Living Words

by William Klock

 

In today’s Gospel St. Matthew tells us that Jesus and his disciples left Jewish Galilee for the district of Tyre and Sidon.  While there were plenty of Jews living in the district of Tyre and Sidon, this was Canaanite country—pagan country—outside the bounds of Israel.  I expect they kept themselves to the countryside and away from the cities crowded with unclean gentiles.  That, and Mark’s telling of this story suggests Jesus was taking a little bit of a holiday from the crowds that followed him everywhere in Galilee.  So Jesus and the disciples found a quiet place to stay, but there’s no peace and quiet for Jesus.  Last week the devil found him on his forty-day retreat in the wilderness.  Now a local Canaanite woman hears he’s in the neighbourhood and tracks him down to the place where they were staying.  As Matthew remembers it, he writes that:

 

Remembering what happened that day and how Jesus and how he and the other disciples responded to her, Matthew tells us that Jesus said nothing at all to her.  And for their part, the disciples prodded Jesus saying, Send her away!  She’s shouting after us.

These are the same disciples that shooed away the little children when they approached Jesus, so their reaction doesn’t seem very surprising or out of character.  After all, they were here to get away from all the people and here’s this pagan, gentile woman shouting at them.  It probably does seem a little odd, however, that Jesus would ignore the woman.  But writing decades later about what happened that day, if we listen closely, we do get a sense of how the gospel had softened Matthew’s heart.  Back then she was just an annoying gentile disturbing their day.  But looking back, Matthew describes her plight with compassion.  Her daughter was in a bad way, he says.  That’s how he usually describes the hurting people who came to Jesus for mercy.  Her daughter, the woman cried out, was demon-possessed.  A terrible thing.  And yet the key to the story is in Matthew’s detail that she was a Canaanite.

 

That’s the problem.  Think about how we often struggle to feel compassion for people who put themselves in bad situations or do dumb and irresponsible things and then suffer the consequence.  Play with fireworks and you might blow your fingers off.  Do drugs and you’ll end up a junkie strung out on the street.  Sleep around and you’ll end up with an STD.  Lie with the dogs and you’ll get up with fleas.  We have various ways of describing this.  “Play stupid games; win stupid prizes” comes to mind.  The Bible has a saying too: You reap what you sow.  Most Jews would look at this Canaanite woman with a demon-possessed daughter with that kind of attitude.  If you worship false gods—remember that Paul says those false gods are just demons in disguise—if you worship false gods, it’s your own fault if you or your children end up possessed by demons.  You reap what you sow.

 

One of the patron gods of Sidon was Eshmun, a Phoenician god of healing.  He had a great temple in the city.  I expect that this woman had taken her daughter there many times to pray to the idol there and to offer it sacrifices in the hope that it would heal her daughter.  Little did she know that her worship of this demonic false god was just the sort of thing that brought demonic possession on her daughter.  No wonder she didn’t get better.  But now she’s heard about Jesus.  Even people in her pagan country were talking about him.  She heard her Jewish neighbours tell how he had delivered people from demons.  She also heard them say that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of David, that somehow, through him or in him or something like that, the God of Israel had come to visit and deliver his people.  She’d never prayed to the God of Israel before.  That would be dumb.  She was a Canaanite.  She wasn’t his problem.  She had her own gods.  Plus, from her perspective, the God of Israel couldn’t be any better than her gods.  His people hadn’t heard him speak for hundreds of years.  And he allowed them to be oppressed by the Romans.  He didn’t sound very powerful—or even very present.  Gentiles like her mocked the faith that the Jews put in him.  “Where’s your God?” they jeered.  But as she listened to the stories about Jesus, it sounded like the God of Israel was finally waking up.  Through this “son of David”, through this “Messiah”, the promises he had made centuries before were starting to come true.  If her gods wouldn’t help her, maybe she should go and find this Jesus.  Yahweh wasn’t her god or even the god of her people, but maybe in Jesus he would show her mercy.  And so she went looking for Jesus and when she found him, there he was talking with his friends.  She decided it was best to be respectful.  Jews—especially rabbis—avoided contact with gentiles.  They thought people like her were unclean.  Plus she was a woman and it wasn’t appropriate for a woman to be too forward with a man who wasn’t family.  And so she called out from a distance.  Again, Matthew writes: Have pity on me, Lord, son of David!

And to her dismay—although I doubt she was surprised—Jesus ignored her.  But that wasn’t going to stop her.  Maybe if she could annoy him enough, he’d just giver her what she wanted.  That’s more or less how the pagans thought it worked with the gods.  Think of our Ash Wednesday gospel and Jesus’ warning about heaping up words with long prayers.  That’s what the gentiles do, he warns.  So she cries out some more at which point the disciples, who had been ignoring her so far, turn to Jesus and plead with him: Send her away!  She’s shouting after us.  And finally Jesus responds—but to them, not to her.  Matthew says that Jesus answered, I was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Ouch.  Where’s all that “For God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten son” stuff that Jesus says in John’s Gospel?  Well, we’ll come back to that.  But first, now that Jesus has acknowledged her presence if not actually spoken directly to her, the woman feels comfortable drawing nearer and speaking to Jesus.  Matthew says that she came and threw herself down at his feet.  “Lord, she said, “please help me.”  And Jesus answered, “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

Wait.  Did Jesus just call her a dog?  But Jesus is just making a point.  He’s reiterating what was the normal, common view that Jews had of gentiles.  They were “dogs”.  There were two types of people in the world: Jews.  And everyone else who wished they were a Jew.  At least that’s sort of how the Jews saw things.  The Jews were God’s people: chosen, called, especially loved.  They were the people who lived with the living God in their midst.  Or, at any rate, they used to be…and they were sure they would be once again.  That was the difference.  The gentiles, they were unchosen, unclean, and unloved.  They worshipped idols and they did evil things.  They were dogs.  And when they talked about dogs, the weren’t talking about cute little lap dogs or friendly pets.  They were talking about feral dogs that roamed the streets at night eating garbage.  That’s how Jews saw gentiles.  In contrast, they we’re the Lord’s beloved children.

 

And the woman understands all of this.  She already knew she had no right to be there.  She had no claim on the God of Israel or his Messiah.  I know, Lord, she says to Jesus, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.

I expect Jesus finally smiled when he heard that.  He wasn’t really a jerk.  He said and did all of this for a reason.  It was another one of his acted prophecies that said more about his mission and his ministry than words ever could.  So having made his point, Jesus replied, “O woman, great is your faith!  Let it be as you wish.  And Matthew adds, And her daughter was healed from that moment.  Maybe Matthew just knew that this is what happened because this is what always happened, but I suspect that the report got back to Jesus and the disciples.  Maybe the woman brought her healed daughter to meet Jesus.  Who knows.  The point is that this woman saw the God of Israel at work in Jesus, she came in faith, and even though she had no claim on him, the God of Israel healed her daughter.

 

But back the question: Why would Jesus treat this woman this way?  Why would he call her a dog?  What’s with all this about not giving the children’s bread to the dogs?  Didn’t God so love the world that he sent his son?  He did.  But here’s the thing: remember that Matthew wrote his Gospel for a Jewish audience and a big part of his agenda was to show them that Jesus really was their Messiah and that he’d come in fulfilment of their prophecies.  In doing that, Matthew reminds us that Jesus didn’t jump into history to save humanity and the world at any old random time and place.  There’s been a tendency in the Church to abstract Jesus’ ministry, to separate theology and story, doctrine and history.  He is the Saviour of the world after all, and so we start thinking that if he’d wanted to he could have come at any time and any place and any people to do his saving work, but in doing that we forget that—no—he came and he had to come where and when and to whom he did because Jesus is part of a bigger story.  Jesus of Montréal couldn’t have saved the word.  Jesus of Nazareth—because he was Jesus of Nazareth—could.

 

This is why I say that this was sort of an acted-out prophecy.  I expect Jesus planned to help this woman from the start, but what he says and does here stresses a point that will be vital to his own people and that, ultimately, will be vital as the gospel goes out from Judea to the whole world.  And that point is that Jesus reveals the faithfulness of the God of Israel.  He does that by first ignoring this gentile woman, then he refuses her request and calls her a dog.  But maybe the most remarkable thing—and it highlights that he really was a prophet—is that his refusal of her request ends up prompting her to speak that vital truth when she says, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”  Take note: The dogs don’t eat until the master’s children have eaten.  And, Brothers and Sisters, just so with the gospel.  The gentiles can’t eat until the children of Israel have first been fed.  The Lord must fulfil his promises to his people before those gospel crumbs can fall to the gentiles.  The amazing thing—and what this Canaanite woman couldn’t have realised at the time—was that those crumbs that fell under the table would, in time, become a great feast for the nations.  But what has drawn the nations to the table was seeing the faithfulness of the Lord to feed his own children, just as the household dogs only came to the table, because they saw the master feeding his beloved children and hoped to eat what was dropped.

 

We too often forget this.  It’s true that “God so loved the world”.  But we’ve forgotten the bigger story of which this is just one part: the story of the people of God that runs from Genesis to Revelation.  We tend to lift Jesus out of his historical and Jewish context, out of his First Century context, which means lifting him out of the story of Israel—which again means lifting him out of the Genesis to Revelation story.  And when we do that, we lose the very thing brought—that still brings—the nations to Jesus: the great theme of the faithfulness, the righteousness of God.  But  Matthew won’t let us do that.  Today he shows us Jesus right in the middle of the big story.

 

So it’s true what Jesus says to the woman here: He did not come to the gentiles.  Jesus came to Israel.  Jesus is Israel’s Messiah.  “But again,” we protest, “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son…”  Jesus said it.  Yes.  Jesus brings salvation for all, but we need to first understand that he does so as Israel’s Messiah.  Jesus stresses it right here: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

 

Jesus came to bring the kingdom that had been promised to Israel through Abraham and through David and he did it to fulfil the Lord’s promises—to show his faithfulness.  There were aspects of that kingdom that were new and different, but Jesus’ kingdom is built firmly and immovably on the covenant and the promises the Lord had made with Israel down through the ages from Abraham’s time.  He had called Israel to be his people.  He had promised to be their God.  He had rescued Israel and set her apart so that he might show her his blessings and give her his word and he did it all so that the world, the nations, the gentiles would see God in the midst of his people and be moved to come and give him glory.  And that’s exactly what Matthew wants us to see happening in our Gospel today.

 

We don’t know exactly what this Canaanite woman hard heard or what she knew.  There were enough Jews living in her part of the world that she might very well have known their stories and have heard about their prophets.  Knowing those things made it all the easier to mock the faith of the Jews.  They told these stories of past greatness.  They told stories about Abraham being led across the desert by their God.  They told stories about their deliverance from slavery in Egypt—about the plagues and the Red Sea—about the law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.  They told stories about how the Lord had conquered the land of Canaan for them.  And the Canaanites laughed: “Where’s your God now?”  Because the God of Israel wasn’t in the temple anymore.  He hadn’t spoken in centuries—if he had ever really spoken at all.  The stories were probably all made up anyway.  Consider that these pagans had their own stories about their own gods.  And, yes, the God of Israel was so much better in Israel’s stories.  He was just and righteous and loving.  Their gods were fickle and capricious and subject to all their passions.  You couldn’t trust them, which is why they heaped up long prayers.  But their gods didn’t speak and, as far as they could tell, neither did the God of Israel.

 

But then, he did speak and he did act.  The first gentiles to notice were the wise men from the East.  The God of Israel placed a star in the sky that guided them to his king, to his Messiah.  And as Jesus travelled around Galilee healing the sick, the lame, the blind, the deaf, and the demon possessed.  As Jesus preached good news and coming judgement, it got the attention of some of the gentiles.  There was that Roman centurion in Capernaum who went to Jesus to plead for the life of his son.  There was the demoniac in the Decapolis.  Jesus had cast his demons into a heard of pigs and now he was healed, sane, and proclaiming what the God of Israel had done.  And now this Canaanite woman.  She’d heard what the God of Israel was doing through Jesus.  In a world of idolatrous and demon-filled darkness, she had a glimpse of the light, and so she came to Jesus in faith—faith that this foreign God whom she’d once mocked, just might actually be for real and unlike any of the other gods her people had ever known.  And through Jesus the God of Israel healed her daughter, drove the darkness away, and sent her home with her faith confirmed.

 

Brothers and Sisters, the Canaanite woman, responding to that little glimpse of God’s light in the midst of the darkness, prefigures what God knew would happen with the gentiles once the light of his righteousness, his faithfulness began to blaze out from the cross and from the empty tomb.  This was his plan all along.  Because he loved the whole world, he sent his son take up the identity and mission of his people, Israel.  Through Jesus—and especially in his death and resurrection and through the judgement that Jesus brought to Judea—the God of Israel fulfilled the promises that he had made to his people.  And in those events, he made his glory known to the gentiles.  In Jesus, the gentiles saw a God unlike any god they had ever known: a God who speaks, a God who acts, a God who is present with his people, and most of all a God who is faithful and just.  And they abandoned their false gods, their demonic idols and through Jesus they bowed down, they submitted in faith, they gave their allegiance to the God of Israel.  And in that, God gathered the dogs and made them his children.  He took what was unclean, and washed it pure.  As Paul writes in our Epistle today: God did not call us to uncleanness, but to holiness.  By putting his glory on full display in Jesus, he has taken us away from our idols and our idolatry and made us holy.  Brothers and Sisters, the Canaanite woman is us—or the vast majority of us, at any rate.  An unclean, gentile dog now washed clean and made holy by Jesus, because we have seen the glory of God shining forth from him—from his cross, from his empty tomb, and from his ascension.  Our ancestors believed and we believe, because the good news about Jesus outshines every god, every demon, every philosophy, every ism, every idol.  And, Brothers and Sisters, my prayer is that—particularly during this season of Lenten fasting—that God by his word and by his Spirit would hold his glory before us and drive away all the distractions that we’ve let creep back into our view, that his glory would drive away every idol, whether that be worldly thinking, selfishness, politics, money, sex, entertainment—whatever our distractions might be and that we would fix our gaze and our grip solely on Jesus, the glory of his Father, and the life of his Spirit and that we would remember that he has delivered us from uncleanness and called us to holiness.

 

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, as you revealed your righteous glory to the Canaanite woman through Jesus, let your glory blaze forth as we recall the good news of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension.  Keep the gospel ever before us so that as we see your great glory, everything else, every idol, every false source of hope and security pales in comparison.  Cause us to let go of everything that we might hold tightly to you and you alone.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

Our Gospel today from Matthew picks up right after Jesus’ baptism by John.  Matthew tells us:

 

Picture the desert.  It was hot and dry and dusty as Jesus made his way from that fertile strip of land along the Jordan up into the Judean wilderness, into the place that the Old Testament calls Yeshiymon.  It means “devastation”.  It’s a land of sand and broken limestone and shingle.  Ridges of stratified rock twist here and turn there and everything in between them is filled with dust, jagged rocks, and broken stone shingles that can easily slide out from under foot.  Into that hot and desolate wilderness Jesus walked at the Spirit’s prompting.  I expect that when he first set out he found beauty in the desert.  I know from experience: There’s a lot of beauty in the desert when you first start out.  Look at that formation over there.  Look at those colours.  Look at the amazing sunset.  And then the clear night sky and the stars.  But eventually the heat gets to you.  Last summer Veronica and I rode the KVR from Penticton to Oliver and back.  On the way out we were admiring the lake and the wildflowers and the wonderful smells all around.  But it was over 100° that day and even after a stop for ice cream, the ride back to Penticton became a real slog.  We just wanted to get back and out of the heat.  We’ve had similar days on foot hiking down in the Anza-Borrego Desert.  Everything’s a wonder on the way out, but by the time you’re on the way back, it’s hot and your sweaty and your exhausted.  Your feet hurt from walking over rocks, and you’re tired and hungry and you just want to get back to the car.  I expect Jesus felt something like that the further he walked into that wilderness of devastation.  But as he put one foot in front of another, as he wiped the sweat from his face, he thought about his forefathers and their wilderness trek from the Red Sea to the promised land.   The Lord, the God of Israel, was about to do something very much like that again.  A new exodus.  And Jesus was at the centre of it.  Why did Jesus do this?  Why did he put himself in such a harsh and difficult space.  Why did he starve himself?  He did it to put himself in the place of his people who so badly needed and who so longed for deliverance.  Even if no one saw him in the wilderness, he was acting out a prophecy, repeating the life and story of his people and putting himself in their place.

 

Eventually Jesus found a spot in the middle of that wasteland, maybe with a little spring of water in the shade of one of those twisting ridges, maybe with a few bushes or even a palm tree for a bit of shade.  He arranged some rocks and scrub to make a (somewhat) comfortable place to sit or lie or to kneel in prayer.  And he communed with God, meditated on the scriptures, pondered the nature of his ministry which was just beginning, and prayed for wisdom to follow the path his Father had set before him.  And, I expect most of all, he prayed for the strength and grace to follow that path to its end.  He was preparing to take the role of Israel up himself, to be and to embody the people of God.  Where they had failed to be what the Lord had called them to be, Jesus would be faithful.  For years he had meditated on his own miraculous birth, he’d heard how people like Simeon and Anna, even is own mother, had seen in him the fulfilment of the Lord’s promises.  He meditated on the Scriptures and there he found his messianic calling and worked out what he was to do and even how it would end—and how that end would really be the beginning.  And if there was any doubt in his mind, it was driven away in his baptism.  Even though he had no need of repentance, he identified himself with his people as he waded into the Jordan to be baptised by John, and when he came up out of the river heaven had opened, the Spirit had descended upon him, and the Lord had spoken, “You are my beloved Son.”  That confirmed everything.  “My beloved son”: that was Israel’s title, given by the Lord in the exodus.  It’s what he’d called his people when he demanded that Pharoah let them go.  It’s what he called them later after they’d crossed the Red Sea and arrived at Mount Sinai.  Israel was the Lord’s beloved son.  So, now, like Moses, Jesus seeks the solitude of the wilderness for forty days and nights, waiting for the Lord to speak again to his son.  But instead, the devil comes to him.  I doubt Jesus was surprised by this.  After all, if Israel was tempted in the wilderness, he had to be tempted in the wilderness too.  Matthew writes:

 

He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and at the end of it he was famished.  Then the tempter approached him.  “If you really are God’s son,” he said, “command these stones to become bread.” (St. Matthew 4:2-3)

 

Again, Jesus is prophetically reenacting the story of his people, so this is what we should expect would happen.  They were tempted in the wilderness and so is he.  The devil leverages his hunger.  “The Lord has declared you to be his Son.  If you believe that’s who you really are, satisfy yourself and turn these stones into bread.”  No doubt, Jesus had spent much of those forty days and nights contemplating what it meant to be the Son of God—and probably also pondering why the Spirit wanted the Son of God to be so hungry.  But Jesus was obedient.  To embody his people and to follow in their footsteps, being faithful at every step where they had failed, that was the Lord’s plan for him.  That was how he would redeem his people.

 

The devil’s temptation here is subtle.  He doesn’t tempt Jesus to disobey the Spirit overtly by leaving the desert.  He tempts Jesus to turn the rocks into bread—in other words, he tempts him to remake the wilderness itself.  There was that one rock—over there—that looked just like a loaf of bread.  Jesus had been eyeing it for days in his hunger.  Just turn it into real bread.  But Jesus knew that the Spirit had brought him to the wilderness for a reason and to undermine that, however it was done, was to be unfaithful, to be disobedient.  It was to reject his Father’s plan.  So he rebukes the devil with the words of Deuteronomy 8:3.

 

 

Jesus reminds the devil of the sermon that Moses preached to the Israelites as they were preparing to march into Canaan.  Moses said:

 

Remember how the Lord your God led you through the wilderness for these forty years, humbling you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or not you would obey his commands.  Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to you and your ancestors.  He did it to teach you that people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)

 

There was a reason why the Lord allowed the Israelites to be hungry: it demonstrated their faith in his provision.  Were they willing to trust him even when it meant hardship?  The Lord taught them that there’s more to life than bread.  What good is living today if you miss out on the life of the age to come?  Remember that the Israelites had failed that test, grumbling against Moses and wanting to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt.  But now, where Israel failed, Jesus passes the test.  He trusts his Father to provide where he has led and shows that he knows that obedience to God’s call is more important than physical comforts and even life itself.  If he can’t endure fasting, how will he endure the cross?  And Brothers and Sisters, if we can’t endure fasting, how can we expect to live sacrificially as Jesus calls us to live, giving up everything that is not him in faith as we look forward ourselves to the age to come?

Back to Matthew: The devil tries a second time, taking a different tack.  Verses 5-6:

 

         lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” (Matthew 4:5-6)

 

Now the devil tempts him to jump from the highest point in Jerusalem, to force God’s hand.  Angels would deliver him and all of Israel would recognise him as Messiah.  What a temptation this must have been.  During those forty days of fasting and prayer, Jesus contemplated that rejection was going to be a significant factor in his ministry.  A few would follow, but Jesus would largely be rejected by Israel—and eventually that rejection would culminate in his death.  But what if he could prove to all of Israel that he really was the Messiah?  What if he could side-step the rejection and go straight to the throne?  This was his chance.  But Jesus knew that this was not his Father’s plan.  If he became King that way, he’d be no better than David.  There would be no means of redemption for his people.  There would be no Spirit poured out on them to renew their hearts.  He would be King, but the Lord’s promises to Abraham, to Moses, to the Prophets would go unfulfilled.  Without the cross, Jesus might put Israel’s earthly enemies under his feet, but they would still be slaves to sin and death.  And without the cross, the nations would know that Israel had a king who worked miracles, but that would never be enough to draw the gentiles to Israel’s God in awe.  No, the gentiles and their nations were to be drawn to the God of Israel as they saw his faithfulness manifest in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

 

The devil throws two bits of Psalm 91 at Jesus.  It’s a psalm about the Lord’s protection.  It sounds good, but it’s not the whole psalm.  Other parts of the psalm qualify God’s provision for his people.  The first two verses read:

 

 

The shelter of the Most High is a wonderful place to find yourself, but to live under his protection requires that we first abide in his shadow.  He is our “refuge and fortress”, but we put ourselves in his care as we trust in him.  In verse 14 the Lord says,

 

 

The devil loves to plucked portions of Scripture out of context in order to twist their meaning, reminding us of God’s promises of blessing and care, while neglecting to remind us of the need for faith, for holiness, and for obedience.  God’s people show their love for him through obedience.  Jesus later said, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).  The same goes for Jesus’ relationship with his Father.  The Lord’s blessings would come only as Jesus walked in faithful obedience.

 

So Jesus rebukes the devil with the words of Deuteronomy 6:16.

 

Where Israel had failed, Jesus is again obedient.  Israel had tested the Lord.  Jesus, instead, expresses his trust in the Lord’s plan, knowing that only through his rejection would the Lord’s promises be fulfilled.

 

Now, the devil makes one last attempt at dragging Jesus away from the path to the cross.  Look at verses 8 and 9:

 

 

Israel, too, was tempted to idolatry in the wilderness and failed—and failed and failed and failed throughout her history.  Jesus is tempted just as his people were.  “All the kingdoms of the world will be yours,” the devil says, “just submit to me.”  Jesus and the devil both knew that if the Lord’s promises through the prophets were true, Jesus’ lordship would extend beyond Israel to all of Creation.  Gabriel had announced to Mary: “He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33).  When the Father had spoken at Jesus’ baptism, he had spoken words from Psalm 2 where we also read of the great King:

 

and the ends of the earth your possessions.  (Psalm 2:8)

 

The devil again offers Jesus a shortcut to his throne—a shortcut that would bypass the heart of his messianic ministry.  Again, Jesus knew that what would bring the nations to his throne was the redemption of Israel through his death and resurrection and the display of the Spirit’s power in the hearts of his people.  In these events the nations would see the greatness and the faithfulness of the God of Israel and they would be drawn to give him glory and to submit themselves in faith to the Lord Jesus.  That was to be God’s means of welcoming the gentiles into his presence and into his kingdom.  And yet, if Jesus followed the devil’s shortcut, there would be no kingdom—at least not the sort of eternal kingdom in which all was set to rights, in which God himself was king, the sort of kingdom that Israel had always looked forward to as the “age to come”.

 

No, the Lord had charged his people in the wilderness, saying:

 

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might…. It is the Lord your God you shall fear.  Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear.  You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you—for the Lord your God in your midst is a jealous God. (Deuteronomy 4-5, 13-15a)

 

Israel had failed.  Even in the wilderness, while Moses was on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments, Aaron had led the people as they made and worshiped a golden calf.  Most of Israel’s history was marked by the worship of foreign gods.  But Jesus responds to the devil’s temptation with the command God had given through Moses:

 

         and serve him alone.’” (Matthew 4:10)

 

Where Israel failed, Jesus is faithful.  He chooses the hard path of obedience that will bring not only kingship, but also redemption.  Jesus was destined not only to be King of the Jews, but Lord of all Creation and conqueror of sin and death.  For that to happen, evil had to be concentrated all in one place, to rise up to its full height, to do its worst to Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah—so that God could raise him from death, overturn the false verdict the people had announced, and vindicate his Son.  Jesus knew that to restore the life of God to his people, the way to inaugurate the age to come in which all would be set to rights, he must first let evil do its worst—he had to walk the path of rejection, suffering, and death.  By his faithfulness, Jesus redeemed those in Israel who were faithful to him.  By his faithfulness, Jesus created a new people of God in whom God poured out his Spirit.  By his faithfulness, Jesus was declared Lord with power and authority.  And because of his faithfulness, the nations have seen the faithfulness of Israel’s God and now give him glory as they—as we—submit ourselves to him in faith.

 

And now we, you and I, walk—or, at least, we should be walking, in faithfulness to the glory of God.  As Lent puts before us the suffering of Jesus and reminds us that God’s life for us came through his submission to death, it reminds us that we, too, must die to self and walk the narrow path, the way that leads to suffering and rejection, in order to know the life of God and the age to come.  We take our first steps down that narrow path as we repent and turn aside from everything that is not Jesus, as stop grasping everything that is not Jesus, and then take hold of him with both hands in faith, trusting in him for the forgiveness of sins, for the life of the Spirit, and for the hope of God’s world set to rights.  Lent calls us to set aside our distractions and our idols so that we might fix our gaze on Jesus, taking up our crosses and following him.

 

St. Paul warned the Corinthians in our Epistle “not to receive the grace of God in vain”.  What a splash of cold water that must have been.  They thought they were doing so well, but Paul rebukes them for tolerating sins that horrified even the pagans; for abusing spiritual gifts, using them selfishly rather than to edify the church; for allowing the values of pagan culture to twist their understanding of the gospel; for abusing the Lord’s Supper—the list is long and troubling.  Brothers and Sisters, fast and pray these next forty days that the gospel might permeate ever deeper into our hearts and minds, and let us submit ourselves to the renewing and regenerating work of the Spirit.  Let us not receive the gospel in vain.  Instead, may we each day die to self that we might emerge the other side of death into the life of God and know his glory.

 

Let’s pray: Lord Jesus Christ, for our sake you fasted forty days and forty nights: give us grace so to discipline ourselves that our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may always obey your will in righteousness and true holiness, to the honour and glory of your name; for you live and reign with the Father and Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

 

by William Klock

“When you fast, don’t be gloomy like the hypocrites,” Jesus said.  “They make their faces quite unrecognisable, so that everyone can see they’re fasting.  I’m telling you the truth: thy have received their reward in full.”

 

As I think about this, I have to admit that this probably isn’t our problem.  I’m sure there must be some people who, when they fast, do make sure everyone knows about it, but I don’t remember ever meeting anyone like that.  (Unless, of course, it was someone doing it as some kind of health-nut thing.)  People in our culture, people in the modern Western church don’t fast.  Even when it’s Lent, what do we do?  We give up chocolate.  We give up Coke.  I saw a post on Facebook that encouraged people to eat one normal meal and then to eat less for their two other meals so that those two other meals equal one normal meal.  A friend who was a missionary commented that the people he ministered to in Zambia ate less than that all the time, so it wasn’t really much of a fast.  And that may be why we’re so often spiritually impoverished in our part of the world.  We have too much and when you have too much, when you don’t know what it means to fast, well, we never really learn to trust God.  And so to fast is to voluntarily put ourselves in a place of poverty, of need, of exile—a spiritual exercise to remind us what it means to trust in God.

 

Brother and Sisters, that’s the point of Lent.  It’s not to look good in front of others.  It’s to remind us to look to the Lord.  So Jesus goes on and says, “No: when you fast, comb your hair and beard the way you normally do, and wash your face, so that others won’t notice you’re fasting—except your Father, privately.  Then your Father, who sees in private, will repay you.”

 

Jesus says the same thing about prayer immediately before this: “When you pray, you mustn’t be like the hypocrites.  They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on street corners, so that people will notice them.  I’m telling you the truth: they have received their reward in full.  No: when you pray, go into your own room, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is there in secret.  And your Father, who sees in secret, will repay you.”  But why?  This is where we really need to hear what Jesus says.

 

He says: “When you pray, don’t pile up a heap of words!  That’s what the gentiles do.”  Remember the gentiles worshipped fickle, capricious, unfaithful gods who never spoke—gods who weren’t worthy of any trust.  Jesus says, “The gentiles think that the more they say, the more likely they are to be heard.  So don’t be like them.  Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.  So this is how you should pray.”  Now, listen closely to what Jesus says.  We pray the Lord’s Prayer so often that we don’t even think about it.  So listen.  “This is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven; may your name be honoured; may your kingdom come; may your will be done; as in heaven, so on earth.  Give us today the bread we need now; and forgive us the things we owe, as we too have forgiven what was owed to us.  And do not bring us into the great trial, but rescue us from evil.”

 

Notice how Jesus’ vision of God’s kingdom—of heaven coming down to earth—how it’s at the heart of everything he says.  But that’s the heart of our prayer.  On one hand prayer, like fasting, is simple, but there’s also a mystery to it.  Sometimes when I pray I feel like my prayers are bouncing off the ceiling, but then I remember what Jesus says here: You’re heavenly Father is with you in that secret place.  My prayers don’t have to get any further than the ceiling, because the Father is right there—right here—with me.  He sees and he hears and he knows what’s in my heart.  He hears the things I say and he hears the things I want to lay before him but struggle to put into words.

 

Over the years I’ve read quite a lot of books about prayer as I’ve tried to unravel the mystery, but none of them has every really helped.  Instead, what has helped is simply to remember what Jesus says here.  And to pray the psalms.  To let Jesus and the inspired scriptures remind me that to pray is to remember that in him heaven and earth have come together and to pray is to recognise this reality, to put myself at the intersection of heaven and earth.

 

And if prayer is about heaven and earth overlapping in the here and now, it’s also about them coming together in the stuff of the world—and in the clay from which God has made us.  To pray is to claim—now think about how amazing this is—to pray is to claim that the living God, enthroned in heaven, is making his home with us—even in us.  And this is why Jesus says that to make a point of this, go into your room in secret and pray there.  By all means pray in church, pray with other people, pray when you’re out in nature, pray in the temple, but sometimes it helps to take God seriously and to shut yourself up in your room, here on earth, and know that heaven—that the Spirit, and Jesus, and his Father are here with and in you.

 

And if we do this.  When we pray and when we recall that in us, by the power of Jesus and the Spirit, that heaven and earth are meeting together—and if they’re meeting together in this little lump of clay that is me—or that is you—it’s going to transform me and it’s going to transform you.  It’s going to change us in a lot of ways, but Jesus stresses first and foremost that it’s going to make me and it’s going to make you forgivers.  This is where the kingdom begins.  With the cross of Jesus.  With the forgiveness of sinners.  And as Jesus forgives us, that forgiveness spills out of us.  We’ve all been hurt and wounded and sinned against by other people.  How much more have we done that to God.  But he hears us because, in Jesus he has poured out his grace on us, he has forgiven us, because in Jesus he has invited us into his presence where heaven and earth meet.  The privilege of prayer is a constant reminder that because we have been forgiven, we ought to forgive others—to let God’s grace pour from us as it has been poured from Jesus.  That’s the kingdom.  That’s “on earth as it is in heaven”.

 

And in that Jesus’ great prayer comes together.  So simple, but so powerful.  So simple we can pray it as children, but so powerful that we never stop—not even the holiest and wisest of saints stops praying these simple worlds.  Because we know that heaven isn’t far away; it’s where we meet the God whom we can address as “our Father”.  To whom we can bring our needs, knowing that if he has given his son for our sakes, he will surely give us the bread we need for today and rescue us from evil.

 

Brothers and Sisters, prayer reminds us not only that God is trustworthy, it reminds us to trust in him.  That’s why, after Jesus warns us about hypocrisy and reminds us what real prayer and fasting are all about, he says, “Nobody can serve two masters.  Otherwise, they will either hate the first and love the second, or be devoted to the first and despise the second.  You can’t serve both God and wealth.”  The kingdom demands our all.  If we’re going to pray “on earth as in heaven”, we’d better remember what that means: that the things of the old, evil age are passing away and that the new age, God’s new creation, his kingdom is being borne today through the power of the gospel and the Spirit and that we would be fools to divide our loyalty between the two.

 

Think on that as we begin another season of Lent: that when we fast and when we pray, when we say “on earth as in heaven” we’re not just saying empty words, but we’re actually in the place where heaven and earth already meet, that we’re already in the presence of God, because we’ve been forgiven by Jesus’ death, raised to new life by his resurrection, and been plunged into the Spirit to be made his temple.  And then let us go out from our prayer and fasting to really be the heaven on earth people who fully trust in God, ready to carry his gracious mercy to everyone around us.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

The other night I was trying to read while Veronica was practising in the other room.  She has a concert with the Symphony next week.  I was finding her practising more distracting than usual, because the piano part of this one piece is really quite unpleasant all on its own.  There’s no melody, just sort of periodic backup for the rest of the orchestra.  Lots of rests and then a few notes that seem almost random if you don’t know the piece.  It was very disracting to listen to.  But bring all the instruments together, let them all play their parts and you’ve got a wonderful piece of music.  The Bible is very much like that.  There are all sorts of themes and sometimes we put all our attention on just one and it ruins the music.  But the better we know and understand the Bible and the big story of God and his people, the better able we are to hear all of those themes, each playing at the right time, each balanced with the others, so that we’re able to hear the grand music that God has—not only for us to hear, but for us to participate in.

 

So if I were to tell a parable the way Jesus did, I might say, “The kingdom of God is like…a symphony.”  When Jesus came he introduced a new piece of music to his people.  The thing was that it wasn’t really new; it’s that everyone had forgotten it.  The Lord had taught it long before to Adam and to Eve.  When their children lost the tune the Lord came and taught it again to Abraham and then to Moses and to the Israelites.  It wasn’t an easy tune—mostly because sinful human beings lacked the full ability to play it.  And so the tune God taught Abraham and Moses was a bit like a simple melody line played on the piano with one hand.  But it was still true to the original.  But even as simple as it was, Israel struggled to play it.  And then when Jesus came he amazed everyone by sitting down at the piano and playing the full harmony with both hands.  The music took on new life.  It was fuller and richer and more beautiful than anything anyone had heard since Adam’s day.  Some people didn’t like it.  Some people flat-out refused to learn it or even listen to it.  But Jesus taught it to a few and each of them taught it to a few and each of those to a few and pretty soon thousands were playing and the music was spreading all over the world.  At some point someone taught it to each of us and now you and I are playing that tune.

 

And yet, even still, we know—or at least we should know—that there’s more yet to come.  What Jesus has taught us to play isn’t the full piece of music.  It’s like the piano solo leading into the great orchestral piece.  It gives a taste of what’s to come, but to hear the full symphony we have to wait for Jesus to return—for Jesus to come back from heaven, bringing the kingdom with him in all its majesty and eternal glory.  In the meantime, we play the piece he’s taught us, the piece he’s specially equipped us to play.  And as we see in our Epistle this morning from First Corinthians, at the heart of this music Jesus has taught us—the melody of it that holds it all together and that will lead into something so much greater one day—the heart, the theme of that music is love.

 

So let’s look again at 1 Corinthians 13.  We often call it the “Love Chapter”.  But think about the context.  Paul sticks this love chapter in the middle of a discussion about the Church, about living together as the body of Christ, about spiritual gifts, and about worship.  A lot of times we take this chapter out of context and we think of it in terms of, say, romantic love.  We read it at weddings.  (Not that that’s bad!)  There is a sense in which what Paul describes here is about the love of husband and wife, but only because it is first and foremost about love amongst Christian brothers and sisters, love in the Church, that spills over into every aspect of life and into every relationship in light of Jesus and what he’s accomplished.

 

During Epiphanytide we were reading in Romans where Paul describes the Church as being like a body, everyone gifted and equipped for a certain task, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the whole Church and our kingdom mission.  And at the beginning of the season, we were reading about the Church as a temple, each of us a stone, shaped and carved and cut very carefully by the Lord and all purposefully fitted together as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.  Last Sunday we read Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.  They were boasting to each other about their gifts and achievements and they’d started following teachers who boasted in their achievements—boasting as Greeks and Romans typically boasted.  It was how people climbed to the top of the heap and demanded respect and honour.  But in contrast Paul describes his own accomplishments: he’d been arrested, beaten, whipped, scourged, shipwrecked, cold, hungry, naked, shamed and run out of town in dishonour—all for the sake of his brothers and sisters, the very ones, in fact, who rejected him.  And we think: How is this all possible?  How do we live for the sake of others?  How do we die to self for the sake of others?  How do we sacrifice for the sake of others?  The last two Sundays pointed us toward discipline and humility.  Today the lessons point us to love.  Love is the theme that ties the whole symphony of the kingdom together.  And so after describing the way the Church acts as a body with each using his or her gifts for the sake of others and, ultimately, for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom Paul writes:

 

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:4)

 

It’s not just about having and using gifts or about doing things in the Church.  The Corinthian Church had no lack of gifts.  It had no lack of activity.  It had no lack of people wanting to contribute money to this cause or that cause.  (One of the reasons Paul wrote to them was to raise money to support the struggling Christians in Jerusalem.)  The problem in Corinth was a lack of love.  Without love all the amazing things they were doing might as well have been nothing.

 

Back in Chapter 3 Paul used the illustration of building a temple.  Like the temple in Jerusalem, it was built of carefully hewn wood, cut stones, gold, and precious jewels.  Jesus is the foundation and others, like Paul and the Corinthians, were building on that foundation, but not everyone was building with stone or with gems and precious metals.  Some were building with hay and straw.  At the end, he says, it’ll all be tested with fire.  The hay and straw will go up in smoke.  This is an image here that gives us a sense of what lies in store.  Other passages talk of the old heaven and earth passing away and a new world being ushered in.  I’m sure much of the language is figurative—the reality is at this point beyond our understanding.  However it happens, though, that which is unworthy, that which is the product of sinfulness and selfishness, that which does not honour God will be consumed and will pass away, leaving a new world in which only the holy and the God-honouring remains.  Only the work in which people truly invested—the stone, the gold, the silver, the precious jewels—will remain.  Some people will make a good show of building, but if love is not their motive, it’s not going to last—it will be exposed and consumed by God’s judgement.  If love isn’t the motive, when Jesus comes and draws our music into his own great symphony, those who have been playing their own tune will have nothing to contribute.

 

Paul goes on in verses 5-7:

 

This is what will be left.  This is the melody that Jesus will take up into his great symphony.  And it stands in stark contrast with the ways and values of the present age, but it stands in contrast, too, with the ways and values of many people in the Church.  What Paul does is to hold up Jesus as our model for love.

 

Jesus is patient and kind.  Remember, he came to condemned sinners, not to heap up more condemnation, but to redeem.  We have dishonoured God and made a mess of this creation he so lovingly created.  He would be within his rights to simply hit control+alt+smite and reboot everything—to wipe us out and start over from the beginning.  God has every right to leave us dead in our sins, but because he loves us, he is patient and has given himself—the life of his Son—to restore us to life and to his presence.  To make us his people once again.  Again, love is patient and kind.

 

And, Paul writes, love is not envious or boastful.  Think again of Jesus.  He who is God humbled himself in the incarnation—again, for our sake—becoming one of us.  And he came not as a great king or warrior, but as the son of a humble girl and her very ordinary husband, raised in a poor backwater, and finally dying—for our sake—the humiliating and painful death of a criminal—a death we deserve, but that he did not.  He had more right to boast than anyone who has ever lived, but as they pressed the crown of thorns on his head and beat him, mocking his sovereignty, he chose not to revile them in return.  Instead, as he was dying he prayed for the very men who were standing there gloating and jeering at him.

 

Love is not irritable or resentful.  Again, God is patient and long-suffering.  Rather than resenting us for our sins, the Lord has given himself to redeem us from them.  Love does not rejoice at wrongs.  Just the opposite.  The angels in heaven rejoice with the Lord whenever a sinner repents.  Again, think of Jesus: Love bears all things…believes all things…hopes all things…endures all things.  Has anyone borne more or endured more than Jesus?

 

And with that image in our heads we need to think of ourselves.  Are we patient and kind?  And we need to be honest.  It’s easy to be patient and kind some of the time and with the people we like, but what about the people we don’t like?  What about those difficult situations we find ourselves in?  Are we really patient and kind?  Are we envious and boastful or, like Jesus, are we humble and willing to give up our honour for the sake of others—even for the sake of people who hurt us and wrong us.  Are we willing to admit when we are wrong and when we have sinned?  Are we irritable and resentful?  These are sins that Christians can be very tolerant of.  Sometimes we even turn irritability and resentment into virtues when the right people and situations come our way.  What’s my reaction when Mormon missionaries knock on my door or when a telemarketer calls?  I admit that I can be pretty irritable and most people would say that that’s just fine when it comes to telemarketers and cult members.  People of Jesus’ day were often like that when it came to tax collectors and prostitutes and gentiles, but Jesus instead forgave these people, made them new, and welcomed them into his family.

 

Again, where and how do we fall short of Jesus’ model of love?  In our families?  In our workplaces?  In our schools?  In our church?  And imagine the difference it would make around us if love were the driving force, the motive behind everything we do.  Imagine what it would be like if we gave of ourselves, our rights, our honour, our glory the way that Jesus did.

 

And it sounds good, but I know it also sounds impossible.  How can we ever give of ourselves the way Jesus did?  Sometimes it’s hard enough giving this way to people we love.  What about people who aren’t close to us, people who have hurt us, people who are our enemies?  This is why we need to have the example of Jesus always before us.  We need to remember that we were his enemies.  We need to remember that he owed us nothing but judgement, and yet he became incarnate and died for us.  We need to think and meditate on the depth of love that God manifested towards us in Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, the love of God in Jesus should motivate and transform us.

 

But that’s not all.  Love is impossible, and for that reason Jesus has done more than give us an example.  He’s washed us of our sin and he’s given us God’s own Spirit.  Think back to John the Baptist.  He told the people, “I’ve plunged you into the water, but one is coming who will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  Jesus doesn’t forgive our sins and leave us in some kind of neutral state.  He forgives our sins and then pours his own life into us.  Remember: The Lord didn’t rescue the Israelites from slavery in Egypt just to leave them wandering in the wilderness.  No.  He freed them from Egypt, he made them his people, and he took up his dwelling in their midst as he led them into a new home and new way of life.  And just so with Jesus, but on an even grander scale.  Jesus rescues us and frees us from sin and death, he makes us his people—more specifically, Paul talks about Jesus making us his own body—and he comes and dwells, not just in our midst, but actually inside us.  He makes us his temple as he pours his Spirit into us.  But his ultimate plan isn’t just to save us, but to redeem his entire creation—to set us back on the track that Adam and Eve abandoned when they sinned, to make us his stewards and his priests.  And so as Israel’s destination was the promised land, our destination is the New Jerusalem, the kingdom that Jesus has promised to bring in all its fullness.  That’s the future, but in Jesus that future has burst into our present.  In the Holy Spirit Jesus gives us a foretaste of what is to come.  He invites us to play the music of the kingdom and the music of the kingdom is love.

 

Again: If it’s not driven by love, it won’t last.  And Paul drives this point home in the rest of the passage.  It’s not just that the things we do without love will go up in smoke when the kingdom finally comes in all its fullness, but even many of the good things Jesus calls us to do will be overwhelmed by the great theme of love.  Look at verses 8-13:

 

First Corinthians gives us the distinct sense that the church in that city was fixated on certain miraculous gifts, especially prophecy and tongues, not only elevating those who had these gifts above others, but emphasizing to everyone that these gifts were sort of the end-all-be-all of Christianity.  Forget everything else—put it all aside—and pursue prophecy and tongues!  But Paul is warning them and saying, “No.  These gifts are great and they’re useful, but there’s something far more important: cultivate love.  Real love.  The kind of love manifest by Jesus at the cross.  If you want to build the kingdom, don’t pursue gifts.  If you’ve got them, use them—lovingly—but pursue love above all else.  When the kingdom is here and we’re all living in God’s presence, there will no longer be any need of prophecy, but there will be a need for love.  The same goes for tongues.  Who needs tongues when the curse of Babel is done away with?  But we’ll still need love.

 

Paul describes it in terms of growing from a child into an adult.  I had a Big Wheel when I was a little kid, but now I ride a real bicycle.  The Big Wheel taught me how to pedal and steer and not run people over.  At one point I had training wheels on my bike that kept me from falling over.  But they did their work and now I’m a grown-up and I don’t need those childish things.  In the present age our view of God is dim.  Paul describes it in terms of an ancient mirror made of polished metal.  The reflection was imperfect and dark.  And so is our view of God.  Even as redeemed men and women, there’s a veil, a gulf between us and God.  Our sin has split apart heaven and earth, but Jesus has begun the work of bringing us back together.  One day we will stand before God face to face.  We’ll know him not only through the mediating words of Scripture or through the mediating work of the Holy Spirit, but we’ll stand before him and know him face-to-face.

 

And it’s on that day that our music will be taken up into God’s great symphony and all that will remain is love.  Faith, hope, and love remain, he says—they’re essential to our life as the Church, as the people of God today—but above all we need to learn to love.  It’s not that faith and hope aren’t important.  They’re vital, but without love they’ll be out of tune with God’s symphony.  We live by faith.  We take hold of Jesus, the forgiveness of sin and the promise of life, and we take hold of him by faith as we trust in him.  We submit to his lordship by faith.  And we live in hope—living for a kingdom and a world for which we have only a down payment.  But on the great day when Jesus returns and the kingdom is consummated, faith will vanish into sight, hope will be fulfilled, but love will only intensify, growing greater and more profound as we see our Lord face to face and the weight of sin and death is finally and fully lifted from us—as the blurry image of the mirror is replaced by the real thing—as our simple one-handed song of love on the piano is taken up as part of the Lord’s grand symphony of love.

 

Brothers and Sisters, think of the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  We pray these words so often and know them so well that we easily forget what they really mean.  This is a prayer that looks forward in faith and hope to the day when we will see him face to face; this is a prayer that looks forward to the day when we have grown from little children into adults; this is a prayer that looks forward to that day when love becomes Creation’s all-consuming theme.  The Lord’s Prayer looks forward to that day in hope and faith, but what it asks for is that this theme of love be manifested here today.  It asks in faith for love to be made known today in the midst of sin and of fear and of hate and of death.  And, Brothers and Sisters, that means that it’s a prayer for our own hearts and minds to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, because if anyone is to manifest love in this present age, it is us, the only people in this world who know first-hand the love of Jesus.  So pray, “thy will be done, on earth as in heaven” and pray those words in hope of the coming kingdom and pray those words in faith, trusting and seeking for the Lord to give you his loving heart so that you can show his love in your church, in your family, in your workplace, in your school, in your community, and in your world.

 

Let us pray: O Lord, you have taught us that whatever we do without love is worth nothing: send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love, the true bond of peace and of all virtues; without which whoever lives is counted dead before you.  Grant this for the sake of your only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

by William Klock

Over and over Jesus would say to the people, “The kingdom of heaven is like…this.  And then he’d go on to tell them a story.  In today’s Gospel he says, “It’s like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourer for his vineyard.”  Jesus draws this imagery straight from the Prophets, so he doesn’t have to explain very much.  In the Prophets the vineyard owner is always the Lord.  The vineyard or the people working in it were always Israel.  So as Jesus tells his story, Matthew and John and Peter and the rest can easily imagine themselves getting up that morning, leaving their wives and children, and going to the town square in the hopes someone will have work for them.  Day labourers were pretty much at the bottom of society.  In some ways slaves were better off.  At least a slave’s owner was obligated to clothe and feed him and his family.  A day labourer lived a meagre hand to mouth existence.  If there was no work, he didn’t eat.  If there was work, he did it, earned just enough to buy food for his family, and got up the next morning already tired, but ready to do it all over again.  If there wasn’t work, he either begged or he and his family went hungry.  So Jesus’ hearers imagine themselves arriving at the town square just before sunrise with their tools in hand and are glad to see this man who offers them a denarius and sends them down the road to harvest his grapes.  A denarius was the going rate for a day’s common labour.  Again, it wasn’t much, but their families would eat tonight and then tomorrow it’d start all over again.

 

The labourers had been labouring hard for a good three hours by mid-morning.  The wind changed.  Rain was coming.  Maybe tonight; definitely tomorrow.  The harvest had to come in before the rain, so the vineyard owner went back to town.  There were still plenty of men waiting to be hired for the day, so he tapped as many as he thought he needed, promised, “I’ll pay you what’s right,” and sent them to harvest his grapes.

 

By noon the clouds started rolling in over the mountains.  Rain was coming sooner than expected so off he went to town again.  The sun was hot now.  Everyone could imagine themselves labouring away in the vineyard.  Maybe the day Jesus told them the story was a hot one and they could feel the heat pressing in on them.  Thank goodness they were sitting in the shade of a tree, not carrying heavy baskets of grapes out under the hot sun, kicking up dust as they shuffled under heavy loads.  But they could imagine.  They were in the story on that sweltering day.  They were certainly earning their denarius!  Even those men who started at noon would be exhausted when the day was done.  And in the backs of their minds they were thinking, “Okay…the men working so hard, they’re Israel, they’re us. Where is this going?”

 

By mid-afternoon the dark rainclouds were almost on them, but there was still too much work to be done.  The man hurried back to town.  Still there were men waiting for work.  They were probably expecting to go home empty-handed, going to bed hungry.  Their children would cry.  But if they left the town square they’d miss out on even that small chance that someone might come late in the day with a job.  “Get to my vineyard and pick like the wind,” the man said, “and I’ll pay you what’s right.”  So off they ran, not wasting a moment.  And the work wasn’t so bad now that the sky was dark and the wind was blowing.

 

But still, an hour til quitting time, there was work to do and then the first raindrops began to fall.  The man ran back to town and rounded up the last few men left…the ones just about ready to go home empty-handed or maybe ready to beg some bread from someone.  An hour’s pay was better than no pay at all, so off they went to help the others finish.

 

And finish they did.  And here’s where Jesus gets to the heart of that bit about “The kingdom of God is like…”  As the thunder began and the rain started pouring, the foreman gathered the men in the barn and pulling the foreman aside, the man said to him, “Pay them their wages, but start with those men who came last and end with the guys who have been here all day.”  Imagine being one of those men who worked only an hour, who, even if they could buy a little food, would still go to bed hungry.  Imagine their reaction as the foreman put a whole denarius in each of their hands.  Again, it wasn’t much, but it was a whole day’s wage.  And imagine the men who had been working since sun-up and mid-morning.  Maybe they’d heard wrong.  They looked at each other.  Some of them said, “No.  A denarius for the day.  That was the deal.  That’s always the deal.”  But if he was paying these guys who’d only worked an hour a whole denarius, maybe they’d get twelve!  Or at least more than one.  But their excitement faded as the foremen went down the line and gave a denarius to everyone: to the men who had worked since mid-afternoon, to the men who’d worked since noon, to the men who’d worked since mid-morning, and even to the men who had been there all day.

 

They grumbled.  I can just hear impetuous Peter interrupting Jesus: “What a jerk!  That’s not fair!  Jesus, I think you meant to say, ‘The kingdom is not like…’”  So first the men grumbled to each other and finally one of them got worked up enough to grumble directly to the vineyard owner.  “What gives, Boss?  Those guys over there only worked an hour and you’ve paid them exactly the same thing that you paid us.  We’ve worn ourselves out working all day…and, man, it was a scorcher.  You’ve done us wrong!”

 

The men were angry, but the vineyard owner responded gently.  “Friend, I’ve done you no wrong.  I offered to pay you a denarius for a day’s work and you agreed.  That’s the going rate after all.  I’ve given you exactly what we agreed on.  Take your pay and go home to your family.  Be happy that you can feed them tonight.  And be happy for these other men.  They can go home and feed their families tonight too.  You know what it’s like to go home empty-handed.  How can you be angry that their children will eat tonight?  Don’t be angry at my generosity.”  And then, no longer telling a parable, Jesus says to his disciples, “So the last will be first, and the first last.”

 

And with that Matthew and John and Peter and all the rest of the twelve and all the people gathered scratched their heads and looked at Jesus, more than a little confused.  “The last will be first and the first will be last?”  Just four verses later we read that James and John got their mother to put in a good word for them with Jesus.  “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand one at your left, in your kingdom.”  I have to wonder if this was in response to the whole thing about the last being first and the first being last.  James and John (and their mother) were worried about their place in the kingdom.  And, of course, when the others heard about this they were angry with James and John, because…of course…they all wanted to sit in those places of honour.  But that was most decidedly not what the kingdom of God is like.  Hardly anyone understood and that’s because almost everyone had forgotten about grace.  James and John were afraid that one of the other disciples might do something extra special and earn greater favour from Jesus.  Imagine the jealousy they had when Peter confessed to Jesus, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God” and Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah…on this rock I will build my church.”  Uh oh.  Just when John, who could smugly tell people that he was Jesus’ best friend, just when he thought that Jesus was going to make him Pope!  They’re all vying for a special place in the kingdom.  They’re all worried that Jesus is going to give something special to one of the other disciples and not to them.

 

No one…or almost no one…understood, because almost everyone had forgotten about grace.  The Jewish people, of all people, should have understood the grace of God.  They lived it every day and they had for more than a thousand years.  God’s grace was exemplified by the manna in the wilderness.  It was new every morning.  There was always just enough for the day.  God even miraculously provided a little extra for those days—the sabbaths—when you couldn’t go out and gather it.  But otherwise, if you tried to store it up, if you tried to take more than you needed, if you tried to outdo your neighbours, do you remember what happened to the manna?  It rotted and stank and grew worms.  Brothers and Sisters, God’s grace is always just enough to meet our needs and to see us through today.  I think that’s why Jesus chose to tell his parable about those poor day-labourers.  A denarius was just enough for the day.  After you fed your family there was nothing left to save.  You went back to the town square in the morning and hoped someone would hire you for another day and another denarius.  The only difference being that God’s grace is not a wage that we earn.  It’s not a reward for good service.  It’s not a sign of special status.  It’s simply life in his presence, sustained by his goodness.  And it comes not by negotiating with him.  It comes as we enter into his covenant.  You don’t get more because Jesus called you early nor do you get less because he called you late.  You get enough, just because he called you.  He promises his all for us and in return we promise our all to him.  In his gracious love he has given his Son for us and made us his covenant people.  In loving gratitude we give our all to him and to his kingdom.  We believed in the first place because we saw his goodness and his faithfulness manifest in Jesus and in his death and resurrection, and we continue to believe because, every day we put out our hands and he pours his grace into them, always just what we need for today.  Always what we need to accomplish the work he has set before us.

 

I think that, too, is a key to the parable.  The men were summoned to work in the vineyard.  So was Israel and so are we.  Think way back to the beginning.  The Lord called Abraham for a reason.  He and his children were to be light in the darkness, they were to make the Lord known to a world that had forgotten him.  Israel was to be the people who lived with the living God in her midst so that the nations would see and know him.  When she failed in that mission, the Lord gave his Son to die on the cross and to rise from the grave in order to set his people to rights and to establish a new covenant and a new people.  And so we carry on the mission.  We proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord and we live the life of the Spirit before the eyes of the watching world and they see the faithfulness of God on full display—a faithfulness that none of the gods or kings of this age can compare with—and they come, and they believe, and the Lord pours his grace into their hands just as he has ours and the mission goes on until the earth is filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.  This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you.”  That wasn’t a promise of wealth or of power or of a position of privilege at his right hand over and above everyone else.  Brothers and Sisters, it was a promise of his grace—like the manna in the wilderness.  Always enough for today, for life and for work and for ministry and for whatever struggles we face and always enough to share with the people around us.  Always enough to do the kingdom work he has given us to do today.

 

And that’s where our Epistle today dovetails into the Gospel.  The Gospel speaks of grace, but because we are so prone to forgetting that grace requires discipline, the lectionary today give us this passage from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth.  Let’s look at those four verses again.  1 Corinthians 9:24-27.

 

 

If you haven’t read 1 Corinthians in a while, it’s helpful to recall the context.  Paul knew the people there were believers.  They’d stretched out their hands and God had poured his grace into them.  But they weren’t putting that grace to work for the sake of the kingdom.  They were using their Spirit-given gifts to build themselves up rather than each other and they were abusing God’s grace to justify sins that, Paul writes, even made the pagans blush.  They were not seeking first the kingdom.

 

Brothers and Sisters, the Christian life isn’t aimless.  In calling us to himself, the Lord has given us a mission and a future hope.  St. Paul likens the Christian life to running a race and boxing in a match.  Serious athletes train.  Serious athletes discipline themselves.  They get up early, they eat healthy, and they work hard.  Paul first uses the illustration of a runner in a footrace.  If he’s willing to discipline himself and put in that effort for a laurel crown, how much more ought we to discipline ourselves to run this race that ends with the resurrection of the dead and new creation and life in the presence of God?  But how often do we dink around instead?  How much do we invest in things that don’t ultimately matter instead of pursuing Jesus and his kingdom with everything we’ve got?  Paul compares this to a poorly trained boxer throwing punches at the air instead of his opponent.  Aimlessly throwing punches won’t win the prize.  Instead, it’ll probably end with your opponent landing a knockout punch on you.  So Paul stresses the need to discipline ourselves—especially reigning in our sinful appetites.  He even talks about being disqualified in the end because of failure.  What’s that about?  If we’re saved by grace, how can we fail?

 

Think of the grand biblical narrative of God and his people.  Too often we reduce things like God’s salvation and his grace to abstract theological terms, but it’s important we remember their place in the big story of God and his people.  Think again of Israel, delivered from Egypt by the Lord.  I mentioned this before, but let’s expand on it.

 

The people of Israel were slaves to Pharaoh.  They cried out to the Lord and he rescued them.  And yet he didn’t just strike down Pharaoh and his army and set the Israelites free to go do whatever they wanted.  “Love you guys.  I’ll see you in heaven someday.  Now go have fun.”  No, Israel was his people.  He’d called and claimed this people for himself in Abraham.  In delivering Israel from Pharaoh the Lord was claiming back what was rightly his.  And so he declared to Israel: You are my firstborn son.  I will be your God and you will be my people.  He led Israel through the Red Sea and through the wilderness, met them at Mt. Sinai, and there he entered into a covenant with them.  He gave them the law.  For his part, he would be their God with all that entailed.  Their part of the covenant—their obligation—was to fulfil the calling he gave them, to be the people who lived with him in their midst and, in doing that, to be a light in the midst of the nations.  The Lord had work to do.  He’s going to set his fallen creation to rights and his plan all along has been to do that work through his people.  Adam was created to be the high priest and steward of his temple, his Creation.  And when the Lord called Abraham in his grace, when he saved Abraham’s children from Egypt in his grace, it was to create a holy nation, a nation of priests, a people of grace to once again be his stewards on earth—as Adam once had been.  So the law was the means by which they maintained the holiness necessary to live in the Lord’s presence and to be his witnesses.  So notice that the Lord’s calling of Israel and his deliverance of her from Egypt were all of grace, and yet to live as his people meant devotion and discipline.  Because they had a job to do.  God made them stewards of his grace.

 

And as we read through the Old Testament, Israel repeatedly failed in her disciplined devotion to the Lord and to the covenant he had established with them.  As the Prophets said, it was a heart problem.  And to fix that heart problem, Jesus brought forgiveness to his people—to those who put their faith in him and became part of the renewed people of God, and he gave them God’s own Spirit to fix that heart problem, to turn their hearts towards the Lord.  Brothers and Sisters, you and I are part of that new covenant community, the people who belong to God through Jesus, the people whom he has redeemed from sin’s bondage that we might be bound to him and to the service of his kingdom.  Jesus does not set us free so that we can go do whatever we want, so that we can serve the Lord half-heartedly, so that we can live with divided loyalties any more than the Lord delivered Israel from Egypt so that they could worship other gods or serve foreign kings.  Through Jesus, we have been redeemed so that we can be faithful stewards of the Lord in this world, to do what we were created to do in the first place, to be the people who live with the Lord himself in our midst and in that, to be light in the darkness, to be witnesses of God’s grace and goodness and love and to declare the royal summons: Jesus is Lord.  To lift the veil on God’s future, on his new creation so that the people around us can have a taste of what’s to come.

 

And it’s hard work.  Hard enough that Jesus has given us his own Spirit, knowing that only by his Spirit can we ever labour through the heat of the day and accomplish our task.  The world, the flesh, and the devil compete for our loyalties.  The gods and kings of the present age fight back and oppose us.  Too often we try to live with one foot in the age to come and one still in the present age.  Our loyalties are still often divided between Jesus and the gods of the present age.  And even in the Church, we often put too much of our energy into things that don’t ultimately matter.  Some of us might as well be sitting on the sidelines of the race.  Others of us are like the boxer wildly throwing punches, working up a sweat, but none of them ever landing where they’ll do any good.  Brothers and Sisters, we owe the Lord our all in return for the grace he has poured out on us.

 

The season of Lent is a time for us to focus on the grace that the Lord has poured out on us in Jesus.  But these three Sunday with the funny Latin names: Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima…that means seventieth, sixtieth, and fiftieth as we count down to Easter…these three Sundays of preparation remind us that grace in action must be coupled with discipline, with humility, and with love.  If we are to be faithful stewards of the Lord’s grace, we first need to dedicate ourselves to the Lord’s grace.  We have to know it ourselves, before we can share it with others.  Brothers and Sisters, commit yourself to the Lord.  Give him your full allegiance as King.  Get up each morning and renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil, then go out to collect the manna for today.  Steep yourselves in the means of grace that he has given.  Be disciplined in immersing yourself in his word and in prayer and do not neglect to meet together, but exhort one another to love and to good works.  And receive the Lord’s invitation to his Supper.  Here at his Table he reminds us of the sacrifice he made at the cross, giving his all…even his life…for our sake, to forgive our sins and to defeat even death itself, to make his enemies his friends.  Don’t decline his invitation.  Put out your hands and take the bread, open your mouth and drink the wine, God’s grace poured out for you in Jesus.  Be strengthened to work in the Lord’s vineyard and remember that no matter how hard the work, his grace is always enough.

Let us pray: Father, in today’s Collect we acknowledge that we who ought to be justly punished for offences have been mercifully delivered by your goodness and for the glory of your name.  We pray that we never forget the reason that you have delivered us and that our priority in all things will be the glory of your name as we share your grace with others and proclaim the good news about your kingdom and about the Lord Jesus.  Teach us to be faithful steward of your grace, O Lord.  Amen.

by William Klock

Seeds.  Matthew 13—most of it at least—is all about seeds.  Well, sort of.  It’s about the kingdom of God.  But Jesus told the people about the kingdom using the imagery of seeds, because it was something familiar to them.  Obviously, they lived in an agrarian society, but more than that, the God of Israel had been using this imagery of seeds going all the way back to the Prophets and even back to Abraham.  Remember his promise all the way back at the beginning: he promised to bless the nations through Abraham’s seed.  In other words, to set the world to rights through Abraham’s descendants, through his family.  This image carries on through the prophets.  The seed grew and became a tree—or in other places it became a vine—but it failed to bear fruit.  The Lord warned that he would come to prune the dead wood—or even to cut the whole tree down.  And yet there was reason to hope.  The Lord keeps his promises.  Even if the tree were to be cut down, the seed would remain—and it would put forth a new shoot.  No matter how bad things might get, there was always reason to hope in the Lord.

 

And so, as Chapter 13 begins, St. Matthew tells us that Jesus sat in a boat on the Sea of Galilee, just off from shore, to preach to a crowd on the beach.  “He had much to say to them, and he said it all in parables,” writes Matthew in verse 3.  And so Jesus begins:

 

“Look!,” he said, “Once there was a sower who went out to sow.  As he sowed, some seed fell beside the path, and the birds came and ate it up.  Some seed fell on rocky soil, where it didn’t have much earth.  It sprang up at once because it didn’t have depth of soil.  But when the sun was high it got scorched, and it withered because it didn’t have any root.  Other seed fell in among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.  And other seed fell in good soil, and produced a crop, some a hundred times over, some sixty, and some thirty times over.  If you’ve got ears, listen!”

 

The people had seen the Messiah things that Jesus was doing throughout Galilee.  Blind eyes and deaf ears opened, lepers cleansed and the dead raised.  Demons ran at his command.  In Jesus, God was on the move.  It was obvious.  The long winter was coming to an end.  Everywhere Jesus went the ground thawed and flowers began to spring up.  At the same time, it wasn’t what they expected.  They knew the prophecies.  They knew the word of the Lord.  They knew his promises and they knew he was faithful.  And so they knew he would come to their rescue.  Like a sower sowing his seed, the Lord would one day sow Israel in her own land.  And so when Jesus began to tell a story of a sower going out to sow, they listened.  But it wasn’t quite the story they were expecting.  The story Jesus told was a story of failure after failure after failure before—eventually—success!  Jesus was telling the story of Israel.  Over and over God had spoken.  Over and over he had sent his emissaries: priests, judges, kings, and prophets to speak his word and to set things to rights.  But the people wouldn’t listen.  But now something was changing.  Jesus had their attention.  “If you’ve got ears, listen!” Jesus says.  In other words, “I get it.  This isn’t what you expected.  It’s hard to understand.  But things are different this time.  Really!  Stick with me.  Keep watching.  Keep listening.  And you’ll figure it out.  You’ll see that God is faithful.”  Eventually they would understand—at least some of them would—but for now thy were just confused.

 

So were the disciples.  So, Matthew says, they “came to him.  ‘Why are you speaking to them in parables?” they asked.  So Jesus answered: “You have been given the gift of knowing the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.  But they haven’t.  Anyone who already has something will be given more, and they will have plenty.  But anyone who has nothing—even what they have will be taken away!  That’s why I speak to them in parables, so that they may look but not see, and hear but not understand or take it in.”

 

Well, that doesn’t seem very helpful, does it?  Every once in a while I hear someone claim that there are secret codes hidden in the Bible.  So far I have yet to discover that any of these secret codes is actually there.  The idea itself runs against the purpose of scripture.  God speaks because he wants us to hear him and to know him.  If scripture is hard to understand, that’s on us, not on him.  But if that’s true, why would Jesus speak in riddles.  That’s how the disciples saw it.  And they knew: in Jesus the most important thing that had ever happened was happening.  Everyone needed to know about it.  So why not just say it plainly?  The thing is that it was the same for them as it is for us.  Jesus was speaking plainly.  Everyone knew that when he told a story about a sower planting seed, he was talking about the Lord sowing his promises for Israel.  They knew their story.  They knew the prophets.  The problem wasn’t with Jesus.  The problem was with the people who thought they had it all figured out already.  The problem was with the people who thought the Messiah should come, for example, to take up a sword and establish his kingdom the way other kings established theirs.  And because they thought they had it all figured out, they weren’t hearing what Jesus was plainly and simply saying.

 

So Jesus says to the disciples (verse 14): “Isaiah’s prophecy is coming true in them [in the people].”  And he quotes from Isaiah 6:9-10.  This was the Lord’s commissioning and sending of Isaiah.  He was to go and say to the people, “You will listen but won’t understand, you will look but not see.  This people’s heart has gone flabby and fat, their ears are muffled and dull, their eyes are darkened and shut; in order that they won’t see with their eyes or hear with their ears, or know in their heart, or turn back again for me to restore them.”

 

Imagine being called as a prophet and the first message you’re to declare is that no one will understand you.  What the Lord had promised to Isaiah was now being fulfilled in Jesus.  Like Isaiah, he would speak plainly, but the muffled ears of the people would be unable to hear.  Jesus goes on and says to his disciples: “But there’s great news for your eyes: they can see!  And for your ears: they can hear!  I’m telling you the truth: many prophets and holy people longed to see what you see and didn’t see it, and to hear what you hear and didn’t hear it.”

 

Now, the disciples knew their Bible.  They knew that in that same passage of Isaiah—in verse 13—they knew that was when the Lord spoke of judging the tree that was Israel.  All that would be left was a stump, and yet, says the Lord, “That stump is the holy seed.”  It was a prophecy of judgement followed by restoration.  So this is what would be in their heads as Jesus explains the parable to them.

 

“This is what the sower story is all about,” Jesus went on.  “When someone hears the word of the kingdom and doesn’t understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in the heart.  This corresponds to what was sown beside the path.  What was sown on rocky ground is the person who hears the word and immediately receives it with delight, but doesn’t have any root of their own.  Someone like that only lasts a short time; as soon as there’s any trouble or persecution because of the word, they trip up at once.  The one sown among thorns is the one who hears the word, but the world’s worries and the seduction of wealth choke the word and it doesn’t bear fruit.  But the one sown on good soil is the one who hears the word and understands it.  Someone like that will bear fruit: one will produce a hundred times over, another sixty, and another thirty times over.”

 

So God’s kingdom is coming.  That’s the point of Jesus’ parable.  But his point is also that it’s not coming the way people expected.  Most people expected the kingdom to come in a blaze of glory.  The Lord would return to his people and defeat their enemies.  He would set everything to rights.  He would bring justice and peace and righteousness, beginning in Jerusalem and then extend his righteous rule throughout the earth.  But Jesus’ parable says that, no, that’s not how God’s kingdom will come.  In fact, instead of coming with a blaze of glory, it’s instead going to be like seed sown on the ground.  It’s going to start quietly, many won’t listen at first, but it will slowly and surely grow.  Because this is how the Lord works.  The story is as much about the history of Israel as it is about the people of First Century Judah or people today.

 

This is how the Lord works and there’s a good reason for it.  The world is not as it should be.  We long for the Lord to set it to rights.  But for him to come back in a blaze of glory to deal justly with the world’s sin problem would mean that every last one of us would stand condemned.  This is why, along with his promises to set the world to rights, the Lord also spoke through the Prophets to say that he is patient and merciful and because of that, his judgement will be delayed so that (1) he can provide a means of salvation for us and so that (2) people will have time to hear this good news and believe.  The word—the seed—has to be sown and it needs time to germinate and grow.

 

This is what the people of Jesus’ day needed to understand.  Not only did they need this gospel seed in order to know God’s mercy in the face of coming judgement, but so did the nations.  They thought the Lord would come, congratulate them for their faithfulness, set them on top of the heap, and then rain down fire and brimstone on the gentile nations, but the truth of the matter was, that they needed to be set right just as much as the gentiles did and it would be through the Lord’s faithfulness to his people on display in the Messiah, that a new people would be born, that judgment would come on unfaithful Israel—and all of this before the eyes of the watching gentiles who would stand in awe of the God of Israel and be drawn to him in faith.  The Lord will set Israel and the world to rights, not only by judging sin, but even more so through his grace and mercy to those who believe.  This is how God would make good on his promises.

 

Now, as I’ve been pondering this parable, one caution came to mind.  The parable was Jesus’ way of telling the story of Israel.  God had sown the seed of his word over and over and people—or most of them—didn’t listen.  The seed didn’t take root.  And Jesus’ point is that in him, this time, God was doing something new.  In him, the seed, the word had become flesh.  This time, through Jesus, the Lord would do something he’d never done before: he would pour out his Spirit.  And because of Jesus and the Spirit, the seed would finally grow and flourish—thirty, sixty, a hundred times over.

 

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus and the Spirit have changed everything.  So I think we need to be at least a little cautious in how we think of this parable, because what we usually do when we hear about the seed on the path or the steed on the rocky soil, or the seed choked by thorns, what we usually do is say something like, “Don’t be that kind of soil.  Don’t let the birds take away the seeds.  Don’t let the thorns choke it out.  Be the good soil.  Let the seed grow and put down deep roots.”  And there is something to be said for that.  People do let the cares of the world choke out gospel seed planted in them.  Some people are rocky soil and the seed looks like it’s going to grow and then it withers and dies.  But here’s the point—and never forget—that because of Jesus and because of the Spirit, everything is different.  They make the soil fertile and that’s why God’s word, ever since, has done what it has done.  That’s why the church exists.  That’s why this good news about the God of Israel has gone out and conquered the nations.  Because Jesus and the Spirit have made the soil fertile.  Without them the gospel seed will never take root and grow.  That’s something else to remember in our ministry and evangelism.  We are stewards.  We’re called to plant the seed.  But it is Jesus and the Spirit who cause it to grow.

 

That doesn’t mean we should just be passive hearers of the word.  Do the work.  Get rid of the rocks in the soil.  Pull the weeds that might choke it out.  But there’s a promise here that if we will faithfully steep ourselves in God’s gospel word, Jesus and the Spirit will cause it to take root and grow.  And if we will proclaim it, Jesus and the Spirit will grow the kingdom.

 

Now, Matthew continues, Jesus put another parable to them.  Verse 24: “The kingdom of heaven is like this.  Once upon a time a man sowed good seed in his field.  While the workers were asleep, his enemy came and sowed weeds in among the wheat, and went away.  When the crop came up and produced wheat, then the weeds appeared as well.  So the farmer’s servants came to him.  “Master,” they said, “didn’t you sow good seed in your field?  Where have the weeds come from?”  “This is the work of an enemy,” he replied.  “So,” the servants said to him, “do you want us to go and pull them up?”  “No,” he replied.  “If you do that you’ll probably pull up the wheat as well while you’re collecting the weeds.  Let them both grow together until the harvest.  Then, when it’s time for the harvest, I will give the reapers this instruction: First gather the weeds and tie them up in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.”

 

Again, it’s in our nature to want God to act right now.  We’re tired of the pain and the tears.  We’re tired of sin and death.  Why does God allow evil to continue?  In the next breath, Jesus tells the disciples that “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.  It’s the smallest of all the seeds, btu when it grows it turns into the biggest of the shrubs.  It becomes a tree, and the birds in the sky can then come and nest in its branches.”  But, of course, the tree doesn’t grow all at once.  That takes many, many years.  And then he talks about a different kind of “seed”: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid inside three measures of flour, until the whole thing was leavened.”

 

Just the other day I saw a video in which a woman went on an angry rant about how her first attempt at bread went horribly wrong.  She turned her bread pan upside down and the loaf fell out and hit the floor with a loud “thud”.  She picked it up and banged it on the counter: “Clunk, clunk!”  “I followed the recipe exactly!” she yelled.  “Why didn’t it work?”  And then in the comments she revealed that, yes, she’d mixed all the ingredients correctly, but she never let the dough rise.  She said she didn’t have time for that.

 

And sometimes we feel like we don’t have time—or we shouldn’t have to wait for God’s word to do its work.  I have to remind myself all the time as a pastor to be patient.  God’s word doesn’t grow people (or the kingdom) overnight.  You probably—or you should—have to remind yourselves that God’s word doesn’t grow pastors overnight either.  It takes time.  That’s why the Lord uses this imagery of God’s word as seed all through scripture.

 

But this also means we need to be patient and to wait for the Lord to do his thing.  The disciples weren’t sure they understood this and they asked Jesus what the parable of the wheat and the weeds meant and Jesus said, “The one who sows the seed is the son of man.  The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom.  The weeds are the children of the evil one; the enemy who sowed them is the devil.  The harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are the angels.  So when the weeds are gathered and burned in the fire, that’s what it will be like at the close of the age.  The son of man will send out his angels, and they will collect together out of his kingdom everything that causes offense, and everyone who acts wickedly.  They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.  If you have ears, listen!”

 

God’s word will do its work.  The kingdom will grow.  The enemy will sow weeds in its midst, but nothing can stop God’s word from bringing the life he sent it out to bring.  As surely as the mustard seed will grow into a giant tree.  As surely as the little lump of dough will rise and fill the bowl, God’s kingdom will do the same.  If you ever doubt that, just remember what Jesus says here: “The one who sows the seed is the son of man”—is Jesus himself.  Jesus (and the Spirit) will grow the kingdom and nothing the devil can do will stop that.  And we can trust that one day God’s justice will confront our old enemies, sin and death, and put an end to them forever.  I think that what Jesus had in mind here was the judgement soon to come on Judah, Jerusalem, and the temple but as that judgement showed God’s faithfulness to his promises, it also points forward to that time at the end of history, that time when the seed has grown into the great tree, when the leaven has worked its way through the whole loaf, when the gospel has gone out and the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, we can trust that God will deal with the wicked and with sin and death once and for all and the righteous will shine like the sun.  That’s an image of resurrection that Jesus takes from the Prophet Daniel.

 

When something doesn’t seem right or when it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work, the experts love to say “trust the process”.  And, Brothers and Sisters, that’s exactly what Jesus is asking us to do.  He’s planted the seed himself.  He’s shed his own blood to water the soil.  He’s given God’s Spirit to make the soil of human hearts fertile.  And he’s done none of that in vain.  His gospel seed will surely grow and if it seems like it’s taking too long, remember that it's all for the sake of his grace and mercy—grace and mercy you and I already know, but grace and mercy that the rest of the world still needs to know for themselves.  Grace and mercy that, like the death and resurrection of Jesus, reveal the God who is worthy of glory, honour, and praise.

 

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, keep your household the Church continually in your true religion; that those who lean only on the hope of your heavenly grace may always be defended by your mighty power, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

Have you ever met someone with leprosy?  Probably not.  Today it’s extremely rare.  We hardly give it a thought.  But in the ancient world it was one of the most dreaded diseases.  It began with the loss of feeling in your extremities and nodules that would turn into ulcers.  The loss of feeling spread.  The ulcers never healed.  Your hair would fall out and your eyes would go blind.  Ulcers would form on your vocal cords, leaving your voice hoarse and rasping.  Gangrene would set in.  Eventually you would lose fingers and toes and sometimes whole limbs.  Sometimes it led to madness.  Eventually it would lead to death, but not quickly.  Some forms of leprosy would take a decade to run their course and others twenty or thirty years.

 

But as bad, if not worse than the physical misery was the fact that it was contagious.  That made lepers outcasts.  The Jewish historian Josephus tells us that lepers were treated “as if they were, in effect, dead men”.  When a person was diagnosed with leprosy, they were immediately banished from family and community.  In Leviticus 13:46 the Lord had commanded, “He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.”  And people didn’t get better from leprosy.  That’s why it was a miracle when the Lord intervened to heal Naaman the Syrian of his leprosy.  Consider that in medieval Europe, before he was cast out, a leper was brought to the church one last time so the priest could read the burial service over him.  So to be a leper was, for all intents and purposes, to be dead.  Not, of course, to yourself, but dead to your family, your friends, and your community.  In Israel lepers were barred from Jerusalem and from any walled town or city.  The law described over sixty types of contact that would render a person unclean and contact with a leper was second only to contact with a dead body.  If a leper so much as poked his head through the door of your house, your house would be rendered unclean.  One rabbi boasted that he threw stones at lepers to keep them at a distance, because that’s where they belonged.  Keep that in mind as we look again at today’s Gospel.  Look with me at Matthew 8:1-4.

 

For the last three chapters Jesus has been preaching the Sermon on the Mount.  So he’s been preaching to the crowds about the kingdom of God—what it’s going to be like and who’s going to be part of it.  And I can imagine the people in the crowd nodding in approval as they listened—but the real weight of it not really sinking in.  It’s often like that when he hear God’s word.  Something like “Love your neighbour.”  We agree.  We think, “Oh, that’s good.”  But the real radicalness of it doesn’t sink in.  And then something happens—we’re faced with a choice, we encounter a person—and the Spirit brings that lesson to mind and we realise just how much God and the gospel expect of us.  Sometimes we fail the test.  Imagine the crowd that had been listening to Jesus preach, now following him into town and this leper approaches Jesus.  And everything Jesus has been saying about the kingdom is forgotten.  People are thinking, “Stupid leper!  Doesn’t he know he shouldn’t be here!  How dare he come so close to the rabbi!”  They’ve just heard Jesus preaching at length about the kingdom, but I expect at least some of them saw the leper and were thinking to themselves that if Jesus were a good rabbi, he would tell this man to take a hike—to obey torah and get out of town—maybe even throw rocks at him.

 

Imagine their surprise when instead of quoting Leviticus at the man and telling him to get lost, Jesus stops as the man kneels at his feet.  That says something right there.  When this leper saw Jesus he saw the Messiah.  Jews didn’t prostrate themselves before any old person.  This posture was reserved for the Lord.  In some way, shape, or form he saw in Jesus the God of Israel.  And with his hoarse and damaged voice he rasps out, “Lord, if you want, you can make me clean!  Please make me clean.”  And to their horror, Jesus reaches out and touches the man.  The law said that a leper could come no closer to a healthy person than a cubit and Matthew makes a point describing Jesus reaching out, stretching out his arm to its full length across that distance to bridge the gap between himself and the leper, so that he could make contact with him, to touch the untouchable, to draw in the outcast.  And Jesus says to him, “I want just that.  Be clean.”

 

Uncleanness should have passed from the leper to Jesus.  Obviously you couldn’t see something like that, but everyone knew that that was the law, ever since the Lord had spoken it through Moses.  Touch a leper and you become unclean.  So imagine their surprise when they did see something happen.  They saw cleanness pass from Jesus to the leper.  As they watched the man was healed.  His sores healed and disappeared.  His sight cleared.  His voice became whole again.  Maybe fingers and toes even grew back before their watching eyes.  The leprosy was gone.  The man was restored.  His death sentence was lifted.

 

Now, the sermon on the mount wasn’t just an abstract ethical manifesto that Jesus delivered to a group of people who could have been from anywhere or any time.  It was a declaration that the kingdom of God had come in fulfilment of the prophets, a declaration that the Messiah had finally come to set God’s people to rights.  They desperately need and longed for that.  Ever since they had been called in Abraham, ever since they had, as a nation, been adopted by the Lord as his covenant people, they had in one way or another failed him and failed to be the people he had called and delivered them to be.  They gave their hearts to idols.  They gave their hearts to kings.  They put their trust in horses and chariots.  They oppressed the widow and the orphan and took advantage of the poor and the stranger.  Their rabbis threw stones at lepers who dared get too close.  The nation had repeatedly known the Lord’s discipline.  The faithful remnant amongst the people had cried out for centuries to the Lord for help and through the prophets he had promised that he would come, that he would deliver, that he would forgive, that he would put his own Spirit in the hearts of his people and turn them away from sin and self and fill them with love for him and for their neighbours.

 

And now, here it is.  There’s a reason we read this Gospel during this season in which we recall and celebrate Jesus’ epiphany, his manifestation.  Jesus has just preached about the restoration of fallen Israel, the adulterous bride, to her Lord and the first person he meets as he heads down the mountain and into town is this poor man, cut off from his people, for all intents and purposes dead.  He has lost his covenant status.  He has lost his family—not just his biological family, but his covenant family.  He hasn’t known the temple or the Passover for who knows how many years.  In the Lord’s providence this man is symbolic of the whole nation of Israel.  Israel hadn’t heard the Lord’s voice or known his presence in the temple for almost six hundred years.  She was governed and oppressed by pagans.  But as he has humbled himself so far as to take on human flesh, to be born of a Jewish woman, to become one of his own rebellious people, to reach out to them, just so Jesus stretches out his hand across the distance between himself and this believing leper and makes him whole.  This lost son who was dead is alive again.

 

And Jesus doesn’t leave it at that.  He sends this man—in accordance with the law—to see the priest so that the priest can see that he has been healed and so that he can restore him to the covenant family.  There are other times in the Gospels that Jesus bypassed the temple and the priests to make a point, but early here in his ministry he instead sends this man to the priests.  It backs up the message he had just preached when he said that he had come not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them.  And, too, it sent a message to the priests of Israel.  Like I said, people didn’t recover form leprosy.  If they got better and the diagnosis was lifted by a priest, it was probably because it wasn’t leprosy in the first place.  I doubt this priest had ever seen a bona fide healing from leprosy.  They might talk about Naaman the Syrian, but no one had ever seen a healing like that for themselves.  And now this man shows up at the home of the local priest—maybe even the priest who had diagnosed him and declared him unclean—and he served as a message from Jesus: the kingdom is at hand.  Israel was about to be set to rights and restored.  And it was all centred in Jesus the Messiah.  The people—and their priests—had a choice before them: Repent and believe in Jesus or find yourself weeping and gnashing your teeth in the darkness when judgement comes—on the outside of the covenant family as this leper had been for so many years.  Repent and believe that in Jesus the Lord was finally here to visit his people, to answer their prayer, and these lost sons and daughters would be invited into their Father’s great banquet.  Jesus had come to set Israel to rights.

 

Many of the people in the crowd watched this with joy.  The Messiah really had come.  That great feast Israel had been waiting for was being prepared.  According to one Jewish tradition the main courses at that feast would be Behemoth, the great mythical land monster, and Leviathan, the great sea monster.  Some in the crowd, having heard Jesus preach and having seen the leper healed could already smell the great beasts roasting in the oven like Thanksgiving turkeys.  And then as they reach Capernaum a Roman centurion approaches Jesus.  If the Lord’s great banquet was being prepared, this man certainly didn’t belong there!

 

Centurions were the backbone of the Roman army and a reminder to the Jews that they were a conquered people.  Matthew doesn’t tell us if this centurion was a kind man or a cruel one or how he used his authority.  None of that really matters.  He could have been the kindest man in the world, but he was still a local representative of Rome and a gentile.  He didn’t belong in that joyful messianic throng.  But down the main street of the town he came.  Look at Matthew 8:5-9.

 

The centurion appeals to Jesus.  Matthew’s word choices stress the man’s desperation.  He addresses Jesus as “Lord”.  He’d surely heard the talk about Jesus being the Jewish Messiah—the Lord—but being a Roman he probably didn’t care about that.  He simply knew that Jesus could heal, that he could fix his desperate situation.  He’d heard the stories.  Maybe he’d even seen the leper, running into town to show himself to the priest.  Exactly who or what Jesus was, that wasn’t really his concern.  He simply saw in Jesus a man with power and authority.  A man who could, as Tolkien once put it, make the sad things of this world come untrue, and such a man, Jewish or not, Messiah or not, was worthy of respect.  “Lord, my son is at home, paralysed, sick, and suffering.”  As Luke and John tell this story, the young boy was near death.  But if Jesus could heal others, he could heal this man’s son.

 

And Jesus said, “I will come and heal him.”  At this point everyone—the Centurion, the Jewish crowd following Jesus, everyone—they stopped and gasped.  They shouldn’t have, but I’m sure they did, because that would have been the natural response of anyone when an upright and godly Jew—a rabbi no less—went to the house of a gentile.  The Mishnah declared in no uncertain terms, “The dwelling places of gentiles are unclean,” and even though it came centuries later, we know the Jews of Jesus day thought no differently.  Gentiles were ritually unclean, but everyone present should have known that this wasn’t a problem for Jesus.  Jesus touched the leper and instead of contracting his impurity, passed purity to the leper, restoring him to the community of the people of God.  Jesus could enter the home of a gentile and do the same thing.

 

So the Centurion was shocked by Jesus’ offer to come to his house.  He refuses with those words so often misused in celebrations of the Lord’s Supper: “No.  Don’t come to my house.  I’m not worthy that you should come under my roof.”  It’s not that the Centurion thought he was personally unworthy, but that he knew the Jewish customs.  His job was to maintain order and the last thing he wanted was a ruckus resulting from a popular rabbi entering his house.  That would just stir up trouble and that was the last thing a Centurion wanted.  His job was to the keep the peace.  And so he says to Jesus, “You don’t need to come to my house.  You and I are alike.  We both have authority.  I know how it works.  I have authority over the men in my command.  I send orders for this man to come and he comes.  I send orders for this man to go and he goes.  If you truly have the authority over sickness and demons that I think you have, then you can do the same.  If you order this disease to go, it will go.  If you order that demon to come, it will come.  Give the orders and my little boy will be healed.”

 

Now it was Jesus’ turn to be surprised.  Matthew says he marvelled.  He was amazed by what he’d just heard.  Look at verse 10:

 

Notice how Jesus turns to the crowd, to his fellow Jews.  Here they are, following Jesus down the mountain, ready for him to lead them into the age to come when everything is set to rights, ready to sit in his presence at that great banquet and feast on behemoth and leviathan.  And the parade is stopped by this dog of a gentile who has no place in that feast.  When the day comes, they’re thinking, the Lord will take care of men like him.  He may strut around Capernaum, in charge of the place today, but one day he would be out in the darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth.  Some probably thought—maybe even expected—Jesus to give him a little foretaste of that right now.  But instead, Jesus turns and commends the man’s faith to everyone.  (This is why people didn’t like Jesus!)  He contrasts the faith of this gentile—a pagan they considered the enemy—Jesus uses it to expose the lack of faith he has seen in Israel.  And he quotes from the Old Testament.  Psalm 107:3 and Isaiah 43:5 (and Baruch 4:37) all speak of the Lord’s promises to restore scattered Israel, bringing her lost sons and daughters from east and west.  But here Jesus puts a twist on those prophecies and promises.  “When Israel is restored,” he’s saying, “When you sit at the Lord’s great feast with your fathers, with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and feast on behemoth and leviathan and celebrate your restoration and the great faithfulness of the Lord, your brothers and sisters from east and west will be there, and this man represents them.  Yes, the Lord will bring Jews from east and west, but he will bring others and they, too, will have a share in the Lord’s new covenant and in the age to come.  And many of those who think that by birth alone they have a right to be in that banquet…well…they will find themselves out in the dark, weeping and gnashing their teeth.”

 

Jesus knew that it wasn’t yet the time for gentiles to come flooding into the kingdom, taking hold of the robes of Jews, as Zechariah had prophesied, and saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”  But in this centurion he saw a foretaste of that day not so far off.  It was a promise most of his fellow Jews had forgotten—or deliberately ignored—in favour of the promises of the great banquet, the setting things to rights, the restoration of Israel.  But this was the reason for Israel’s existence as a people, even if few remembered it.  Simeon was one of those who remembered and having met the infant Jesus at his presentation in the temple he sang those familiar words:

 

Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.  For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou has prepared before the face of all people; to be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel.  (Luke 2:29-32)

 

Jesus would be the glory of Israel in that he would fulfil their mission to be a light to the nations—bringing them to the God of Israel.  In that he would fulfil the law and the prophets and manifest the faithfulness of God.  Again that great theme of epiphany.

 

Jesus commended the centurion’s faith and sent him home to his healed little boy, the firstfruits—after a fashion at any rate—of the nations who would see the faithfulness of the God of Israel manifest in Jesus, come to him in faith to give him glory, and would themselves not only be healed and set to rights, but incorporated into this covenant family as sons and daughters of God, seated at the great banquet to feast on behemoth and leviathan.

 

So, Brothers and Sisters, come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  In the bread and wine we recall and participate in the great exodus that Jesus wrought at the cross, here we remember and are assured that we belong to him.  Here we take hold of his blood-stained robe and say, “Take us with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”  And here the veil is lifted on the age to come as Jesus gives us a foretaste of the great banquet that awaits us on the day when he will, finally and once and for all, set us and all of his creation to rights.  In the meantime, Friends, take the grace you have found at his Table out into the world and live it for all to see.  Take the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen, with you and proclaim it to all.  As sons and daughters of God, you are stewards of the gospel.  Let every day be Epiphany.  Make the Gospel, make the life of Jesus and the Spirit manifest in what you do and what you say so that the people around you will say, “Take us with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

 

Let’s pray: O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: grant to us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

“On the third day.”  All through the first week of John’s Gospel he tells us, “On the next day…on the next day,” but now it’s not just the next day, but the third day.  That should resonate with us.  John knew that a Christian can’t—or shouldn’t be able to—hear “the third day” and not think of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  John’s Gospel is a story of the birth of God’s new creation and it culminates on the third day after Jesus was crucified, the day when Jesus burst from the tomb, triumphant over sin and death to inaugurate God’s new world.  Already here at the beginning of the story John wants us to anticipate, to be looking forward to Jesus’ resurrection.  God, in Jesus the Messiah, is going to do something amazing this day—something will show a bit of his new creation and reveal his glory.

 

So Mary and Jesus are invited to a wedding in Cana and Jesus’ disciples along with him.  Cana was small village just a few kilometres from Nazareth.  The people of one town would have known the people of the other.  Many of them would have been related, which explains why Mary and Jesus were invited.  One Second Century extra-biblical source says that Mary and the groom’s mother were sisters.  Another fairly early source claims that the groom’s mother was Mary’s sister, Salome—which would make the groom none other than John.  It’s hard to say how reliable these traditions are.  They’re not inspired scripture.  But if they’re true they certainly make sense of the details in the story.  John tells it as someone who was an eyewitness.

 

Weddings in that world were a big deal.  Way more of a big deal than even the biggest weddings are in our culture.  The whole thing would begin with a feast.  The actual ceremony would follow later in the evening.  Once married, the guests, carrying torches, would parade the couple to their new home.  They would wind their way through the town, taking the longest route possible so that the guests could wish them well for as long as possible.  But that wasn’t the end of it.  The bride and groom didn’t go away on a honeymoon.  Instead, they would keep an open house for the rest of the week.  They’d dress like a king and queen while they entertained their guests.  You can imagine how big a deal and what a time of celebration and happiness this would be in a time and place when people were poor and spent their lives in hard work.

 

Picture the festivities.  People eating and drinking, celebrating the bride and groom, and enjoying themselves.  It was a reminder for them of what the Lord had promised it would be like on the day when he would finally return to set his world to rights.  The Prophet Isaiah had written:

 

he will swallow up death forever. (Isaiah 25:6-8)

 

The world was not as it was supposed to be, but a wedding gave the people an opportunity to look forward to the day when the Lord would visit them, wipe away their tears, and defeat their enemies—even, somehow, death itself.

 

Now as we’re picturing this great celebration, John writes that the wine ran out.

 

This was bad.  Really, really bad.  There was no such thing as teetotaling in Jesus’ day.  The rabbis said that without wine there is no joy.  You couldn’t have a feast without it.  That doesn’t mean they were all drunk.  The Bible condemns drunkenness and so did Jewish society, but they nevertheless enjoyed their wine as one of God’s great gifts.  So to run out of wine at a wedding was a party killer.  More than that, it was a disgrace to the groom.  Hospitality was a big deal and the groom was responsible for being hospitable to his guests.  But where did all the wine come from?  The groom’s family provided some, but so did the guests.  Depending on their relation with the groom and whether or not they were married or unmarried, there was an expectation amongst the male guests of reciprocal gifts.  An unmarried relative might bring ten dinars worth of wine to the feast with the expectation that when it was his wedding day, the groom would return the favour with ten dinars of wine himself.  For others, the groom’s generous hospitality at this wedding was in return for the hospitality they had once shown to him.  If the wine ran out, it wasn’t just a social disgrace for the groom—it could heap financial obligations on him that would be hard to repay.  Remember, these weren’t wealthy people.  Cana was a small country village.

 

So the wine ran out.  Maybe it was even Jesus’ fault.  It’s hard to say whether or not he would have been expected to bring his own gifts of wine.  That sort of thing was probably beyond his means.  But regardless of that, he shows up at the wedding with his disciples.  How many is also hard to say.  Up to this point, John has only told us of four, but John tells the story out of order, so that doesn’t mean all twelve—or even more—weren’t there with Jesus.  In a situation where people would have taken great pains to make sure there was enough wine for everyone, the presence of Jesus and his disciples may explain why it ran out.

 

The worried servants went to the hostess, the groom’s mother to tell her disaster had struck.  Mary—possible her sister—was there with her.  Maybe—again, I’m speculating—but maybe that’s why they went to her first: “Your son and his friends were guzzling away despite having brought no wine themselves!”  And so, John writes, “Mary, Jesus’ mother, said to him, “They have no wine!”  Whatever the case, it’s clear that Mary told Jesus because she expected him to do something about it.  And by do something about it, I don’t mean ducking out for a quick stop at the Cana liquor store to grab a case of wine.  Getting more wine wasn’t nearly that easy.  I think it’s pretty clear that Mary was expecting some kind of miracle even though, by all accounts, this would be Jesus’ first.  But Mary knew who he was, she knew that he’d finally begun his ministry, she knew he’d been baptised by John and had heard all about that whole scene with the heaven’s being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.  She’d met these men he’d been calling as his disciples.  Mary knew: it was time for the Messiah to start doing Messiah things and what better opportunity—and especially so if Jesus and his disciples were the reason why the groom was in this awful spot.

 

And yet, John writes, Jesus replied, “Oh woman!  What’s that got to do with you and me?  My time hasn’t yet come.”

 

What does Jesus mean?  He responds to Mary with a phrase that’s found quite a few times through the Old Testament.  Specifically, though, I think Jesus is deliberately recalling an episode from the ministry of the Prophet Elisha.  In 2 Kings 3 we read about the kings of Israel, Judah, and Edom.  They were on their way to do battle with Moab.  Their armies had been travelling for a week and had run out of water.  They were thirst—just like the wedding guests were about to be thirsty.  The King of Israel was wailing that the Lord had sent them out only to be defeated by the Moabites, but King Jehoshaphat—the King of Judah—told them that the Prophet Elisha was nearby and they should go to him and inquire of the Lord.  Elisha wasn’t keen on Jehoshaphat’s request.  “What’s that got to do with you and me?” he asks the King.  (Those are the same words Jesus says to Mary.)  But Jehoshaphat insists.  The Lord had sent them to battle Moab, but without water Moab would defeat them.  So Elisha finally relents to the King’s request and the Lord speaks through him: “You shall see no wind or rain, but the streambed will be filled with water…and he will also give the Moabites into your hand.”  And, sure thing, the next morning a nearby stream was filled with water.  Not only that, they defeated the Moabites just as the Lord had promised.

 

That Jesus adds that it wasn’t yet his time, I think highlights that what Mary is asking of him runs a very good chance of getting him into trouble.  Jesus hadn’t yet officially launched his public ministry, but doing what Mary was asking him to do would get him noticed and being exposed as Messiah—well—it was bound to spark opposition.  But I have to think that Mary knew her Bible and recognised Jesus’ echo of Elisha.  She knew he would do something and so she turns to the servants—again, this suggests that she was an insider to this family and was involved with the preparations for the feast—she turns to the servants and she tells them what to do with her own quote echoing the Bible: “Do whatever he tells you to do.”

 

Those were the words of Pharaoh to the Egyptians when he put Joseph in charge of Egypt.  Remember Pharoah’s dreams about the grain and the cows and how Joseph interpreted them to mean that Egypt was about to experience seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine.  Pharaoh was impressed with Joseph’s wisdom and put him in charge of Egypt.  For seven years the crown would store up as much grain as possible for the famine to come.  Pharaoh presented Joseph to the people and said, “Do whatever he tells you to do.”  And Joseph, because the Lord was with him, saved Egypt.  And now Jesus, because the Lord is with him, will save the wedding.  Like Joseph saving the Egyptians.  Like the Lord causing that dry streambed to run with water.

 

So, John writes, “Six stone water-jars were standing there, ready for use in the Jewish purification rites.  Each held about twenty or thirty gallons.”

 

Big stone jars.  This was the water used to wash people’s feet when they came in from the streets and it was the water they used to wash their hands before a meal and between courses, so that they would be ritually pure.  The jars were big and there were so many of them, because the water was usually poured into a mikvah—like a big bath that could be used for immersion.  Presumably these had already been emptied into the mikvah and were standing empty.  John writes: “‘Fill the jars with water,’ said Jesus to the servants.  And they filled them, right up to the brim.”  This was no small thing for them to do.  Did they have to carry the water to the jars or the jars to the water?  Whichever it was, there would have been a lot of heaving and grunting and it would have taken time to fill those six big, heavy jars.  But they obeyed.  Then Jesus said, “‘Now draw some out and take it to the chief steward.’  They did so,” writes John.

 

Surely they could see and smell the wine as they drew it out and you can imagine them running excitedly to the chief steward.  He was sort of the ancient Jewish equivalent of a wedding planner and head waiter for the wedding.  He had no idea that the wine had run out.  He was just wondering what had taken the servants so long to bring more.  John goes on, “When the chief steward tasted the water that had turned into wine (he didn’t know where it had come from, but the servants who had drawn the water knew), he called the bride-groom.”

 

The chief steward is confused.  This wine was good.  Really good.  Better than anything they’d served so far.  I’ll go so far as to say that since Jesus made it, it was probably the best wine anyone has ever tasted in the history of the human race before or since.  And so the steward went to the groom.  It was too late now, but he had to say it: “What everybody normally does,” he said, “is to serve the good wine first, and then the worse stuff when people have had plenty to drink.  But you’ve kept the good wine until now!”

 

I can only imagine the groom’s confusion?  What’s this guy talking about?  We did serve the best wine first.  And then he took a sip and was even more confused.  The steward was right.  This was the best.  In fact, it was better than any wine he’d ever had—certainly better than any wine he could afford, better than any wine made in Cana or even the whole of Galilee.  And what they’d find before too long wasn’t just that it was the best wine ever, but that there was no danger of it running out.  If you do the math, those six stone jars full to the brim with wine work out to about 900 modern bottles of wine.  Jesus never skimped, because God’s new creation is all about abundance.  Like the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, there was always plenty left over.  It pointed to the new thing God was doing in Jesus.  These miracles reminded people of God’s provision of manna in the wilderness, but whereas there was ever only enough manna for the day and anything left over would spoil, in Jesus God’s abundant provision was a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s God’s amazing grace.

 

John then wraps up his telling of the wedding saying, “This event, in Cana of Galilee, was the first of Jesus’ signs.  He displayed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.”

 

He displayed his glory—that’s kind of the theme of John’s whole Gospel.  And seeing his glory, the disciples believed.  I have to think others at that feast believed too.  The quality and the abundance of the wine—imagine the people of that little village scrambling for skins to hold all that wine so it didn’t go to waste—they saw the promises of God, the words of the prophets beginning to come true.  As it turns out, it was indeed Jesus’ time.  In the very next episode John tells, Jesus goes to the temple in Jerusalem and throws out the money-changers and the merchants and announces the coming destruction of the temple and a new one that he will build in three days.  There’s John reminding us about those three days again.

 

But the disciples.  Jesus had just been calling them.  First, Andrew and Peter, who had been disciples of John the Baptist, and then Philip and Nathanael.  And here, John says, they believed.  Just the day before Nathanael had said to Jesus, “You’re the son of God.  You’re the king of Israel.”  “Wait a minute,” Jesus said back to him, “Are you telling me that you believe just because I told you I saw you under the fig tree?  You’ll see a lot more than that!  In fact, I’m telling you the solemn truth.  You’ll see heaven opened, and God’s angels ascending and descending on the son of man.”  And see he did.  I wonder if Nathanael had any idea he’d see such great things so soon.  Again, John says that the disciples saw the sign and they believed.

 

That was the purpose of Jesus’ signs.  With each one he planted another signpost pointing his people towards God’s new creation.  This time the wine was the signpost, pointing to that feast for all the peoples, the feast of rich food, the feast of well-aged wines the prophet had foretold.  In Jesus the God of Israel was on the move—turning famine into feast, sparing his people from disaster, saving the day—leading the people towards God’s new creation.

 

Again, when John gives us details, they’re always rich with symbolism.  Those six stone jars for the rites of purification are one of those symbols.  The stone jars are symbolic of the law and of the old covenant.  Jesus doesn’t ignore them or smash them.  They served a good purpose.  Just as the old covenant was God’s way of preparing his people for the new, Jesus fills those jars with his wine.  He made them useless for their original purpose in order to serve a new and better one—to usher in a feast where no one would ever again have to worry about being unclean, because the son of God has shed his own blood to make us clean once and for all.

 

That’s the final sign in John’s Gospel. At the end—after Thomas has examined Jesus’ wounds—on the third day—John writes that “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which aren’t written in this book.  But these are written so that you may believe that the Messiah, the son of God, is none other than Jesus; and that, with faith, you may have life in his name.”  Jesus’ resurrection was the final and ultimate signpost.  Follow it in faith and you become part of God’s new creation yourself, washed clean by Jesus and filled with God’s Spirit.

 

And that brings us to a final point.  Those words of Mary, quoting Joseph: “Do whatever he tells you to do.”  Brothers and Sisters, believing—faith—produces obedience.  Obedience isn’t always easy.  Think of those servants and the big stone jars and 120 gallons of water.  It was through the faithful obedience of those servants that Jesus manifested God’s new creation at the wedding.  And so it is with us.  Brothers and Sisters, we have seen his glory.  Now we follow—we obey—in faith.  Kingdom work is hard work, but it is joyful work.  It's work that wipes away the tears of the people around us.  It’s work that brings God’s abundant grace to the lost.  It’s work that reinforces our hope.  God will surely set this broken world to rights as the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen, goes out—light spreading in the darkness.  But remember, it doesn’t go out by itself and more than that wine made it to the steward and the guests all by itself.  That’s why God’s called us—just as he called John to tell his story.  He’s forgiven us by the blood of Jesus and made us his own; he’s equipped us by filling us with his own Spirit, and he's given us—he’s made us stewards of—the story, of the gospel, of the good news.  We’re the servants joyfully carrying Jesus’ wine to the wedding guests that might rejoice and be glad and see his glory.

 

So come to Jesus’ Table this morning.  The Lord’s Supper is another of his signposts pointing to his kingdom.  Come and feast.  Eat his bread and drink his wine, then go out in faith to do whatever he tells you.  Go out to live and to proclaim the good news of Jesus the Messiah that all the world might see God’s glory.

 

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, in Jesus you have shown us your glory.  Strengthen us now that might be faithful stewards of your good news, going out in faith to make your gospel of glory known to the world.  Through Jesus our Lord we pray.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

With those words, Mark launches into telling the story of Jesus.  It’s gospel.  It’s good news.  Good news as in “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!”  Good news as in “Aslan is on the move.”  Good news as in the war is over and now we’ll know peace.  Good news as in the old tyrant has been run out and a new, good king has taken his place.  That’s what good news means.  Everything has changed because of it and life will never be the same.  Good news stand in contrast to good advice.  Try the new burrito place.  Go for a walk on the new trail.  Buy a Honda.  Maybe.  Probably.  But none of the burrito place, the trail, the Honda won’t change your life, let alone the world.  Good advice?  You can take it or leave it.  Good news?  Good news can’t be ignored.

 

And this good news, says Mark, isn’t any old good news.  It’s bigger than “the war is over”.  It’s bigger than Caesar has defeated his rivals.  This is the good news that in Jesus the promised and long-awaited Messiah has come.  And, Mark adds, that he’s the son of God.  To Jews that meant something different than it does to most of us.  To us it sounds like a statement of Jesus divinity.  But for Jews—well—“son of God” was Israel’s title—one the Lord had given them when he demanded Pharaoh let them go, one that he’d given them again at Mount Sinai.  So Mark’s announcement is that Jesus has come to represent his people.  That’s what king’s do.  And Jesus is the Messiah—God’s anointed King.

 

So right at the outset Mark tells us that this good news is the story of the Messiah, the King, who has come defeat the enemies of his people and to set everything wrong to right.  This good news is that the King has come and so has his kingdom and because of that, everything has changed.  And because of that both Israel and the gentile nations face a choice: Will they come in faith to the king and give him their allegiance or will they stand as enemies of his kingdom?

 

Centuries before, the prophet Isaiah declared, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace…happiness…salvation…who announces…“Your God reigns.”  When St. Mark thought of those beautiful feet he thought of John the Baptist.  He quotes another passage from Isaiah—one about the Lord sending a messenger to prepare his way.  And he quotes the Prophet Micah, too: “A shout goes up in the desert.  Make way for the Lord!  Prepare the way for him!”

 

That was John.  John had been sent to prepare Israel.  The Lord had heard their cries, as he’d heard them crying out from Egypt and from Babylon.  And he was coming to visit and to deliver again—this time once and for all.  The world was going to change forever.  And so, says Mark, John led the people out into the desert, to the banks of the Jordan River, and summoned them to be baptised as an act of repentance and a sign of forgiveness.  Picture  John, out in the desert, on the banks of the Jordan with all those people.  It was a prophetic reenactment of the crossing of the Red Sea.  And as so many people do when they’re sure the Lord is drawing near, the people confessed their sins.  And John baptised them.  Because they knew the God of Israel was about to do something amazing.  He was about to fulfil his promises.

 

The new exodus had begun.  And lest the people think that it was John who would lead them in this new exodus, he also announced:

 

 

And there it is.  That, Brothers and Sisters, changes everything.  Picture Israel again in the desert, their tents pitched in neat formation around the tabernacle.  Picture the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night at the centre of the camp.  Picture the cloud of his glory resting on the ark in the holy of holies.  God in the midst of his people.  But now John points to something even greater.  Instead of God living in our midst, but living over there in the tabernacle—and, more particularly, in the holy of holies where none of us can actually go because we’re not holy enough, God is now coming to live not just in our midst, but inside us.  As St. Peter writes, he’s building a new temple for himself and we ourselves are the blocks of stone he’s carefully cut and carefully fitted together.  In the first Exodus, the Lord took his people through the water, he gave them a law written on stone tablets, and he gave them priests to tell them to do it.  And most of the time they weren’t particularly good at living out that law.  But in this new exodus, Jesus leads us not only through the water, but in doing so he plunges us into his own Holy Spirit.  Instead of giving us the law on tablets of stone the Spirit writes God’s law on our hearts so that it’s not only internal, but so that we’ll actually be in love with it and motivated by it and want to do it—that’s the significance of it being written on our hearts.  And so we don’t anymore need priests urging us to do it, because we’ll have the Lord’s Spirit himself in us, making his desires our desires as we steep ourselves in his word.

 

This was the baptism Israel so desperately needed.  And so it was a surprise to John when Jesus came to him and asked to be baptised.  Jesus didn’t need to repent.  But as the King, as the representative of his people, he did need to go before his people—to lead where they would follow.  And so John agreed and Mark then writes in verses 10-11:

 

Another epiphany!  For Jesus this was divine confirmation that he was who he’d come to believe he was.  It confirmed the words of the angel to Mary and to Joseph, it confirmed the song the angels sang to the shepherds, it confirmed the prophetic words of Simeon and Anna, and it confirmed the worship and the gifts of the magi.  It was an epiphany for John, too.  Jesus really was the Messiah he’d been sent to announce.  And it was an epiphany for the crowd, for the people of Israel.  In Jesus, the God of Israel was truly visiting his people.  As surely as John had plunged them into the water, this Jesus would plunge them into God’s Spirit—and when that happened, nothing would ever be the same again.

 

For that brief moment, Mark says, the heavens were torn open and Jesus, John, and everyone else there had a glimpse of what was to come—of the kingdom, of God’s new age, of new creation.  It was like getting a glimpse into the closest where your mom had all the Christmas presents stored away—and you catch your breath and you get excited to think of what’s to come when the time is right to bring it all out.  Like Christmas morning—but Christmas morning is just a dim comparison—this was a glimpse of God’s coming kingdom—heaven come to earth—finally!

 

Brothers and Sisters, consider that the church—redeemed by Jesus and plunged into the Spirit—the church is now—or it should be—we are now that vision into heaven, we’re now that little pocket of God’s new age, his new creation—his future right here in the present.  We’re God’s new age in the midst of the old.  That, I think, is why the men who selected our lessons for the Epistles and Gospels put today’s Gospel from Mark with our Epistle from Romans 12.  Paul doesn’t put it quite this way, but what he describes in the Epistle is what it means to be on-earth-as-in-heaven people.

 

Today’s Epistle begins at verse 6, but I want to back up a few verses.  (We would have read verses 1-5 last week if we hadn’t shifted our observance of the Epiphany to Sunday.)  Paul starts out appealing to the Christians in Rome to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.  Why?  Because that kind of worship, he writes, is what line’s our minds up with God’s.  It’s a commitment to live as light in the midst of darkness.  It’s a commitment to live as the people of God’s new age in the midst of the old.  So he goes on in verse 3: “What’s more, don’t let yourselves be squeezed into the shape dictated by the present age.  Instead, be transformed by the renewing or your minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is—what is good, acceptable, and perfect.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, be the people of heaven who have been plunged into the Holy Spirit.  Be the people who embody God’s new world in the middle of the old one—because it glorifies God and because it witnesses his goodness and his faithfulness to everyone around us.  And what does that look like?  It’s going to be different in different circumstances.  This is something we have to work out for ourselves, but Paul shows us that we’re to work it out in light of what Jesus has done for us.  The Romans were struggling to be united.  Jewish and Gentile believers were turning away from each other and in doing that they were living like people of the old age, not the new.  So Paul writes to them: “As in one body we have many limbs and organs, you see, and all the parts have different functions, so we, many as we are, are one body in the Messiah, and individually we belong to one another.”  We can’t be the church Jesus has called us to be if we don’t offer ourselves humbly to each other.  Brothers and Sisters, what Jesus has done for us, we do for each other.  So, for example, think of the gifts that the Spirit gives us.  Paul writes starting in verse 6:

 

 

The list could go on and on and on, but this is enough for Paul to make his point.  The Spirit has worked in us—sometimes working with our natural gifts and abilities and sometimes giving us gifts we don’t naturally have—and he’s brought us together like a body.  Each of us has an essential part to play.  Arms and legs, hands and feet, eyes and ears, hearts and voice all working together towards one gospel purpose.  Think of Peter’s illustration again of the temple not made with hands, a temple with each stone carefully cut by the Spirit for a unique spot, and all of them—all of us—assembled together with Jesus as our cornerstone.  If we don’t all do the part we’ve been given and equipped to do, the body can’t function, the temple falls apart.

 

The prophet must prophesy and the teacher must teach.  The server must serve and the exhorter must exhort.  The leader must lead, the giver must give, and the doer must do—with cheerfulness and everything according to the pattern of faith.  In other words, remember that it’s all gospel work rooted in Jesus and the Spirit and the amazing, loving, gracious, and merciful work he has done in us.  Sometimes we forget the gospel as we work and the work becomes a chore and a burden.  There are all sorts of things in ministry that can be discouraging and we can be tempted to give up.  And so Paul reminds us to keep our eyes on the gospel—on the good news that the king has come, that he has made us part of his kingdom, and that we have the joyful privilege of being his stewards and heralds.

 

But there’s more to life together than spiritual gifts.  Elsewhere Paul writes about the fruit that the Spirit causes to grow in us.  In other places he talks about being conformed to the mind of the Messiah.  There are lots of ways we can describe the Christian life as we live it out together, but ultimately what we need to recognise is that being in Jesus and the Spirit changes us and living as changed people is part of being kingdom people.  Think again about being a little kid and getting a glimpse into the closet where the presents are stored until Christmas morning.  When the world looks at us—as individual Christians but even more important, as the church, as a group of Christians living together—it should be like seeing that closet full of Christmas presents.  Except in our case, it’s not a bunch of nicely wrapped packages; it’s a glimpse of God’s new creation—of his world set to rights.  Seeing the church ought to make people eager to be part of God’s new age.  Seeing us should make them long for Jesus and the Spirit too.  So Paul goes on in verse 9:

 

We don’t have time to cover each of these in detail, but again think of them in terms of giving the world a glimpse of Jesus and the kingdom.  We’ve seen real love in Jesus.  In him we’ve seen what it looks like to abhor evil and hold fast to good.  In him we get a sense of what it looks like to show honour to others rather than grabbing it all for ourselves.  We see in him what humility and lowliness toward others look like.  We—especially Gentile believers—have seen what Jesus’ hospitality looks like as he welcomes us in to Abraham’s family.  In Jesus we’ve seen the greatest example ever of what it looks like to bless those who persecute us.  And Paul ends this list in verse 21, writing, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, this is what it looks like to be faithful stewards of the grace of God and heralds of the gospel.  This is what it looks like to live the life Jesus has given us.  This is what it looks like to be people who have been plunged into the Holy Spirit.  This is what it looks like to be the new Israel, rescued from our bondage to sin and death and given hope for a new life.  We love each other as Jesus has loved us and as he specially equipped us to love, and as we do so we show our love for him, because in loving each other we are loving the people whom Jesus loves.  But it’s not just the Church we love.  Jesus was sent to redeem because “God so loved the world”.  We witness what love looks like as we love each other, but we also witness the love of God as we give ourselves for the sake of the world, as we give ourselves to be light in the darkness—even when the darkness is hostile and seeks to snuff us out.  In Jesus, God overcame evil with good and we are called to be his witnesses by doing the same.  And so let us proclaim the good news: Repent, for the kingdom of God has come.  But let’s also show the world that this is good news, not just good advice.  Let’s ourselves live in light of the knowledge that Jesus and the Spirit have changed everything.  Let us be heaven-on-earth people so that when the world looks at the church, it sees heaven torn open, so that it has a glimpse of God’s new creation.  May the life of the church, redeemed by Jesus and filled with the Spirit, cause everyone around us to give glory to God.

 

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in the baptism of Jesus you revealed him to be your Son and you anointed him with the Holy Spirit.  May we who are born again of that same water and Spirit, we ask, be faithful to our calling as your children by grace, living and manifesting in our lives the love and mercy you have shown to us as we proclaim your kingdom.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Ephesians 3:1-12 & St. Matthew 2:1-12

by William Klock

Imagine the magi, the wisemen, on their long trek from “the East”—from Persia—to Judah.  They followed the trade routes through deserts and through cities, through mountains and across rivers for weeks.  Oasis to oasis, city to city, village to village to make their way to Jerusalem, to King Herod’s palace, and eventually to Bethlehem.  And they carried those expensive gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  They were astrologers and they had seen a star.  They knew all the stars, but this one was different.  I wish we knew what made it so different, but we’ll have to wait to find that out.  However they worked it out, that star told them the King of the Jews had been born, and so they made this long trek, not just to visit this new king, but to worship him.

 

Now, consider that Jesus was hardly the first King of the Jews, but as far as we know, no Persian magi ever visited those others when they were born.  Something extraordinary had happened this time.  Maybe these men had studied the Israelite prophets.  It’s not a stretch to think that they’d met Jews and heard of their scriptures.  However they knew it, these men knew—again—that something extraordinary had happened, so they came to pay homage to this foreign king.  In the ancient Near East that meant that they worshipped the king’s god.  Maybe they knew, maybe the star was heralding the birth of Israel’s God in human flesh.  They had to know something, otherwise it makes no sense.  Judah was a conquered nation.  The King of the Jews was a loser—and so was his god.  That’s how people in that world thought.  But somehow these men knew—I wish Matthew had been more specific—but somehow these men knew that this was no ordinary king.  And so they made this long trek to honour him and to give glory to his god.  It was an epiphany: God made manifest in Jesus.  First to his own people, represented by the shepherds we read about on Christmas, and now made manifest to the gentiles, represented by these kings from the East.

 

We’ll come back to magi and to our Gospel, but first, listen again to St. Paul in our Epistle, Ephesians 3, as he writes to his brothers and sisters in Ephesus:

Ephesus was a predominantly gentile church that Paul had started when he visited the city on his second missionary journey.  Now he’s writing to them some years later as he sits in prison, having been arrested for proclaiming the good news about Jesus.  He goes on:

This was, as we say, Paul’s “thing”.  This was for him the great secret or mystery—the great, earth-shattering revelation that changes everything.  We might say an “epiphany”.  For Paul the great secret was first the revelation that Jesus really was the Messiah, but then when he’d had the chance to work through all the implications of that great truth he was confronted with this one: “the gentiles are to share Israel’s inheritance.  They are to become fellow members of the body, along with them, and fellow sharers of the promise in Jesus the Messiah.”  Most people would have thought this was a thoroughly un-Jewish thing to say.  Even that it was blasphemy that gentiles—unclean dogs!—were coheirs with the people of God.  A few of them, sure, but only after they’d been purified and circumcised and committed to observing torah.  And then they weren’t really gentiles anymore.  But Paul’s realised that, in fact, once you get the story of God and Israel straight, it would be hard to come up with anything more Jewish than this conclusion that the gentiles are, in Jesus, fellow heirs, members of the same body, and part of Abraham’s family.  This is what the story was working towards all along, even though hardly anyone realised it anymore.  As he says as he continues, ministering this truth was his calling:

 

The Jews of Paul’s day had got their own story wrong and no longer had any sense that “salvation is for the Gentiles”.  As far as they were concerned, they were God’s people, God cared about them, God would deliver them from their oppressors and put them on top, and one day he would rain down destruction on all the unclean people of the word.  Salvation was for the Jews, they might have said.  Even those first Jewish Christians were still thinking in this vein.  Jesus was their Messiah.  There were a few gentiles who believed, but they had to first become Jews.  And there were the Samaritans who believed.  That was a challenge to this kind of thinking, but until Paul, no one seemed to have this vision of the deliverance, of the salvation of the Gentiles—at least not on a large scale.

 

The irony is that today we’ve made the opposite mistake.  We’ve so dehistoricised, flattened out, and universalised the story that we’ve all but forgotten that “Salvation is from the Jews.”  “Salvation is from the Jews.”  That’s what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman and it ought to ring in our ears too.  Those words ought to remind us of the great story of the God of Israel and his people.  St. Paul writes in today’s Epistle to explain his unique apostolic ministry to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles.  It has been my experience that many Christians have never stopped to consider just how odd Paul’s ministry would have seemed at the time.  They’ve never stopped to think, because we have largely removed the gospel from its narrative and historical context and we’ve unnecessarily flattened it out to communicate its universal nature.  Sometime we need to stop and remember that, even though “God so loved the world,” it is also true that “salvation is from the Jews”.  That might not seem important, but think again of the big story.  Out of a world that had lost all knowledge of him, the Lord chose and called Abraham and from him created a people whom he made holy and in whose midst he lived.  He gave this people his law and his presence and made them unique amongst the nations.  And he promised that through them he would save his whole creation.  So Jesus was born a Jew—one of those special people.  He was the Jewish Messiah.  He fulfilled the Jewish law and the words of the Jewish prophets.  He proclaimed good news about a coming kingdom and a coming judgement to Jews and for Jews.  And while gentiles were welcomed when they came to him, he made it clear that his ministry was to his own people.  The evangelists lay the blame for Jesus’ death with Jews.  The gentiles had their part in it—hinting that they would eventually also have a share in his salvation—but it was Jesus’ own people who betrayed him and demanded his death.  Even in his death by crucifixion, Jesus foreshadowed the means of execution that the unrepentant Jewish rebels would face when judgement came a generation later.  Jesus literally took the death of his people on himself in that sense.  It cannot be stressed enough that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, lived and died for the sake of the Jews and to bring their story to its climax in fulfilment of God’s promises.

 

We can’t just skip all that to get to John’s announcement that God so loved the world that he gave his Son, because when we do that, we short-circuit the story, we leave out most or all of the bits that show us how God, in Jesus, has been faithful to his promises made under the old covenant.  And in that, we cast a veil over his glory.  It was necessary for Jesus to fulfil the story of his own people, because only then would the Gentiles see the faithfulness of Israel’s God, be drawn to what they saw, give him glory, and in the process be incorporated into the new people of God by faith.  In this, too, we see that the means by which the Gentiles are incorporated into the new Israel fulfils the message of Israel’s prophets and glorifies the Lord.  While it is certainly true that a dehistoricised and flattened gospel has brought millions to the Lord Jesus, it is also true that communicating the gospel within its context better communicates the faithfulness of God as the basis for our own faith with a greater depth and builds upon a firm foundation.  In contrast, our evangelism today, rather than centring on proclaiming the faithfulness of God, is centred on our needs and wants.  Our culture is obsessed with the therapeutic, with feeling good and so we’ve tailored our gospel.  And it’s not wrong to talk about what God, in Jesus, does for us, but if that’s the focus, we end up with a small and truncated gospel.  Brothers and Sisters, when we get the gospel the right way round; when we make the gospel about the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus, the gospel is so much bigger, so much greater—so much more powerful.  What we see in Paul’s ministry—and what we see especially in Revelation—is the gentile nations being drawn to the God of Israel by the revelation of his glory in Jesus the Messiah.  In the New Testament, the gentiles come to Jesus, because in him they see a God who is faithful and worthy of glory—a God unlike anything or anyone known in the pagan world.  Again, Christians today need to understand just how weird Paul’s ministry would have seemed in his day—even, at first, to the other apostles.  Again, most believed that the good news about the Jewish Messiah was for other Jews, and of little interest (or even relevance) to gentiles.  Jesus radically changed what it meant to be the people of God, but in many respects, it was not until St. Paul emerged from his wilderness sojourn that this dramatic change was really grasped by the fledgling Church.

 

Of course, Israel’s ministry to the Gentiles was there all along.  The Lord set Israel apart before the watching nations.  She was to be his witness.  Through her he would restore and reconcile humanity to himself.  But as Paul points out in our Epistle, this “mystery” was largely lost on Israel.  And yet there it was from the beginning, all the way back in Abraham’s day—if anyone was paying really close attention—that the Lord’s intent was to one day bring the Gentiles into his family and to make them fellow heirs with those who were children by birth rather than adoption.  This truth had been revealed by the Spirit to the prophets of old and, in the same way, had been revealed to the apostles—who took some time to parse it out—and to Paul it was a personal commission: to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles.  Paul adds here that this mission is not simply to ordinary people, nor is it a matter of personal piety.  As Gentile believers come into their inheritance in the Messiah, the Church becomes both a witness and a challenge to the rulers of the Gentile world.  This diverse body of Jews and Gentiles of every sort, living in unity the inheritance given them by Jesus, announces that he is Lord and that a new age is breaking in.  Just as was the case with Israel, the lords of the earth can submit in faith to the lordship of Jesus or face the judgement to come.

 

Now, let’s go back to today’s Gospel, Matthew 2:1-12, which dovetails with what Paul has written in the Epistle.  Here’s the truth that Paul writes, manifest in the story of Jesus.  Matthew writes:

While St. Luke recalls the events of the night Jesus was born and shows us the shepherds visiting one of their own, one who will follow in the footsteps of David as both king and shepherd, St. Matthew tells of Jesus’ birth in passing and puts all the emphasis on Jesus as King.  Wise men, these astrologers from the East, have seen a heavenly sign that heralds the birth of a king in Israel.  They desire to worship him and to give him gifts.  As I said earlier, they knew that this was no ordinary king.  There had been no star heralding Herod’s birth.

 

So naturally, they looked for the King of the Jews in Jerusalem.  Herod knew nothing of the birth of a king, but was politically astute enough to recognise the political nature of the magi’s claim and paranoid enough to take action.  Matthew makes it clear that if Jesus is indeed the King, then Herod was not.  Again, Matthew emphasises the kingship of Jesus in the report of the priests to Herod.  They cite Micah 5:2—and it’s not clear if this is their paraphrase or Matthew’s—but they point Herod to Bethlehem.  And yet, in the paraphrase we see again an important bit of context.  Micah speaks, not of a universal king per se, but of one who will be king over Israel.  This king will shepherd the Lord’s flock—a bit from verse 4 that the priests add to their paraphrase of verse 2.  The Messiah is the King of Israel.  It is only once Micah has established that the Messiah will be King over Israel that he goes on to tell us that this King “shall be great to the ends of the earth” (5:4).  Both the Magi and the priests highlight Jesus’ kingship specifically over Israel.  Again, “salvation is from the Jews”.  It is because Jesus is King of Israel, in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises through the prophets, that the good news about him goes out to the Gentiles.  The magi are the first, who foreshadow the future.  Matthew bookends his Gospel with Gentiles.  Here the magi come at Jesus’ birth, Gentiles come to worship a very uniquely Jewish king and to give him glory.  And at the end of the Gospel, Matthew records the commissioning of the disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations”.  The good news is only good news to the Gentiles because it reveals that the God of Israel is unlike the gods of the nations: he does what he says he will do and he fulfils his promises to his own.  Think again of Revelation and how the nations there, the nations that worshiped the beast and frolicked with the great prostitute, discovered in the downfall of the beast that the kings and gods of this world can’t hold a candle to the God of Israel revealed in Jesus, to his power and might, and most importantly, to his faithfulness.  Specifically, he fulfils his promises to his people in Jesus.  It is this faithfulness just as much as the amazing report of Jesus risen from the dead and the defeat of his enemies that draws the Gentiles to give glory to the God of Israel and to submit in faith and to give their allegiance to Jesus, the King of the Jews.  Of course, this carries the same ramifications for Caesar and the other rulers and gods of this age as it did for Herod.  This is what Paul stresses in the final verses of our Epistle.  Their days are numbered, for as the royal summons to the King goes out, Jesus “shall be great to the ends of the earth”.

 

Brothers and Sisters, the gospel about Jesus is good news, because it reveals the faithfulness of God.  He does what he says he will do.  He fulfils his promises.  He does so like no other.  And that’s reason for us to trust him, to give him our allegiance, to worship him and to give him glory.  And to proclaim his good news to the world.

 

I want to close with the Collect for today, because it offers a wonderful comparison between the magi and ourselves.  They were drawn to Jesus by sight and we by faith, and so we look forward in hope to the day on which we, too, will see his majesty on full display.  It’s the prayer of Gentiles who have seen the glory of the God of Israel revealed in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.  It is a thanksgiving for what God has done in Jesus, creating a new Israel in which the Gentiles are fellow heirs, and it looks forward in hope to the day in which Jesus will set the cosmos to rights and will be revealed in all his glory as both King and God.

Let’s pray: O God, who by the leading of a star manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: mercifully grant that we, who know you now by faith, may at last behold your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.