Mark agree in calling one of the Twelve “Thaddaeus,” though some manuscripts have “Lebbaeus” instead. Luke, on the other hand, has neither of those names and has someone called “James’s Judas” in the list. (In English, we usually call him “Jude” to save him the embarrassment of being confused with Judas Iscariot.) Another oddity is that, although all three gospels name Matthew in the list of the Twelve, when Mark (2:13-17) and Luke (5:27-32) tell the story of Jesus calling the tax collector, they give that man’s name as “Levi,” not “Matthew.”
(In case you’re wondering what John does with all this, the answer would be “Next to nothing.” He refers to “The Twelve” four times and says that Jesus chose them, but never offers a list of them.)
To sum up, then: The Twelve may have had some variability in membership, but all four gospels agree they were specifically chosen by Jesus. What’s more, all four emphasize that within this inner circle was the man who would betray him. And Matthew makes the additional point that that tax collector whom Jesus called away from his tax table became one of them. It’s hardly an accident that this gospel bears that disciple’s name.
Do you mean that Matthew wrote it?
We can’t know much about the actual authors of the gospels. The names by which we know them now can only have been given later on, after they had all been gathered up into a single volume entitled To Euanggelion, “The Gospel.” Each of the four was then distinguished as “According to Matthew,” “According to Mark,” and so on. No doubt there was a long tradition before that about the origin of each; but such traditions may tell us less about individual authors than about the Christian community where each gospel emerged and to whom they traced their knowledge of Jesus.
In any case, the name “Matthew” offers us a particular perspective for reading this gospel. It bears the name of a religious outcast whom Jesus included in his inner circle of disciples. And that matches up quite closely with all that we have read in chapters 8-9: our author is particularly interested in how Jesus repeatedly violated the boundaries of conventional piety for the sake of declaring God’s love.
But then the scary “instructions” about Christians not having any money and so forth? They make me anxious every time they get read in church. Is this really Jesus’ rule for Christian life?
Not exactly. It’s essentially the way he himself lived. But these instructions are directed to a specific group who are being sent out on a particular mission. In verse 2, Matthew refers to them as apostoloi, from which we get the English word “apostles.” But it doesn’t mean “apostle” in the modern sense—a kind of grand title granted to only a small selection of saints. It means something on the order of “agents, emissaries, people entrusted with a specific mission, representatives.” This is the only place Matthew uses the word, and it applies specifically to the mission of the moment. They are Jesus’ delegates in the towns and villages he can’t reach. And if they do their job faithfully, Jesus says, people will generally receive their message as good news and their power over demons will be welcomed and they will themselves be welcomed and housed and fed. After all, this is how Jesus himself has been greeted.
But not by everybody!
Exactly. And that’s why Jesus goes on to say, “If they don’t welcome you, it’s not your fault.” Some people, as we know, have decided that the good Jesus does is really a form of evil and that they must oppose him. The people who can’t recognize good when it happens to their neighbor, Jesus says, will be condemned as worse than Sodom and Gomorrah—towns that were destroyed by fire from heaven in Genesis 19 because of their savage treatment of strangers.
Why does he tell them to limit their mission to “the house of Israel”? He hasn’t seemed particularly hostile to Gentiles up to now.
No, far from it. It’s interesting that he also forbids them to visit Samaritans, who claimed to be as much Israelites as Jesus’ own people, the Jews. When he says, then, that they are to go only “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he’s using language that his countrymen used to define themselves over against the other inhabitants of the area.
That gives us a clue as to what the prohibition is about. He is aware how deep the prejudice against other ethnicities runs among all the inhabitants of the area. Gentiles and Samaritans, as groups, were apt to be as suspicious of Jews (and of each other) as Jews were of them. He himself has crossed the boundaries a couple of times (the centurion and the Gadarene demoniacs in chapter 8). But he is not going to make his green recruits deal with these complexities so early in their work. Later on, he will countermand this order. But, for now, he will not make their mission more difficult than it already is.
Because not every one will be happy with it?
Yes. In fact, he sends them off with a warning: there are wolves out there. You’ll have to be “wise as serpents”—attentive to your surroundings and careful about how you proceed. But, at the same time, they have to remain true to their commission, which is to do good, not harm—”harmless as doves.” That’s a hard bit of hybridization to bring off.
And then he launches into a discourse on the dangers they must expect.

Next up: JESUS’ MESSAGE WILL PROVE DEEPLY DIVISIVE (10:16-42)

MATTHEW, 15: A DECISIVE BREAK WITH THE RIGHTEOUS (9:18-34)

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Here we have the last of the series of miracle stories that began in chapter 8. Matthew’s treatment of these stories is different from the parallel versions of Mark and Luke. He doesn’t offer much in the way of vivid details. He seldom refers to the awe of the spectators—an important element in most miracle stories. What he does focus on is the way in which these miracles create tension and confrontation with the very pious and the religious authorities. Jesus doesn’t stick carefully to the rules of religion as they were taught and practiced around him. Instead, he places acts of love above acts of sacrifice or the avoidance of impurity. The miracles we now come to, concluding the series, continue the same emphasis and also raise the stakes, as it were. The two most contagious sources of impurity in Jesus’ world were death and menstruation, and in the first story he gets polluted by both—at least according to normal reckoning,.
Oh yes! Raising Jairus’ daughter and healing the woman with the hemorrhage.
Yes—though the name “Jairus” isn’t actually found in Matthew; we borrow it from the more vivid accounts in Mark and Luke. (Once again, Matthew shows little interest in telling “a good story.”) And the passage (9:18-26), as you see, is a double story, with one miracle sandwiched, as it were, inside the other. The longer story, with which it begins and ends, is about death—the single worst source of pollution according to Torah.
It begins with a prominent citizen who is presumably Jewish (though the phrase “of the synagogue” in NRSV here was added by the translators and isn’t found in the Greek text). He tells Jesus that his daughter is dead and pleads with him to come, lay his hand on her, and bring her back to life. This will taint Jesus with the impurity that affects everything under the same roof as the corpse,. Nonetheless, he goes without question.
When Jesus reaches the house, however, even before entering it, he announces that the girl is not dead but sleeping. When the mourners react with derision, he has them all turned out of the house. He goes in, apparently alone, and takes her by the hand, whereupon she gets up.
Was she not really dead?
The people who had actually seen her were quite certain that she was. Jesus’ insistence that she wasn’t does curious things to the story. It makes a claim to supernatural knowledge, but it also has the effect of questioning the purity issue. If there was no corpse, there could be no question of his having become impure by entering the house and touching a dead body. Perhaps the statement is deliberately ambiguous. Later Christians, at least, would speak of death itself as “sleep.” But in any case, the declaration that she wasn’t dead creates another awkward situation for Jesus’ critics, comparable to his healing of the paralytic after being criticized for granting him forgiveness. How do you figure out whether someone who has just raised a dead girl to life, while claiming that she wasn’t really dead, has incurred impurity? For that matter, would you rather admit that she wasn’t dead, thus reducing the magnitude of the miracle, or insist that she was and make his exploit all the more amazing?
The intervening story works a little differently. The “leader” who asked Jesus to raise his daughter was at the peak of the social ladder, but the woman with the hemorrhage shouldn’t even have been out in public. A menstruating woman was invariably impure and conveyed that impurity to whatever and whoever she touched. This woman was ignoring purity restrictions in her desperate search for healing. And it was a serious offense for her to touch the teacher’s garment, rendering him unclean even though he would not know about it. But Jesus almost shrugs it off in Matthew’s abbreviated version: “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” As in the story of cleansing the leper at the beginning of chapter 8, Jesus has once against reversed the contagion of purity/impurity. He is in no danger of “catching” impurity: with him it’s purity that is contagious.
He’s had quite a day since getting back from Gadara. All this on top of healing the paralytic on the Sabbath and associating with tax collectors and sinners and letting his disciples off the hook on fasting.
Yes, and it’s not over. But, at least, he’s finally succeeded in getting from the shore to the place where he lives. “When he entered the house” is equivalent to saying “When he got home.” But he still has a couple of blind men asking for help. Like the woman with the hemorrhage, their healing turns on the question of faith. But this time, Jesus makes it explicit that the faith is placed in him and in his power to heal—a stronger assertion of his own role than he has expressed before. And despite his ordering them to keep silent, they spread the news and thus intensify the rivalry between Jesus and the existing religious hierarchy.
And, finally, we get one more miracle, followed by a formal declaration of hostilities. Jesus exorcises a demon that has deprived a man of speech. Matthew, for once, takes the trouble here to note that the crowds are amazed. And it’s the last straw for the pious. Jesus is undermining the standards of religious correctness—and becoming immensely popular in the process. But how can they attack him when he is doing so much good? The battle line has to be drawn. Since they’re convinced that his whole message and ministry is undermining religion, it is a fairly short step to conclude that Jesus is an evil influence, in league with “the ruler of demons.” Thus, they also reassure themselves that they are on the side of God.
This is how religious fights often work and why they tend to turn deadly. We human beings in our religious mode can accomplish great good, but it is treacherously easy to identify ourselves and our way of doing things with God—as if any human being or human institution could aspire to the perfection that belongs to God. Indeed, from Jesus’ perspective, as Matthew presents it, we are quite apt to misunderstand the nature of God’s perfection, which has to do not with accuracy of belief or religious practice, but with the intensity and generosity of God’s love. Remember how he described God’s perfection in Matthew 5:43-48—making rain fall on the just and on the unjust.

Next up: PREPARING THE INNER CIRCLE OF DISCIPLES (9:35-10:16)

MATTHEW, 14: FROM MIRACLES TO OPEN CONFLICT (9:1-17)

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We’ve seen how Matthew, in chapter 8, tells stories of Jesus’ miracles in such a way as to emphasize not just how great Jesus’ power was but also the way he transgressed expectations—the expectations of religious leaders among Jesus’ own people, the expectations of Jesus’ disciples (who are left wondering just who he really is), and the expectations of the pagan folk of Gadara, who apparently felt that the cost for exorcising a couple of violent homeless men was much too high.
He’s putting himself in a dangerous position, isn’t he?
It looks that way. And Matthew implies that it was an inevitable consequence of his basic message, the message embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, with its blessings on the merciful, its command to love one’s enemies, its indifference to normal human anxieties. And now chapter 9 continues this series of miracles, leading finally to a radical rupture with the established religious leadership. That little expedition to Gadara on the far shore of the Sea of Galilee was a kind of prologue to more extensive travels that will fill the middle of Matthew’s Gospel. But, for now, Jesus is back in “his own town” (9:1). You get the sense that he’s just stepped out of the boat onto the shore when he sees “some people” carrying a paralyzed man on a cot and he himself initiates the interaction that follows.
And that’s not how I remember the story. I thought he was indoors in the middle of a crowd and they actually had to open a hole in the roof and let the cot down on ropes!
Yes, once again Mark tells a much livelier version of this story (2:1-12), and it’s the one that irresistibly sticks in our minds. But in Matthew’s time as much as in ours, people who retell a story typically have a purpose in mind that necessarily shapes the telling. And Matthew’s purpose, here, is to talk about tensions and conflicts as much as miraculous healings
He seems to be feeding the tensions! Why does Jesus start off by forgiving the man’s sins? He doesn’t even know him. And it’s his faith but that of the people carrying him that catches Jesus’ attention. Where does this sudden focus on sin come from?
People often make an association between sin and sickness. In our time, we’re more to start with sins of diet or stress or (lack of) exercise. In other periods, any sort of sin would do. I wonder if Jesus is saying, in effect, that we always have to deal with the deeper causes as well as the symptoms. Yet, it’s interesting that forgiving the sins doesn’t, in itself, heal the paralysis. Maybe the point, then, is that people require all sorts of healing and we shouldn’t be misled into thinking that the physical healing is the only important kind. Forgiveness is as much an expression of God’s love as bodily healing.
In any case, Matthew has stripped the story down in a way that focuses it squarely on Jesus’ remission of the man’s sins and the outraged reaction of the scribes who are present. The story of the healing that follows is a miracle in its own right, but it also (and this may be even more important) makes it difficult for the authorities to criticize Jesus’ granting of forgiveness.
But their reaction seems perfectly reasonable to them, since only God can truly forgive sins; there is no provision for a human being to do it. He’s violating the religion he shares with them. So how can Jesus call their reaction “evil”?
Matthew may be suggesting that their religious system is more important to them than the good done to the man by hearing a message of forgiveness. Certainly, when Jesus does go on to heal the man’s paralysis, it’s a direct challenge to them, their criticism, and, in effect, their authority. And, to make matters worse, Matthew, for once, also includes the traditional note of amazement at the end of the story—something that’s routine in Mark’s Gospel, but not in Matthew’s: “When the crowds saw it, they were filled with awe, and they glorified God who had given such authority to human beings.” The point? Jesus has public opinion on his side, which makes the scribes’ position more awkward and also raises the stakes and ultimately precipitates a public rift.
I suppose that hanging out with tax collectors and sinners isn’t going to help, either.
Probably not. In chapter 8, Jesus turned down a scribe who wanted to be part of his inner circle. In this chapter, he summons one Matthew, a tax collector to join that very group. What does Matthew know of Jesus at this point? What sort of disciple would he prove to be? Why does Jesus summon him without warning? These are questions we’ll consider further when we come to the formal listing of the Twelve in chapter 10.
But we can at least say that calling Matthew immediately puts Jesus in touch with a whole group of interested hearers who might never have dared approach him on their own—the tax collectors and sinners that he has dinner with at Matthew’s house. Who were these people? “Sinners” is such a broad term that it could include almost anybody who was less than rigorous in piety. Tax collectors, for their part, were further suspect because of their work. Taxes were collected on a system that rewarded those who collected as much as possible, making them the natural enemies of everyone who had to pay the taxes. But, also, they had a practice of going into people’s houses and poking their noses and hands into all sorts of things. They could easily become unclean in the process and then carry that uncleanness into the houses of other people, such as the Pharisees, who were trying to maintain the highest standards of purity. It’s no wonder the Pharisees reproach Jesus’ disciples about it. They feel they can no longer trust his commitment to purity.
So he tells them to go soak their heads! He’s not trying to avoid conflict, is he?
Not at all. But he’s not just being insulting. He’s setting forth a basic principle. The love of God brings forgiveness to sinners and healing to the sick. It may seem meaningless, then, to the righteous and healthy—or to those who conceive themselves as such. But a suggestion remains hanging in the air that the righteous might be mistaken about themselves. There is a suggestion, too, that the religious leadership has misunderstood the God on whose behalf they claim to act. If they are more concerned about sacrifice (and the purity code that governed access to it) than about mercy, they have God quite wrong. Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 to make it clear that this is no new-fangled notion of his own.
What about fasting? Even the disciples of John the Baptist are upset about the lack of that among Jesus’ disciples.
Since fasting was broadly accepted as a basic expression of piety, it must have seemed bizarre that Jesus and his disciples weren’t practicing it. And Jesus has the effrontery to say that his ministry is a wedding feast, the exact opposite of fasting. His teaching won’t be conventional. It’s a proclamation of “good news,” which changes everything. How strange to read the passage about patches and wineskins here after Jesus’ assertion in the Sermon on the Mount that he wasn’t changing anything at all (5:17-20)! He is changing nothing. And he is changing everything. And neither he nor Matthew intends to give us a detailed explanation of how to work this out, though he does expect that fasting will reappear after he is taken away from his disciples.

Next up: A DECISIVE BREAK WITH THE RIGHTEOUS (13:18-38)

MATTHEW, 13: MORE TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:18-9:1)

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I see that there are more miracle stories coming up in this chapter, but the next few verses—the problem of the two wannabe disciples—feel like an interruption. Actually, one of the two is already referred to as a disciple! Why is Jesus discouraging them?
It’s not an easy passage to figure out. I notice that the passage begins (vs. 18) with Jesus wanting to escape the crowds and giving orders to cross over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. So, these are, in effect, not general requests to become some kind of disciple, but specific requests to go with Jesus as he leaves Capernaum. In fact, as you noticed, one of them is already a disciple and can only be asking to go along on the new adventure.
Jesus is not actually rejecting these people from discipleship as such. We sometimes assume that discipleship was a single category. But Jesus clearly had disciples of more than one kind. Some were folk who continued their daily lives, but took his teaching seriously (like the crowds at the Sermon on the Mount!) and came to hear him when they could. Other disciples, like Peter and Andrew, James and John, have been spending much of their time with him in Capernaum. But it’s their own hometown, where he has been living since 4:3. They’re also part of a developing group who will soon take up a wandering lifestyle alongside Jesus. Indeed, the impending voyage across the lake is a kind of preview of that period, which will begin in earnest in chapter 10.
The scribe who wants to go with Jesus is already recognized as a religious expert, by virtue of his learning and his office, who now wants to learn Jesus’ interpretation of the religion of Israel. But can he really give up his dignity and his social importance in Capernaum to go on the road? Jesus thinks not. The other disciple here has been listening to Jesus and wants to hear more but he has family ties that he’s not prepared to break. Jesus says, “You won’t be able to join this expedition.”
But aren’t they still being rejected as disciples?
I always read the passage this way in the past. But I no longer think so. Jesus is saying to these two, “No, this sacrifice is not for you.” It’s also worth noting that Matthew presents the inner group of disciples as people whom Jesus himself has picked. He initiates the relationship, not the would-be disciple. We read about the calling of the first of these folk in 4:18-22, and we’ll get a full list later on in 10:1-4. But this doesn’t mean that the other kind of discipleship is of no importance. The specially “called” have a particular role in Matthew’s story: to learn, yes, to assist Jesus, yes; but also to make mistakes, to misunderstand, and, finally, to betray or deny or desert Jesus. Theirs isn’t the only pattern of discipleship, though it is critical to Matthew’s narrative. They are there as much for the sake of us, the readers, as anything else.
So it’s this inner group alone who witness the stilling of the storm?
Yes. And notice that they don’t know what to make of it. The inner circle were not necessarily the most perceptive people that Jesus came across. Jesus gives most of his high praise to people he encounters only tangentially, like the centurion we just met (8:5-13). The disciples often get things wrong, which gives Jesus a chance to teach them something more, which they may then misunderstand in some new way. Their response to the stilling of the storm is part amazement—as is proper when you’ve just witnessed a miracle—but mostly, at base, incomprehension: “Huh! What was all that about? How did he do that? Who is he, really?”
Then they come to Gadara and Jesus gets into trouble in Gentile territory as easily as Jewish.
He’s good at it, isn’t he? He can rile almost anybody up. They must be out on the outskirts of the town in this story. Burials weren’t allowed within ancient city limits. It’s an uncanny place with nobody around except a few swineherds and a couple of demoniacs. Greek tombs were often above-ground structures like small temples or houses. It sounds as if they may have broken into one of these tombs and are living in it. And they’re a major public problem. Jesus exorcises them at the very high cost of a large number of pigs, belonging to unnamed citizens of Gadara. (Had there been a Jewish crowd present, they would have thought it perfectly appropriate for the demons to drown a bunch of unclean animals; it might even have seemed a good joke,)
One might have thought the Gadarenes would have found it worth the price to have these two public menaces restored to a peaceable frame of mind. Yet, it comes as no surprise that the citizens beg Jesus to leave. He’s not only expensive; he’s unpredictable and far too powerful.
The story isn’t altogether different from the way Jesus trespasses purity boundaries in the Jewish community. These Gentile demoniacs have been pushed away from the respectable society into the uncanny territory of the dead. All societies, all cultures, have purity rules that serve, among other things, to keep some people on the margins and confirm the social standing of others. The story continues Jesus’ insistence that God loves the unloved. But this love isn’t cost-free in any culture; it disrupts familiar expectations and can cost the respectable more than they want to give.
And then Jesus just goes home to Capernaum again. Isn’t that the very place he was trying to get away from?
Yes, the trip to Gadara seems to have been just a dress rehearsal for the wandering life he’ll soon take up in earnest. But his return lands him in an even tenser series of confrontations that will end in a decisive break with the local religious authorities.

Next up: OPEN CONFRONTATION (9:1-17)

ANOTHER STORY

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We’ve just heard a long and demanding story [Mark 15], one that looks deeply into human evil and God’s self-giving love of humanity and the ways those two collide. It’s a story that’s hard to add anything to by way of preaching, but, this year, I’m going to offer you an alternate story, one that turns out quite differently but may give us some help in understanding the one we just heard a little better.
The story comes from a Czech poet of the last century, Milovan Bureš, and it begins in a village church, where:

The gentle Mother,
complaining in the darkness of the church,
descended from the altar and passed through candle light.
Like thrifty peasants do,
she took off her sandals
when she came to the edge of the village.

In that country of rocks and rivulets,
where the azure was cut up by swallows’ wings,
she met her son there in the field.
The blood on his hips had long gone rusty,
and the wounds by thorns pierced the mother’s heart.
Without the aureole, her face a little wrinkled,
between the creases of her dress the fragrance
of the glades,
in the shade of the cross, the widow was seated.

“Sweet son of mine,
they jailed my heart in stone,
and I would like to live again.
Why ever is your and my plight
so often engraved in stone,
and at my feet cold candlesticks placed?
I wish I were like other women,
with joy as part of me, not only suffering.
Bare-footed, I would like to step on the primrose.”

“Sweet mother of mine,
I wish that not my bood but love would save humankind.
For is it not enough
that in their hands grain waits for salvation,
and that its blossom bears the whole heaven’s weight?
May this mouldering stone fall off our shoulders,
and towards blue skies the captive heart be set free.
May all the statues come out of the dark
and may all the saints be changed to people
from that land of butterflies and forget-me-nots.

The pious villagers discover that their Virgin has gone missing and rush out to look for her.

Meanwhile, she, in a robe of ripening rye,
her hair uncombed, unwashed,
after the simple village people’s habit,
rushes toward the brook, its waters chilly in the morning.
In her fingers she holds wind, like a comb,
running it through her long hair. . . . .

They did not recognize her as they rushed past,
they saw only their meadows and their fields,
and by the brook, a peasant maid—
a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave. . . .
They did not recognize her.

At length, the searchers return without success, but news spreads that
Some lads who grazed goats on the slopes,
as it were, found Mother of God.
She was well and in good health.

They tell their story to the doubting elders:
“Well, as we grazed our goats there in the fields,
there she was, sitting amidst the farmhands relishing buttermilk.
Each of them shared his bit with her.
Like on the altar, her hair was of gold,
only in place of the halo she wore a flowered scarf,
and she was wiping sweat off her brow,
as if she’d been with us for ages.”

All the elders can do is mourn over what they have lost. But the story concludes:
Mother of God, cousin of rowan-tree, clear as a flame,
has found her Christ
in these lads full of life and strength.
What use would she have for the dark church
with its candles’ tears,
if now all around she saw the sunflowers agleam.
The good mother of springs and light,
without whom, it’s said, not even daises will reach bloom,
lives on in our midst, eternal.

It’s a happier ending, isn’t it? And it’s an attractive story. The saints, for a moment, become people and simple working folk become saints. We go out of the church to a warm spring day. And we humans are at peace not only with one another but with the whole world—the goats, the sunflowers, the primroses, the daisies, the cold water from the brook, the wind. Mary is as close to us as nature itself.

But right at the heart of it all is that question Mary asks Jesus, “Why ever is it that your and my plight is engraved in stone?” And Jesus’ answer: “I wish that not my blood but love would save humankind.” Yes, how deeply we wish that. What attracts us in this story is a kind of picture of heaven, where harm and hatred and cruelty and suffering and alienation are things of the past.
I believe we were starting to think, not so long ago, that we ourselves were coming within sight of such a world. A world of democracy, respecting the sacredness of human rights, discovering a new sense of justice toward the creation as well as toward one another. The whole world has had a rude awakening from that dream. Not that the dream is dead, not that it is no longer worth working toward. It is still the goal of every loving heart. But we see now that the path will be more rugged and perilous than we had thought.

And God, confronted with this reality, does what? This is what the Passion Story today has been telling us. It’s not enough for God to join us only in the moments of sunshine and flowers and butterflies. If God is going to be with us in our world, God has to be with us even in the worst that our world deals out. If God is to be with us in such a way, the Passion story becomes inevitable.
The other story that I set alongside it, the one that ends with Mary watching over our human life and joy—there is no direct path that can lead us, once for all, to that one. But hang onto it, anyway. It is an image of heaven, an image of the life Jesus wants to invite us into even as he walks the Way of the Cross. The goal of the Passion Story is not the cross, but life lived in the power of God’s love.

This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, 2019 at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. It draws heavily on Milovan Bureš’s poem translated by Hilda Hearne as “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” I have taken it from the booklet to the Supraphon CD of Cantatas by Bohuslav Martinů, performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Lukáš Vasilek. Copyrights by Ms. Hearne (2016) and Supraphon (1993).
Incidentally, Martinů’s music for this piece is wonderful! I highly recommend this recording.

MATTHEW, 12: SOME TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:1-17)

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After Jesus finishes his great Sermon, he comes down from the mountain—followed now by crowds of people—and begins performing a series of miracles. Matthew had mentioned earlier (4:23-25) that Jesus was healing and exorcising people, but there were no actual miracle stories until now. And they are odd miracle stories.
Yes, looking ahead, I notice something odd in the story of the Gadarene swine (vss. 28-34). I remember it as being a longer and more detailed story than this. And I thought there was just one demoniac, but in Matthew there are two.
Good observation! Mark and Luke both narrate this same episode and, frankly, make a more gripping story of it. Matthew doesn’t seem very interested in the human details here, and the way he uses two demoniacs in his version instead of one is rather like a story-teller in English starting off with “There were a couple of . . . ” The individuals aren’t important in themselves; they’re types. Matthew also keeps his telling of the story (and of other miracle stories, too) quite brief and shapes the stories in a way that underlines the troublesome quality of Jesus’ actions—troublesome from the point of view of the very pious and the religious authorities.
Why would they be troublesome?
For a variety of reasons, many of them centering on questions of purity. In the first story—the cleansing of a leper—Jesus touches the man, thereby violating the most basic principle of purity systems, namely that impurity always trumps purity. That’s why lepers were exiled from their communities—so that they wouldn’t make everybody else unclean. Touching a leper makes you dirty, but it doesn’t work the other way. You can’t make a leper clean by touch. Except that Jesus can and does! With him, the “contagion” flows the other way; he makes cleansing contagious, not dirt. Interestingly, though, Jesus doesn’t seem to want to make a public issue of this. He tells the cleansed leper to keep matters quiet and just go to the priest to perform the ritual that will certify that he’s no longer a leper and can be welcomed back into the community.
So Jesus isn’t going to abide by the rules. But does he really expect to go unnoticed?
Perhaps not. He certainly doesn’t avoid awkward situations in this chapter. But breaking the rules isn’t the point in itself. It’s an expression of his message that God loves everybody, even the unclean and sinful. Even Gentiles—a potentially divisive claim in a Jewish community that had been subject to the domination of Gentile empires for centuries.
Gentiles like the centurion in Capernaum?
Exactly. It’s interesting that Luke also tells this story (7:1-10), but carefully buffers the interaction between Jesus and the centurion by saying that the centurion sent local Jewish leaders to plead with Jesus on his behalf rather than coming himself. Matthew, however, (who in many ways seems the most self-consciously Jewish of the four gospel writers) brings the two men into direct interaction with each other. Jesus even volunteers to go to the centurion’s house. To understand how unsettling this suggestion was, just re-read the story of Peter’s visit to the house of the Gentile Cornelius, also a centurion, in Acts 10. Peter hated the idea of entering a Gentile house so much that he had to be given a special revolution to persuade him to do it. And the revelation had to be repeated three times just so he’d be sure God really meant it.
Jesus not only grants the centurion’s plea for help. He announces to all within hearing distance that this Gentile has just shown more faith than any one Jesus has met in the Jewish community. Jesus even has the temerity to suggest that people like this man might well replace some of the less faithful of Israel in the Kingdom of Heaven. Hard words for his hearers! It’s like suggesting to modern Christian that some non-believers may get better seats at the heavenly banquet than they will. So Jesus isn’t evading controversial issues. He’s quite willing to address them as occasion warrants.
I see that there are some other big miracle stories ahead—Stilling of the Storm, Gadarene Demoniacs, the Paralytic—but the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is a disappointment. It’s so short it’s barely a story.
I agree. Even by Matthew’s standards, it seems like a nub, not a real story. Still, there’s more to it than first meets the eye. It’s not a flashy miracle and it’s done in private, not on the street. But Jesus’ touching of this woman is problematic in its own way. She could have been in a state of contagious impurity—something that menstruation occasioned. There seems to have been a widespread expectation that male religious leaders would avoid contact with women outside their own households—if only as a defense against becoming accidentally unclean.
Of course, there’s also an element in the story that can irritate modern readers—the phrase “and she got up and began serving him.” Some see it as one more reduction of a woman to a servant’s role. I always wondered if she shouldn’t at least have gotten a bit of recuperation time. Perhaps part of the point is that the healing was so complete that it was as if she’d never been sick at all. But, as I grow older and experience a bit more infirmity myself. I find myself reading it another way. Now I think, “Yes, exactly.” When I’ve been under the weather and unable to work, this is exactly what I want—I want to be out working in the garden. Maybe in honor of having a guest and a miraculous healing, I’d have gone a step further: “and he got up and served tea in the garden.”
Now, we’re not through with this series of troublesome miracles. But the scope of the trouble is about to broaden out. It isn’t just the pious and the religious authorities of Israel that Jesus is disturbing. He’ll be doing it to his own disciples and to some neighboring pagans, too.

Next up: MORE TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:18-9:1)