Daily Liturgy and Scripture

Jesus continues to turn the system of Law and purity on its head, but he does not miss the opportunity to tell the listeners to "first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye." This would have been particularly poignant to the Pharisees, who specialized in telling others the way they should live through the Law. This gave that group a kind of control over how to live and that's not what Jesus was teaching. He wanted to leave control and judgement with God alone, and keep our focus on what God is doing instead of the actions of others.

The connection Jesus challenges us to have with God is radical. In the vision of Jesus, God is close, providing our needs, even seeing what we need. This is not a God who is far away, but a God who is close enough to be part of our lives.

Jesus intends to show us the way into an interior life with God that will govern our exterior lives with others. In that approach to life, we are turned toward God and can forgive others; we are looking for the Kingdom now and building it for the future.

Jesus's Sermon on the Mount is a tough pill to swallow. He is taking the Law, which was probably a heavy burden for many at the time already, and making it worse. Why? So that nobody can be righteous? Of course not. Those who want to make themselves right by rigid adherence to the Law are in the wrong kingdom. In the Kingdom of Jesus, following Jesus gets the life of the Law and the Life in the Spirit together, and that is transformational.

Jesus declares those blessed who would have been among the lost, lonely, and left out. They do. Not look triumphant, but such is the case in the Kingdom he brings. Those who reside in the Kingdom of Jesus are oriented in a different way, and the life of Jesus remains our true way.

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." Jesus spent more time talking about the Kingdom of God than anything else, and it started with him. To build a Kingdom like that, you need to start in a different way. How did Jesus start? By rejecting easy power and pride. He chose instead to walk a long road to suffering, but the Kingdom he brought was worthy of God because of its slow coming.

God’s plan was unfolding with Jesus, but it included other characters. John was central to that, because he began preparing the stage for Jesus to advance. It still wasn’t a perfect world for the message that Jesus would bring, but John would bring some of the first apostles along, and performing Jesus’s baptism set an example for all of us to follow.

Not only is prophecy being fulfilled in Jesus’s coming, but the Exodus story is also being remembered with this series of events. Just as Moses’s birth caused Pharaoh to kill the generation in which Moses was born, so did the same thing happen with children Jesus’s age in an attempt to stop God’s moving. In both cases, God is enacting a rescue play for humanity, but Jesus is expanding that far beyond what Moses did.

Jesus didn’t come to maintain the status quo, and his birth is no exception. The scandal of his birth was small, but it set the stage for what was to come. He would disrupt and upend the thinking of many, and his parents both got an early taste of that.

Let us never forget that Jesus was from an earthly family, and that family was not made of superheroes. It is full of scoundrels and murderers, cheats and cowards. From that family line, the Son came to show us what life could really be like. Only God could do that!