Not Native—A Meditation on Matthew 1:1-17
This week, I was thinking about how the book of Matthew starts, and meditating on what it means for me and my neighbors to read that text. I've talked and written about the passage before, but it became clear to me that I've often glossed over what may be the most significant feature of the text for me, and for many readers like me, a feature which seriously affects our experience of reading the text: the names are weird. Of course, "weird" isn't an objective term, but names something important, even if subjective, that we experience in reading the Bible, particularly in texts like the genealogies. These texts are just chock full of names that are weird to me, that would be weird in our culture. By my count, of the 48 names in the genealogy, only about 10, a fifth, are regularly used by people in our culture. For every Jacob in the list that sounds familiar, there is a Zadok, a Jotham, an Abiud, a Nashon, and a Salathiel. My wife are in the process of picking baby names, and there is no way on God's green earth she would let me use about eighty percent of these.The fact of this unfamiliarity becomes abundantly clear in any type of group reading setting. Almost any reader will struggle through pronouncing all the names on the list, which makes sense given that nobody in our churches knows anybody named Jeconiah or Zerubbabel.So what does that unfamiliarity do to us? I think it reinforces to us that we are non-natives when it comes to the world of the Bible. Even those of us who grew up hearing the names in Sunday School have to admit that for all our time as visitors to the Bible, or even as immigrants who have lived in its world, we are still a bit out of our own water.It strikes me that this has long been true of Christian readers of the Bible, at least since Cornelius, the first non-Jewish convert. After all, I suppose many of these Semitic names would have sounded strange to the Gentile Christians of Rome, Ephesus, and Athens, just as they do to me. Even in those cosmopolitan centers of the Mediterranean world, the gospel message was cross-cultural, wrapped in strange and foreign garb. Quickly translated into greek, these Hebrew names signaled to our early brothers and sisters that they were joining a story that arose in another people, with another language and another culture. And yet, somehow, they found a home in that foreign text. They willingly immigrated to the narrative world of the Bible, learned to speak its language of faith, and made some version of it their own.Even though we often ignore it, it's a good thing to be reminded of the foreign weirdness of the scriptures from time to time. First, it reminds us that we have some translation work to do if the gospel is going to be intelligible to our neighbors—they may not be as used to moving through the Biblical weirdness as we are, glossing over the odd names and applying the bits and pieces of cultural information we've picked up along the way.Second, it keeps us from pretending that we own the book. We take a little too much ownership of the Bible sometimes; it can be our way of domesticating it, pretending that we are fully aligned with it. In reality, we are always learning what it means to live in its world. Hearing and recognizing the weirdness of the names may also prepare me to read with humility and a little healthy caution about my ability to easily and naturally understand what is happening in these texts that come to me from another culture.Finally, recognizing the foreign character of the scriptures prepares me to have a more cosmopolitan faith, one that can be conversant with other cultures besides my own. Recognizing that my faith is really an ancient Hebrew-Greek faith spoken in a Southern American accent prepares me to hear that faith spoken in other accents as well. The faith of the Bible is not an American faith, at least not in origin. So, when I hear other accents struggling to pronounce the genealogies, I can lay down any presupposition of superiority, knowing that I too had to learn how to say names like Hezron and Abijah, and that I too am a non-native to the language and faith of the Bible.I have much to learn.
Are You the One?—A Sermon from Matthew 11
We humans invest. We invest our time, energy, and money in projects, people, and plans for profit. We’re looking to get all kinds of things back from those investments, but most of us end up making a mix of good and bad investments along the way. Sometimes it’s hard to tell how they’re going to turn out.Lots of people invested in Jesus while he was on earth. For some of them, it was the investment of time in trying to go hear him, or just see him pass by—Zaccheus started out like that, even though he ended up much more heavily invested by the time the story was over. Some were invested in things Jesus was opposing—the religious and political elites of Jerusalem were heavily invested in the temple, and no doubt felt that investment was threatened by the way Jesus talked about the temple and acted when he came to visit it. Others were invested in different ways: Peter talked about having left everything behind to follow Jesus, and one time Jesus told him he was going to end up with a pretty good return on that investment.But I don’t know if anybody was more invested in Jesus than John the Baptist. It seems like John could have had pretty good life following the priestly calling that he was in line for. But instead he spent most of his life in the wilderness—Luke tells us that he was living there even before he started preaching (1:80), and if anything the Bible says about John is to be believed, it was anything but a plush, cushy lifestyle. Jesus says as much here in Matthew 11—John lived the prophet’s lifestyle in the desert, far from the fine robes people would have found if they had gone looking in the palaces. He was out in the wilderness, living a life of denial, decked out in rough looking clothes, eating locusts and wild honey, and all of it was investment in the kingdom of God.John was ready for a new king, and believed that a new king was coming, and that his work was to prepare the way for that king. Everything he did has to be read against that backdrop, from where he located himself in the wilderness on the other side of the Jordan, (a place that was home to many revolutionary movements) to his practice of calling people to repentance, and symbolically cleansing them in baptism, so that God would graciously forgive the people and send the true king to bring in the new age that Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah and the other prophets had promised. John believed that in all this work, he was preparing the people for God’s true king, the messiah—and he believed that Jesus was that messiah. With John’s prophecies against Herod, he was totally invested in God’s kingdom, but even more specifically, he was totally and fully invested in Jesus.John went all in for the sake of the kingdom, pushing all his chips to the center of the table by calling out the current king of the land. Herod had the stamp of approval from Rome, but John proclaimed that there was a higher authority that either Herod or Caesar. Herod was living against the law, and thus against God—he was not the true king. And, believing that in Jesus the time had come for Herod to be replaced, John spoke out openly against Herod. Herod took that prophetic word for what it was—not simple moral exhortation, but a treasonous rejection of his kingly authority, which was a dangerous sort of thing for a popular prophet to be saying. And so John sat in prison in a place called Machaerus, with his execution looming ahead of him.So, you can understand John’s confusion at this point in the story. There he is in prison, shackled by the king he believes Jesus will replace, and yet...no sign of when Jesus will make his move. Who knows what John really expected, whether to be freed by Jesus and his followers as they seized Judea, or to have his death vindicated by Jesus as he took power, or something else entirely, but there’s no question about this: John was fully invested in Jesus. He hadn’t hedged his bets, or held anything back. Either Jesus was the real deal, or John had gone way out of his way to waste his life. The ascetic lifestyle, the hard prophetic ministry, his imprisonment and impending execution—if Jesus wasn’t really the messiah, it was all a waste.So you can understand the question. You can understand how he would want to know, and would send messengers to make the journey to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one? Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”Some people don’t like this story. They think it’s awkward for John, a spirit-filled prophet if there ever was one, to have doubts about Jesus. I suppose it is a little strange. In the end though, John’s role wasn’t to know the whole story, or every detail of how things would work out, but to prepare the way for God to act. In the end, John had done the work God had given him. John had played his prophetic part, and the rest was beyond him. I suppose he was okay with that; after all, he doesn’t ask Jesus for a detailed battle plan, or a missionary prospectus. Still, he wanted to know, was it all for naught? “Are you really the one, or not?”Jesus answers with a collection of images from Isaiah, “the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news brought to them.” I suppose a simple yes would have done the trick, but Jesus wants John to know that indeed, God was at work, fulfilling a plan that had been around a long time before John walked out into the desert. John may have been more invested in Jesus than anyone on earth, but God had been planning and investing in this mission for a long time. God began investing in the mission in creation, and continued to invest after the fall. God invested in his mission of redemption when he made the covenant with Abraham, and through the lives of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. God invested in his mission in Egypt at the Exodus, at Sinai, and in the same wilderness where John went to work. God had invested during the times of Joshua and the Judges, and continued to stick with his investment during the lives of Saul, David, and Solomon. God continued to invest in the kingdom by sending prophets to proclaim justice and judgment, holiness and hope. Now, in the work of Jesus, in the ministry of Jesus and of course in his eventual death and resurrection, God would become as invested as possible in the project of redeeming the world. Through the spirit at work in the church, God has continued to invest in mission, and even as we gather here this morning, God’s spirit is at work. John may have been the most invested person on earth in Jesus’s mission, but the truth is, God had been investing in that mission for a long time. Even when it feels like we have everything on the line for God’s mission, we do well to remember that God’s been investing in it a lot longer than we have, and is more deeply committed to the redemption of the world than we could ever be—even at our best.We humans invest. And when we’ve invested in something, whether it be a project, a person, or plans for profit, we’re typically looking to get something out of it. We have investment expectations. Over the years, many have invested in God’s kingdom, and I know many of you have too, and that’s a beautiful thing, but it comes with a danger. When we invest in something, we want to have some control over it, and the more we’re invested, the more control we want to have. Sometimes, because of things that we see at work, or because we’ve gotten a good hard, honest look at a piece of scripture we hadn’t paid attention to before, we find that our expectations are at odds with God’s mission. And in that time, something very, very important happens. We have the opportunity to rethink, to revise, our understanding of God’s mission. We have the opportunity to ask, “Whose mission am I really invested in?”
The Sending—A Sermon from Matthew 10
As we’ve been walking through Matthew’s story, we’ve walked with Jesus through several episodes that reveal his authority. Jesus teaches with authority and orders around demons with authority. He claims the authority to forgive sins, and points his finger at the sky and demands that the storm obey him. The people in the story who get it are the ones who understand his authority, and either come to him humbly, needing his authoritative action, or who obey his call to follow. The ones who get it are the lepers and tax collectors, the blind and the lame. They are the ones who, apparently conscious of their own brokenness, recognize the authority of Jesus to do something about it. We’ve been seeing the story through their eyes, and our attention and focus have been centered on Jesus.And then, here in chapter ten, there is a startling turning point in the gospel. Like a skilled filmmaker who suddenly changes the focus of a lens, bringing what was blurred in the background of the shot into clear focus, Matthew reveals that he is not simply telling the story about Jesus, but about his disciples. They’ve been there the whole time—following Jesus from synagogue to synagogue, town to town, house to house. They’ve been watching him teach, hearing him proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and then they’ve watched him act out that sermon by healing the sick, casting out demons, and offering forgiveness. They’ve been here the whole time, but always in the background. But now, Matthew twists the lens, and they suddenly jump from the background to the front of the story.It’s one of those moments that makes you go back and rethink the movie. Everything Jesus has been doing now becomes a rehearsal for what he’s calling them to do. Notice what he tells them in verses 7-8: “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” It sounds a lot like what Matthew’s been telling us Jesus did, doesn’t it? It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely go on learning from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. The last few chapters have been a barrage of stories that demonstrate that Jesus has authority—now he gives it away. “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority…”This provokes a new, different kind of faith question. Up until now, all the stories have been about what people believed Jesus could do for them:“Do you believe that I am teaching you the truth?”“Do you believe I can heal your servant?”“Do you believe I can protect you from this storm?”“Do you believe I can forgive you?”It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely learn from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. As somebody in our small group said last week when we read those words, and were imagining what it was like to be sent on that mission by Jesus, “These are life-changing words.” Now, all of a sudden, the question for the disciples is not “What do we believe Jesus can do for us?” but “What what do we believe Jesus will do through us?” That is a tremendous difference.But even while we recognize the difference, it’s important to recognize that even though this is a different kind of question, it’s still a faith question. It’s not a question of what the disciples are capable of in and of themselves. Jesus can’t give them authority unless he truly has it himself. There isn’t even a question of the gospel beginning at this point—this moment depends on their faith in everything that’s happened before this. Matthew doesn’t begin in chapter ten, (and there’s no Acts without Luke). Christian mission is never about what we are capable of or not—it’s about what God is capable of. It exists in the tension between what God is at work doing and what we are at work doing. But both of those work together—God is at work through us.The challenge implicit in all of this is: “Are we ready to be agents of the gospels?” Are we willing to take on the mantle of what Jesus was doing, and take his mission to be our own? Are we content to be recipients of the gospel, or are we ready to become participants of the gospel?That’s an important question in the gospel, one that I think is implicit in this story. And normally, this is the point in the sermon when I would dramatically hold out my hands and ask you to seriously consider that challenge...but not this week. At this point in the gospel, in chapter ten, we’re still not ready for it. This story, where Jesus sends his disciples out to replicate his ministry, is incomplete. Sure, the mission as it is would be enough to keep their hands full, and it’s full of the gospel—but it’s still an incomplete gospel. After all, the story Matthew is telling doesn’t end here, but ends in another sending story, what we call the great commission. Matthew is a tale of two commissions, or two sendings, and what happens between the two is incredibly important.So far, Jesus’s disciples have learned about his power, but they have not yet seen him become powerless. They’ve seen him in strength, but not yet in weakness. Between the two commissions, stands the truth of Jesus’s suffering. Before they can receive the great commission, they have to follow Jesus on the road to the cross—and so do we. Because it’s on that road that we finally can experience the full gospel of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection—the gospel that we are called not only to receive, but to participate in.
Kingdom Come: A Sermon about Matthew's Genealogy
He was the "Son of God", the "bringer of Good News", the Lord, the Savior, the one who would restore order and justice to the earth—at least that was Rome's official story about Caesar. History also seems to look favorably on the Pax Romana, and in many ways, that version of reality isn't that far off. The Roman Empire brought relative peace, wealth, and stability to many in the mediterranean world.However, there was another side to life in Caesar's world. Beneath the heel of the empire were whole peoples, exploited for the empire's sake, hopeless to fight back against the efficient military machine of Rome's storied army. In Palestine, a particularly dark cloud hung over the recipients of Caesar's "good news". The Jewish people living in Judea and Galilee lived in a world in which power was king—and they had none of it. They had always been a proud people, and once a powerful nation, but now lived under another flag. Over and over again they rose up to resist the Empire, trying to beat the empire at its own game by asserting their own power—and they failed miserably. Rome brutally asserted its power over what was, to them, a strategic territory filled with a stubborn, irritating, and irrational people. Religious leaders based in the temple used divine distinction to stoke the fires of resentment that justified bouts of armed revolution. Many a would-be leader rose to fame by resisting the Romans, claiming divine consent for their revolutionary attempts to throw the pagans out. Certainly not everyone joined in the violence, but everyone felt the force of Rome's response to it. To some it was an empire of peace, but to others, it was an empire of violence.Also, while it was an empire of wealth, it was also an empire of poverty, built on the backs of slaves and enslaved nations. Wealth drifted upward, and the few who controlled land or other means increased their assets while the poor became poorer with each generation. Some of the most recent historical work is trying to move beyond simple binary descriptions as elite/nonelite or haves/have-nots, but even still, the best estimate show that between 75-97 percent of the population in the roman world lived in poverty, if that is defined by living at or near subsistence level.Beyond that violence and turbulence, the economic conditions were tough as well. Under the empire and its elite accomplices, a small minority controlled land, food, and wealth. Although historians are working to get beyond simple distinctions like elite/poor, the best estimates now are that somewhere between 75% to 97% of the population across the empire lived in poverty—meaning at or below subsistence levels, with very few resources. Palestine, having been rocked by violence and dependent on agriculture, was worse off than most areas. For many of the Jews of Palestine, life under the Roman empire was anything but a life of wealth—it was a life of poverty.As far as stability goes, Rome knew that it needed local leaders who sought to keep the people in check, and found more than enough who were willing to become accomplices to the empire's power in exchange for a few of the empire's coins. These imperial elite played a dangerous game, negotiating the terms of the relationship between the people and the empire. When the people were pushed too far, revolution erupted. When the empire's power was too openly challenged, the military convincingly crushed the opposition. The imperial elites danced between these two, trying to keep both parties reasonably content in the effort to maintain their own power, and often failing. Thus the people of Judea and Galilee faced a cycle of would-be revolution, followed by crackdowns, growing dissatisfaction, and new uprisings.Caesar promised a world of peace, wealth, and stability. For many of the people living in Jerusalem, Judea, and Galilee in the first century, the reality was a life of violence, poverty, and turbulence. Is it any wonder that many of the people were anxious for a change? Caesar's world was a world where power stood in the place of justice, where influence held more sway than righteousness, and where rich and the poor were nearly destined to become richer and poorer. Depending on who you were, you either hoped it would go on forever, or hoped and prayed that God would intervene, and remake the world into something else.The book of Matthew grows out of the latter perspective, and is thoroughly subversive to the empire. It begins with the assumption that this is not Caesar's world. It is God's world, and God has been active in it a lot longer than Caesar could imagine. The book's opening line, "The book of the generations of Jesus Christ" calls us back to Genesis, to the story of God creating the world and of God's relationships and promises to the patriarchs. It points toward the language Genesis uses to introduce its own narrative ("The book of the generations of the heavens and the earth" Gen 2:4), and to move to new phases of the story. (5:1, 10:1, etc.). Matthew uses it here to let the reader know that he is about to tell about a new phase in that same story. He does all this because he wants us to know, from the very beginning, that this is not a narrative set in Caesar's world—it is God's world, and Caesar is just living in it. Beyond that, the genealogy is a substitute for a formula such as "in the days of Caesar Augustus...", and gives the story of Jesus it's primary context, which is not in the history of the Roman empire, but in the narrative of God's covenant people. He is the son of Abraham and the son of David, being born in this moment of the story of God's people.Matthew marks the significance of the moment by structuring his genealogical list into three periods. There is the period from Abraham to David, one from David to the Exile, and from the exile to the moment of Jesus. Abraham, David, the Exile, represent critical moments in the story, and by noting the time, Matthew is underlining the importance of Jesus. Matthew 1:17 points out the symmetry of this for the reader, "Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ." The only problem is, Matthew's math is wrong. 
Most of the time, we don't notice stuff like this because we read the Bible too quickly, but if you count up the named generations Matthew lists, the numbers should be fourteen, fourteen, and thirteen. Now, to be clear, I don't think that's a mistake—ancient authors loved to play with numbers in settings like this, and I feel certain that Matthew is doing this on purpose, somewhat playfully. I think he is setting us up to look at the story and ask, "Who comes after Jesus?" It's a great way to open his book, because the rest of the gospel really teases out this question, as Jesus recruits disciples, teaches them about a new way of life, and then eventually charges them to do the exact same thing, replicating their experience of discipleship throughout the world. The genealogy is therefore connected with the rest of Matthew's story, right up to the end, where Jesus gives the great commission, "Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Matthew's gospel, from the genealogy to the commission, points to the question, "Who comes after Jesus?" and, I think, to an answer.The answer is "us." We are the descendants of Jesus. Ultimately, Jesus's work is producing a sustained community that lives consciously under the reign of God—a community of which we are now a part. In our living as disciples of Jesus we find ourselves in Jesus's story, and the mission of his life become our mission. We continue his story. We are the fourteenth generation.Abraham Lincoln once said, "Some folks worry about who their ancestors were. I am more concerned with who my descendants will be." Matthew's story shares that concern, and even the genealogy, which seems to look back, looks forward to the fulfillment of Jesus's mission. As we take our part in that mission, may we look forward to its fulfillment as well, and trust that to that end we will be used by God, for God's own glory. Amen.
Matthew's Genealogy and the End of the Exile
After reading N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I read Matthew's genealogy a little differently this morning.
Reflecting on the way I normally read Matthew's first chapter, I think I have typically read the counts that Matthew offers as simply being about the persons involved—Abraham to David, David to Jechoniah, and Jechoniah to Jesus. I've typically thought about that as one of the playful ways that Matthew, like the other gospels, shows that Jesus is in fact the Messiah. I suppose that reading is fine as far as it goes, but this morning a new layer seemed apparent.One of the insights from Wright that I found extremely helpful was the perspective that Israel still thought about itself as in exile into the new Testament period—indeed, for many Jews, long after that period. The spirit of the day was one of waiting for the promised day of Israel's full restoration from exile. (There is so much more to be said about this.)Reading Matthew with that perspective fresh on my mind, it's clear that the counted generations are not there simply to highlight certain people, but also the periods between those persons. So you're looking at the period leading up to the Davidic kingdom, the period of the rule of the Davidic kings, and the period of exile during which those kings lost their throne.What seems to me to be extremely significant in that reading is that by Matthew's reckoning, Jesus then represents the true end to the exile, the inauguration of a new period in the Davidic kingship. This doesn't deny my normal way of reading the text, but certainly shifts the emphasis towards what is happening with Israel in the coming of Jesus.