Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Bible Readings :-
What we have to understand about Jesus is that he wasn’t the wet drip of modern liberal thought, but one who challenged, one who upset the status quo, one who asked the award questions about his time and pointed out to society precisely where it had failed and who was responsible for this failure. That’s why eventually he was murdered by the leaders of the society in which he lived. Matthew, wrote his Gospel in the aftermath of the failure of the Jewish Revolt (66-70) against Rome, with its appalling aftermath for the Jewish people, his own race as he witnessed the Christian faith go out to pagans. He would reflect the character of Jesus throughout his gospel with one word ‘skandalon’, scandal in English, but largely lost in our translations, as it is replaced by mealy-mouthed phrases such as ‘do not lose faith’ or ‘take offence’ or even ‘a stumbling block’, none of which capture the sharpness and power of the Greek world in which Jesus was born, lived out his life and died; a scandal to temple Judaism and its leaders. Matthew wrote his great love-song for his Lord as the tragedy of this collision and its results unfolded, and anyone reading his Gospel must be alert to the sharpness of the edge with which he will present his picture of Jesus the Galilean suspect Jew, the one who relentlessly took Judaism to task and died for it. As we dig deeper into Advent, we need to open ourselves up to the ‘real’ Jesus, lest we simply let this Christmas become one more of the same, a sugar-coated occasion with little meaning for our world.
We would be quite wrong to think of Jesus as a ‘one-off’, for the story of Israel’s great prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea and their like was one of their consistent harsh criticism of the Jewish people and their ruling elite, despite the prophets playing such a significant part in the religious and political thought of the ages. Our Reading from 1st Isaiah (35:1-5.10) and repeated regularly by this prophet looks for the redemption of a purified Israel, here after exile in Assyria, and sees this in terms of the restoration, even resurrection, of the poor and outcast of the land, the blind, deaf, lame, dumb those the ‘righteous’ deemed ‘sinners’ and rejected by God. For Isaiah, this was also to be a time of God’s vengeance, though upon whom it is not entirely clear, and in quoting this passage Matthew’s Jesus significantly omits this threat. What these prophets all looked forward to was radical change, usually social change, a new world in which the downtrodden were respected and given a place in society; something echoed in Mary’s Magnificat.
In our Gospel, (Matthew 11:2-11) we find Jesus in the full swing of his ministry; miracles abound as does teaching as we find in his great rethinking of Jewish teaching in his Beatitudes, here developed between Matthew Chs.5-7, with a personal application and edge which rejects the box-ticking of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus has met John the Baptist on a number of occasions, and receives his disciples as John awaits execution by Herod. John desperately waits to have confirmed that Jesus is the one so long expected, and Jesus replies quoting our Isaiah passage. But John is to make up his own mind on the basis of the evidence. ‘Tell John what you hear and see.’ The upshot will be ‘Blessed is he who is not scandalised in me.’ Clearly, that radical rejection of the Temple and its elite, we observed last week in the Baptist, is alive and fundamental in the ministry of Jesus. Indeed, Jesus pressed this dramatic parallel home by his question about John and his desert ministry away from Jerusalem: John is not a reed swaying in the wind (empty grass, meaningless preaching); nor a rich man, but a prophet and ‘Much more than a prophet’. He is the one who heralds the coming of the Christ, yet he himself is nothing – a witness merely to the power of God the Son. This heralded Saviour and Redeemer of Israel is without parallel precisely because of who he is and who he comes from; all previous prophets and holy men fall into insignificance in relation to the Christ. Lest we fail to recognise the significance of this moment, Matthew immediately continues with what amounts to Jesus’ curses on the Jewish cities of Galilee, and praises the powerful trading pagan cities of Tyre, Sidon, and even that byword of depravity Sodom! So this is a dramatic and radical moment of division in this gospel, a moment of discovery and rejection, a moment when all hearing Jesus’ words are called to account and confronted with the truth about the Christ and the message that he brings; and anyone looking for a gentle, meek and mild Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel is going to be disappointed, and I suggest scandalised.
Our Reading from James, (5:7-10) read as we have it today and the work of a superb rhetorician who it appears cleaned up the writing of the apostle, dead in the early 60’s CE could come over simply as a diatribe against the rich and advice to keep on the straight and narrow. Yet, when we remember the work of all those Old Testament prophets, many of them martyrs who espoused the cause of the poor and outcast perhaps we have to recognise that ‘James’ was speaking to a Christian community grown established and comfortable with itself – rather like ours today- and possibly divided between those ‘in’ and those ‘on the edge’. Possibly wealth, issues of leadership and power were things foremost in this community, and James, pedantic as he is, makes his point in appealing for ‘patience’, or what the Greek has as ‘long-suffering’, which possibly has more to do with keeping the faith alive, renewed and alert, than simply putting up and shutting up as we await the consummation of all things. After all, the coming of the Lord at Christmas is but the beginning of every man, woman and child’s great journey to God.
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