Matthew 9:18-26 - Thinking Like a Historian

Most New Testament scholars are convinced that Mark's Gospel was the earliest of the four gospels and that Matthew and Luke drew heavily from it in writing their own gospels; and this passage is often cited as evidence to support the "Marcan priority" theory.  Matthew's author edited down Mark's version, tightening up the story, but the literary form here of a story within a story is more typical of Mark.  Also in Mark's version, when the woman touches Jesus' cloak, he asked, "Who touched my cloak?"  The author of Matthew apparently didn't like the implication of Jesus' ignorance and dropped the question, making Jesus more all-knowing.

Matthew also inserted a couple of things that aren't in Mark, and it is worth speculating why.  For one thing, Matthew makes a point of the disciples following Jesus when he goes to the home of the synagogue guy, a detail not found in Mark.  Also, at the end of Matthew's version, there is an editorial comment stating that the story of this healing was told all over the place.  How come?  Why insert the disciples going along and making the point that the healing of the guy's daughter was well-known?

Just maybe the compiler/author of Matthew felt that she or he had to justify the inclusion of these two stories in his or her gospel and did this in two ways.  First the author provides the original source of the story, the disciples.  They were there.  They saw these events.  We have, thus, a reputable source (and a footnote!) for the stories.  The author makes the point, furthermore, that the story of the daughter being healed was widely known to explain to the gospel's audience that the story was reputable and not made up.  It was fact not fiction.  It was widely known.  Jesus really did this sort of thing and everyone knew it.

In other words, it is possible that the author was citing sources so that his or her audience understood that the gospel contained verified, trustworthy data.  Any good biographer or historian would do nothing less.

Matthew 9:14-15 – Doing Something New

These two verses offer us a glimpse into the religio-political landscape facing Jesus.  The Pharisees were mostly traditionalists, and they would eventually be a key faction in the resistance to him.  There evidently was also a John party, which would have been a reform party, but here the author/compiler of Matthew places the “John-ites” closer to the Pharisees than to Jesus and his “party”.  At, least they are here presented as sharing the Pharisees’ criticism that Jesus’ disciples didn’t fast, which they took to be an important marker of true piety.

Some scholars have argued, however, that Jesus originally was a disciple of John, which explains his baptism at John’s hands.  If so, however, Jesus made it abundantly clear, according to the gospel, that he was no longer associated with John and his band of disciples.  He referred to himself as the “bridegroom” that Israel had been waiting for, that is the Messiah, and so it was a time for celebration not fasting.  There would be time for fasting later when the bridegroom was to be ripped away from the people, which was a foreshadowing of things to come.  In the meantime, Jesus also asserted that he represented something entirely new in the history of the Jewish people.  It could not have been made any clearer.  Jesus was a party onto himself, intentionally so.

How did our little church that we’ve been imagining hear this vignette in the gospel?  What value did it have for them?  The basic message seems clear enough, namely that Jesus represented something new and different, something that fell outside of the boundaries of typical religious practice with all of its expensive ceremonies, rites, and practices.  I'm not sure that the fasting thing was a big concern with the members of this congregation.  They were mostly poor and sometimes fasted out of necessity not as a religious practice. We will remember from the sermon on the mount, moreover, that Jesus in any event frowned on fasting as being mostly for showing off one's piety.  But the message of newness, reinforced in verses 16-17, would like have resonated with them.  They "joined up" because Jesus represented something different, which offered them hope, comfort, and a way to get beyond just coping with a hard life.  That is likely what they heard and why these verses resonated with them.

That being said, I do have to be careful to not claim that the compiler/author of the gospel had a Gentile audience in mind.  Many scholars believe that it was addressed to Jewish Christians, probably especially those living in Palestine.  I am assuming, however, that this gospel proved invaluable enough that copies of it soon circulated much more widely and reached a much larger audience within the Jesus Movement.  That must have been the case.  Otherwise, why did it become so prized across the early church that it became just one of four gospels to be included in the New Testament?  There were dozens of other gospels circulating in the churches, but Matthew came to be valued above all of them excepting only three others (Mark, Luke, John).  It circulated more widely, I assume, because verses like these hit home for Gentile followers of Jesus as well.

Matthew 9:9-13 - Key Story

In Matthew 8-9, the compiler/author of Matthew was working on two supremely important questions: (1) who was Jesus' target audience? and (2) what did he want from that audience?  These are issues that would have greatly concerned that little first century urban congregation that we've been imagining.  They were new followers of the Way and members of the working class poor who had joined the Jesus Movement because it spoke to them in their daily struggles.  But, they were still figuring things out and had a lot of questions.   They must have listened to the gospel with rapt attention precisely because it addressed their questions and gave them some answers.

Up to this point, the gospel has posed and begun to answer the question of, "Who is this guy?" (Mt. 8:27)  He was, as we've seen, most especially a Rabbi of serious power, power over nature, demons, and sin.  He was a healer as well as a teacher.  So, a picture was coming into focus.  But, members of our little church were still listening for a clear answer as to what this meant for them.  Were they part of the story?  Was Jesus speaking to them?  And, if so, how should they respond?

This passage, Matthew 9:913, provides answers to these questions.  First, what was expected was faith, the kind of faith that doesn't ask questions—the kind of faith that hears Jesus' call and says, "yes," on the spot, closes down the office, and follows the Master.  Second, this passage also answered the question as to who could follow Jesus.  In it, Jesus hobnobs with tax collectors and others of that ilk.  When some Pharisees complained about this to his disciples, Jesus responded that he was like a merciful doctor with his patients.  They were ill and needed his care.  That's who he had to associate with.  Jesus then quoted the prophet Hosea to make the point that he didn't begin his ministry to participate in rituals but to address the needs of "sinners," so called.

Did the members of our congregation feel that they fit in here?  As people who lived in the bottom rungs of society and certainly did not have the money to participate in the religious life of their society with all of the sacrifices to the gods that involved, they may well have felt that the appellation "sinners" fit them.  They may also have believed that their poverty and the lack of respect it entailed was a consequence of their own moral shortcomings.  Their "betters" certainly thought that was the case.  If that was the case, then these poor folks would also have felt that their poverty and lack of respectfulness was their own fault.  And in that context, they would have heard this story as a bombshell of comfort and hope:  "Jesus is powerful.  He is also merciful and came to heal and free people just like us—outcasts (see the TEV translation) living on the edges of society.  Whatever our condition, he is the way through it to a better life."  The stories of a merciful and powerful Jesus touched people who lived in a harsh, very real world and gave them hope.  They responded by putting their trust in the Rabbi and each other.  It is hardly surprising, then, that the Jesus Movement became the most popular and powerful religious movement of the late Roman Empire.

Matthew 8:29 - Son of God

Before moving on to Matthew chapter nine, I would like to linger for a moment on the title the demons used with Jesus, "Son of God."  Modern readers, whether devout Christians or not, are almost surely going to assume that the demons were addressing Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity, the divine, pre-existent God-Jesus who has been the object of Christian faith and devotion for many long centuries.  But that's not how the small, urban first-century church we've been imagining would have heard this title.  We can't be sure, actually, how they heard it or what it meant to them.

Bart Ehrman in his book, The Orthodox Corruption of the Church (Oxford University Press, 1993), points out that there was great theological ferment and diversity among Christians in the first three centuries of the church.  He writes that some Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries believed there is one God, others believed in more than one.  Some thought Jesus was only human, others that he was God and human (including some who thought that he was only temporarily part God), and some thought that he wasn't human at all.  They didn't even agree on whether or not Jesus' death on the cross was for salvation.  Some even believed that the biblical God is evil—and, yet, all of them were followers of Jesus.

When early Christians, thus, heard the term, "Son of God," some would have associated it with the Jewish Messiah, others would  have heard "merely" a term of respect for Jesus.  Still others would have seen it as a sign that God worked through Jesus or maybe temporarily inhabited Jesus.  And some may well have simply assumed that, since they were all God's children, that this was just a fancy way of pointing to Jesus' humanity as another son of God.  We don't know.

The important point here is that a modern-day Christians by-and-large read the Bible on the basis of a whole host of assumptions that have nothing to do with the ancient text(s) or the time in which they were written.  Those assumptions represent Christian traditions that developed in later centuries, which now are frequently treated as if they have the force of scripture themselves; and all they do is make it less likely that modern-day readers will wrestle with the meaning of the biblical text.  We feel that we don't have to wrestle because we already know what the Bible means—supposedly.

My sense is that the Spirit speaks through the Bible best when we wrestle with it, question it, and try to make sense of it in its own time and since then.  And, for me personally at least, the best way to wrestle with the text is to try to put it back in its original siz im leben, place in life.  That is nearly impossible, of course, but even so and with some imagination as well as research and reflection (and humility) we can still discern important some tangible, ancient meanings.  What a great challenge!  Amen.

Matthew 8:28-34 - Jesus' Powers

The little first-century urban church that I have been imagining to try to understand how the Gospel of Matthew was understood in its own time was a Gentile church.  Its members were almost surely new to the Jesus faith.  They would have been mostly poor and with little education.  One wonders how they would have understood the story about healing two demoniacs in Matthew 8:28-34.  Did they know enough Palestinian geography to know that the story took place in Gentile territory, not Jewish?  What did the title, "Son of God," mean to them?  It, apparently, was a Jewish messianic title.  Would they have known that?  Had they ever heard the Gospel of Mark read or even know about it with its very different version of this story (Mark 5:1-20)?

I raise these questions because this story in 8:28-34 must have required a more than passing knowledge of "things biblical" in order to be understood by first-century audiences.  The title, "Son of God," is a particularly important one.  In the first century, it did not mean that Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, the whole trinitarian thing having yet to be worked out.  In a Jewish context, it was a term for the Messiah.  But, how would a Gentile audience have heard it?  Their background was not Jewish, and I'm not sure just how much background they had in Jewish theology.  Something like, "Son of God," was applied to the Roman emperors of the day.  What did they hear when the demons proclaimed Jesus to be the Son of God?

Let me offer a possibility.  The demon's declaration comes in the midst of three stories about Jesus, which display his power and authority.  As we have seen in Matthew 8:23-27, Jesus had power over the storms, over chaos.  In this story, he has power over demons.  In the next story, 9:1-7, he has power to forgive human sin.  Nature. Demons. Sin.  That's a lot of power!  It certainly places Jesus in a category all by himself, one that puts him a lot closer to God than anyone else.  The title, "Son of God," in this context thus could have meant to our little church at least that Jesus had divine-like power and authority that came from God.  They could well have thought of him as being human-plus, something more than merely a human being.  They already knew about his resurrection, and this story must have served to reinforce a deep reverence for Jesus, the Christ.  And our little church would have taken great comfort in his divine-like power over the forces of chaos, evil, and sin.

In sum, our little church may not have known a whole lot about the Jewish context of the story of the demoniacs, but that may not have mattered very much either.  The basic message of the gospel as they heard it read to them was clear enough, and it reinforced their experience of Jesus as being practical, life-changing good news for them individually and in their life together as a community of faith.

Matthew 8:23-27 - Who is This Guy?

That little church in some city of the Roman Empire that we've been imagining heard the Gospel of Matthew read to them.  Their congregation would have acquired  a hand-written copy, probably on loan, and then one of the few literate members would have read it to the rest.  Scholars theorize that they probably heard it read in one sitting so that the order of its contents was very important.

Thus, in Matthew 8, the author told stories about Jesus' prowess as a healer and then in the midst of those stories observed that following Jesus was difficult.  He was the suffering servant and they had to share in that condition.  In other words: yes, Jesus, was a miracle worker and had a great compassion for the suffering of the people, but if you're going to follow him (and be a member of a church) you better temper your enthusiasm with the reality of what discipleship really means.

Then comes this story in Matthew 8:23-27 about Jesus' calming the storm.  How does it fit in with the flow of what came before?  What connections did the gospel's auditors make?  We can imagine that they heard, for one thing, that Jesus' disciples didn't seem to have all that much trust.  They also surely would have grasped the symbolism of the story: the storm stood for chaos, the chaos of their own realities.  They themselves would have gone through chaotic times when the ship of their life felt like it was sinking.  So, there were those disciples of Jesus, supposedly the heroes of the Jesus Movement, and when push came to shove they panicked and displayed a whole lot of a lack of trust in Jesus.  Jesus was clearly disappointed in them.

This following Jesus thing really isn't easy.  Even the best of us come up short.

The key to this story is verse 27:  Everyone was amazed and asked, "Who is this guy?  Even the forces of nature obey him."  Who is this guy?  In the context of the flow of the gospel, this was the question that the miracles posed and that, indeed, the whole gospel asked.  This was the fundamental question facing the disciples themselves as they experienced Jesus.  This, the author was telling her or his audience is the central, basic, and inescapable question posed by the story of Jesus, namely the question of his true identity.  Discipleship is a journey of discovery of who Jesus is and, just as important, what it means to live in trust of him in the midst of life's chaos.

The miracles reported in the gospel did not prove that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity.  They didn't "prove" anything.  What they did was raise the question of the identity of Jesus.  People witnessed what he did, and they could not help but ask, "Who is this guy?"  The life of faith is a journey of discovery.

Matthew 8:18-22 - Defining Discipleship

Jesus' followers in the first century understood that being the Messiah was no picnic.  They either witnessed Jesus' struggles directly or knew of them from people who had.  Thus, we saw in Matthew 8:17, the author cites the suffering servant passage from Isaiah 52 and 53 to describe the true nature of Messiahship.  The next verses, Matthew 8:18-22 follow up with a warning to the faithful that being a disciple is no picnic either.  Jesus here is portrayed as being homeless with the clear implication that the "teacher of the law" who said he'd follow Jesus anywhere better be prepared to be homeless, too.  Then, another disciple said that he was with Jesus 100%—but, oh, hey, Dad is dead and I really need to see to his funeral arrangements.  Sorry, but I gotta do this first.  Then, Jesus, I'll be right there with you.  Jesus' response was that discipleship means putting everything else second including the most important and pressing duties and relationships.  Jesus was the suffering Messiah.  His disciples were expected to suffer with him.

The message to the gospel's audience is clear.  Joining the Jesus Movement does not mean that your problems are all over.  Discipleship means making sacrifices.  We can speculate that the author may well have had those in mind who jumped on the Jesus bandwagon, all enthused and fired-up—only to give it up when things got tough.  Following Jesus meant a re-ordering of priorities that could be hard sometimes.  It meant a new way of living that didn't make you any better off financially, in fact it could cost you income.  If you're poor and living in a Roman urban center when you join up, you will still be poor after joining up.

Why would people have joined the little, mostly urban churches of the Jesus Movement in the face of such warnings?  As I've said before in this series, they became followers of Jesus because it made a difference in their lives, at least for most of them most of the time.  They learned that their discipleship was not a way around problems and challenges, but it was a better way through them.  They may not have had a larger income, but they had a richer life.  It was a life that demanded humility rather than the prideful arrogance of the Pharisees, which generally worked better than a dishonest pride.  Following the Jesus Way was nine times out of ten a better way to live and to work through the problems and challenges of life.  Nothing is 100%, but Jesus' way was a better way.

So, bring it on, Jesus.  We'll sleep under the stars with you.  We'll let someone else bury Dad.  We're game to give your way a try.  That's the attitude that the gospel called for.

Matthew 8:16-17 - The Suffering Servant Messiah

The Gospel of Matthew is not a biography of Jesus.  It is a first-century description of how his followers made sense of him, which is historical but not historiographical in our modern sense of a critical study of the past using modern research methods.  It does, nonetheless, offer us insights into what the Jesus Movement about Jesus, that is its Christology.

On the face of it, this brief bit of commentary in Matthew 8:16-17 seems to portray him as a miracle worker and a healer who had become very popular as a result.  The early church, however, had learned that this profile was only one side of the coin.  Jesus' own teachings about who is great and who is not, his intense struggle with the Jewish power structures, and the paradigm-shattering events of his death and resurrection—all of this had convinced his earliest followers that he was not your standard miracle-worker Messiah.  The Spirit was doing something very different in him.

The earliest church began as a Jewish sect-movement, and it was only natural that they thought Jesus was the Messiah—and maybe something more than that, but that's where they started.  However, he didn't fit the usual image of the Messiah.  There had been no army of angels.  He was not a conquering hero in the usual sense of the term.  So they turned to the (Hebrew) scriptures to sort things out, and one of the places that helped them make sense of Jesus was Isaiah's prophecy concerning a different kind of Messiah, namely a suffering servant who was humble, seemingly weak, despised by the powerful, and yet took on the suffering of the people and healed them (Isaiah 52:13-53:12).  It is that prophecy that the author of Matthew cites here in the midst of several stories about Jesus' prowess as a healer.  Jesus really was humble, seemingly weak, and despised by the powerful.  On the cross, he took on their suffering.  And he healed them, as these stories demonstrate.  The inescapable conclusion was that God's Messiah, no question.  The author's research into the scriptures proved the case.

The gospel is not a biography, but that does not mean that the compiler/author did not conduct research in writing it.  In fact he or she, did a great deal of research especially in collecting and collating the stories contained in the gospel.  She or he also did the necessary secondary research into the scriptures, and from this research crafted a cogent, well-argued portrait of Jesus, the Messiah-plus, a portrait the churches have long believed shows evidence of the Spirit.

The Spirit can be present even in the work of researchers.  Amazing.

Matthew 8:5-13 - We Belong!

Let's continue to sit with that small Jesus Movement congregation that we have imagined as being composed of new followers situated in some urban center in the eastern Mediterranean; and imagine them as they listened to the story of the faithful Roman army captain in Matthew 8.  What did they hear?  Why was the story in the gospel in the first place?

There were several reasons, to be sure.  But it is likely an important one was that they would have heard an affirmation of themselves as valued, accepted followers of Jesus even though they were Gentiles.  It is clear from the Book of the Acts that the whole idea that Gentiles could be part of a Jewish-inspired religious movement was controversial, and it took some time and conflict to work things out.  It is entirely reasonable to think, then, that one reason the author/compiler of the gospel included this story was to reassure the gospel's Gentile audiences that they belonged, were valued.  After all, Jesus himself commended the Roman soldier's profound trust in his authority.

Now, certainly, the story taught them about more than that.  It was also about the very nature of faith itself.  It was about the power and authority of Jesus.  It was also about the political conflict between Jesus and the power-players of his day.  But the meaning of the back end of the story (vss. 10-12) is stark and blunt: lots of Gentiles from places like Persia to the east and Rome to the west will have their place in the Kingdom while many Jews, who should be the first citizens of the Kingdom, will be thrown out on their ear.  We belong!  That is one thing, maybe the most exciting thing, the members of our little church would have heard.  Jesus died and was risen for us.  That was good news worth sharing with others.  Race doesn't matter.  Social status doesn't matter.  Not to Jesus.

We are the heirs of the Jesus Movement, and one key element of our heritage is the understanding that Christianity is not tied to one race, ethnicity, culture, or class.  It is universal in the sense that anybody so inclined can follow Jesus and be welcomed into the family of the faithful.  We haven't always lived up to this ideal, which is an understatement; and far too often we have tried to make Christianity a Universal Religion, that is the totality of the way the Spirit works in our world.  Having been given the freedom of the Kingdom, we've spent a lot of our time trying to take it over and make it exclusively ours.

Still, that is not all we have done with our inheritance.  We have also fought against racism, ethnocentrism, and the other -isms that divided the human race.  It is still our heritage to celebrate the differences and distinctives that make the human race the diverse, endlessly fascinating thing that it is.  We belong means that They belong.  I belong means that You belong even if You don't speak my language, look like Me, or come from where I come from.  This is a precious inheritance.  Amen.

Matthew 8:1-4 -- Mark's version is better

So, we begin a new section of the gospel, which features Jesus' healing miracles just as the previous section (Matt. 5-7) featured his teachings.  The compiler/author begins this section with what can only be called a strange healing, a head-scratcher of sorts.  The story has Jesus coming down from the hills with a large crowd following him and then, without any transition in the story a man "with a dreaded skin disease" kneels before him and tells Jesus that if Jesus wants to he can heal this guy.  Jesus said he did want and then did.  And then, Jesus tells him to go to a priest, get himself certified as clean, and then sponsor a sacrifice—but, says Jesus, don't tell anyone.  Don't tell anyone?  What happened to the crowd?  And, why not tell anyone?  Isn't the whole point of Jesus' ministry to communicate good news of liberation by word and deed?

Scholars struggle to answer these questions, but at the end of the day there's something a little unsatisfying about this story whatever their explanations.   There is just one loose end too many however we cut it.  It helps, I think, to check out the earlier version of the story in Mark 1:40-45.  There the tale is much the same except for the ending.  In Mark, the guy who is healed went off and, having been ordered to be silent, proceeds to tell everyone and their uncle about Jesus.  In fact, he talked so much to so many that Jesus couldn't walk through town without being swamped by the crowd.  Instead, he had to go out into the country-side, and even then large crowds flocked to him.

Some scholars argue that Matthew drops Mark's ending because it is disrespectful of Jesus, a kind of undercutting of his authority.  The healed guy is more or less shown to be the star of the story, praiseworthy for his faith in Jesus and for his enthusiastic evangelistic endeavours in spite of the fact that he failed to do what Jesus instructed him to do.  The compiler of Matthew, so this argument goes, simply couldn't accept this diminishing of Jesus,' authority.  We don't know if this speculation is correct, of course, but if it is it only serves to underscore a point I made in a previous post (here) that Matthew reflects the thinking of a particular party within the early Jesus Movement.  It was a party that was already moving toward a more exalted view of the person of Christ.

But I like Mark.  Jesus' sanctity didn't need defending; and what is impressive in the story is the kind of fearless, open faith he excited in the man.  And Mark's story makes more sense.  The reason it has Jesus admonishing the guy not to tell anyone he's been healed is to highlight the extent of his subsequent elation.  Being healed of a "dreaded skin disease" was a big deal.  He had been exiled from home, family, and community and forced to live a degraded existence.  Suddenly, he could go home.  He was free!  Amazing!  Awesome!  He was so fired-up, so elated that he just couldn't keep what happened to him to himself.  He had to tell the story.

Piety isn't all it is cracked up to be.  It can be so straight-laced, so worried about right thinking, and so protective of its doctrines that it quashes things that matter because they don't seem to be pious enough.  Mark is ambiguous.  Matthew isn't.  And it is in Mark we get a happy, almost hilarious description of true faith in Jesus—a faith so exuberant that it won't let even the Rabbi himself silence it.  That seems contradictory.  It is counter-intuitive.  It is so typically human.  Mark thus celebrates what Matthew frowns on as wrong, bad, un-Christian.  Spoil-sport!  Mark's version is better.  Amen.

Matthew 8-9 - Another Dimension

Where Matthew 5-7 is widely recognized as a unit, the so-called sermon on the mount, chapter 8-9 are not as often seen that way, at least by the average reader.  But they are.  The author, having set forth a compendium of Jesus' teachings, now provides us with a series of examples of Jesus' skills as a healer.  In the summary statement at the end of the section (9:35-38), the compiler/author observes that Jesus had a two-fold ministry, teaching about the Kingdom and then demonstrating its reality through healing.  The author then avows that Jesus did all of this because he was profoundly touched at a gut level—the meaning of the Greek word, esplanchnisthē (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη)—by the pitiable state of the people who lived in anxiety and seemed to be like lost sheep in need of a shepherd.

Where Matthew 5-7 summarized Jesus' teachings to those in need, we now move into a section of two chapters (8-9) that show how Jesus responded to their needs, which was to alleviate their suffering.  In our terms, Jesus was both a prophet and a humanitarian.  The point of concern here is not with miraculous healing per se.  In the first century, people believed in such things and concerned themselves with miracles for what they demonstrated, which was (holy) power and authority.  In this case, his miracles actually demonstrated a deep concern on Jesus' part to alleviate suffering, and if the author's portrait of him is correct Jesus does not seem to have been concerned with proving anything about himself.  He exercised holy power and authority on behalf of people in need.

In later years, Christians became fixated with the power and authority of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  They pointed to his miracles as proof of his divinity.  Then, still later, doubters and skeptics ridiculed the whole idea of such miracles as being largely Christian propaganda and superstitious nonsense.  The first century message so clearly set out in Matthew that Jesus taught and healed out of a prophetic and humanitarian concern for the Jewish people of his day was largely lost, especially when it came to the healing miracles.  Insisting, thus, that the miracles "really happened," literally, as described in the Bible misses their point entirely.  They are not a proof of the truth of the Christian religion and the Bible.  In the first century, they knew that miracles took place and nobody argued that point.  In our age, whether we "believe in miracles" or not is irrelevant to the message of the gospel and obscures its original intent, which was to emphasise that Jesus was not your ordinary attention-grabbing charlatan.  If Matthew is an accurate portrayal of Jesus, he was not motivated by power or the desire for attention.  He was "the real deal" because of his compassion for others, demonstrated both in the way he taught and in his ability to heal others in dire need.  Amen.

Matthew 7:28-29 - Blown Away

Matthew's compilation of Jesus' teachings that we call the "sermon on the mount" concludes with these two verses (7:28-29), which state that "the crowd" had their minds blown away by his teaching. He knew what he was talking about unlike the teachers' of the law who, apparently, seemed just to be blowing smoke most of the time.  That comparison is important because it was about politics as much as about religion, there being no distinction between the two in that era.

As we read through the gospel, I've been making some noise about its political nature and implications.  Partly, we need to be reminded that it contains real world stuff, CNN headlines material.  Partly, as we can see here, Jesus' political context clearly mattered to the compiler/author .  These two verses are not from Jesus himself.  They are editorial material that claim to represent the thinking of "the crowd".  They don't have to be here, but here they are; and 7:29 makes it clear that the public was comparing Jesus to the religious big shots and finding the big shots wanting.  Those big shots were as much political leaders as they were religious teachers, and very soon they would begin to react to what they perceived as Jesus' challenge to their power (see Matt. 9:3).  If the author didn't think this political stuff wasn't important, he or she wouldn't keep reminding us about it.

One thing that made Jesus so politically potent was the mind-blowing way in which he spoke.  The Greek word that I've translated as "mind-blowing" here, according to Biblehub.com, is ekplésso (ἐκπλήσσω), which means being utterly amazed, dumbfounded, or left at a loss for words by something that causes one to gape in astonishment. In first century Palestine, a country-bumpkin self-appointed rabbi stepped out on thin ice when he blew the minds of his audience.  That made the powers that be look bad and, more importantly, suggested that the rabbi could become a political player, an agitator of the public.

We can imagine that small church in some city in the eastern Mediterranean listening to the gospel being read for the first time and thinking to themselves right about now, "Oh, oh, this could be a problem."  Their interest would have been piqued.  They knew the outcome, but not the details.  Now, things started to make sense.  The gospel was revealing to them the first steps on the way to the cross.

Matthew 7:13-27 - The Real Jesus

The Jesus Movement was, obviously, about Jesus.  It began as a Jewish sectarian movement, which quickly spread beyond Judaism—to Samaria and into Gentile territories.  It was a movement, which meant that it was only loosely organized and no one was really in control.  Being part of such a movement can be an exhilarating experience—and it can be worrisome because things can get out of hand.  These passages remind us that one of the reasons the compiler/author of Matthew wrote the gospel was because things were getting out of hand.  All sorts of ideas about Jesus were being bandied about.  Some taught that he was just a rabbi, though a very good one.  Others claimed he was super-human to one degree or another.  And there were many other positions in-between.

The author, in this section of the gospel, wants her or his readers to understand that the Jesus presented in the gospel was the real Jesus.  Don't listen to other renditions of him!  If you do, you are not walking through the narrow gate.  You are building your house on sand.  You are eating sour fruit, and on That Day Jesus himself will reject you.  Not everyone who proclaims Jesus' name is worthy of listening to or following after.  Follow the Jesus you find here in this gospel!

Matthew was a party document.  It was a reasoned, persuasive presentation of one understanding of who the "real" Jesus was, which eventually became part of the basis of orthodox Christianity in the early church.  It's Christology became an expression of the standard theology about Christ, which is why we still have it today.

The point is that Matthew can be (and was) a "party document" and a place in which we hear the Spirit speaking to us.  We believe that God was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, but that does not mean that God was/is/will be incarnate only in Jesus.  Incarnation, instead, is the way God the Spirit is present with us, working in an amazing array of ways to inspire us forward.  I know I've made this point already, but we need to remind ourselves regularly that the whole idea of incarnation means that the Spirit works through human beings and their institutions, languages, cultures, and life ways to the end that we willingly, independently have faith in God.

So, among other things, the Spirit is present in and speaks through a first-century document written originally to put forward one faction's views of Jesus.  Thank God.

Matthew 7:13-27- Dualism

Matthew was written at some point in the late first century, 1,900-plus years ago.  The complier/author's goal was to present a selection of the sayings and doings of Jesus useful to the churches of the Jesus Movement.  The author did not have us in mind.  She wrote for his time, not ours.  Understanding that we are not going to get any closer to the actual Jesus than the three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, & Luke), we need to read them critically and even selectively.  Not everything in there is helpful to us today.

Speaking personally, one of the things I find difficult is the dualism of the whole of the Bible, both testaments.  We see that dualism in today's passages.  There is a narrow gate and a broad one.  There are healthy trees and fruit-less ones.  There are those who will enter the Kingdom and those wicked people who will not.  Wise individuals build on rock, stupid ones build on sand.  There is good; there is evil.  Nothing in between.  Right - Wrong.  The Kingdom - hell.  Wisdom - Folly.  Nothing in between.  This is dualism, and dualism is a human ideology.  Dualism is about building walls.    Dualists deal with opposition through judgment, pointed debates, oppositional politics, and even violence "when necessary."  Dualists do not compromise because compromise is a sin.  They do not dialogue, because the "bad guys" have nothing to say that they want to hear.  Their goal is victory, often enough at any price.  Us vs. Them.  That's all there is.

So far as I can see dualism, as a human ideology, is often the antithesis of the teachings and actions of Jesus.  In his acceptance of the poor, he violated one of the fundamental dualisms of his day, the distinction between the wealthy/righteous and the poor/sinful.  He took pity on and healed the sick—in a time when illness was understood to be a symptom of God's displeasure.  He touched lepers.  He called a "sinful" tax collector to be one of his inner circle of disciples.  He had a very different attitude about another one of the basic dualisms of his day, the distinction between ("superior") men and ("inferior") women.  He even let women sit as his feet, a place normally reserved for male student/disciples.

Now, we take the point in these passages: there are wolves among the Jesus Movement sheep, advocating untenable moralities and theologies.  False prophets were making Jesus out to be someone he wasn't.  But we can't help but wonder who the compiler/author thought fell on the negative side of these dualities.  Who were the bad guys who took the easy way out and built their houses on sand?  Baptists, maybe.  Catholics?  Buddhists?  LGBTQ'ers?  Democrats?

My beef with dualism is that, for one thing, it simply doesn't reflect our human reality which is much more complex and where everything falls along continuums rather than at the two polar opposites.  For another thing, it leads to prejudice, arrogance, a contentious spirit, judgmentalism, meanness, bigotry, and a whole lot of violence.  The ultimate symbol of dualism is the Klan hanging black males for crimes they did not commit.  It is the horrific ideologies that led to World War II.

Dualism was a fundamental, unquestioned, supposedly common sense ideology of the ancient world. It is hardly surprising that we find it in the Bible.  That doesn't mean we have to buy into it.  So far as I can see, at least, the Spirit of Christ transcended it.  Amen.

Matthew 7:7-12 - The Way Forward

As we have been reading through Matthew, we've been imagining two historical contexts of the gospel.  The first is the one in which Jesus originally taught and the second is the one of the early church in the decades after him.  The compiler/author of the gospel sought to connect the two, telling the story of Jesus to new followers who did not know him personally or know someone who had known him personally.  Matthew is thus a compilation of stories and teachings from and about Jesus that the author believed to be relevant to the churches.  Both contexts, Jesus' and the churches', were in play.

What did the author think that the churches need to hear?  What did Jesus have to offer the people of the Roman Empire in the first century?  According to the sermon on the mount, they needed a vision.  They had to be instructed that Jesus' way is not easy.  They needed to be warned about injurious behaviors that cripple lives.  They particularly needed to be warned about false pieties that only make matters worse.

And this brings us to Matthew 7:7-12 and the crux of the matter.  Jesus taught that the way forward was to trust God and then do for others what we would have them do for us.  That's it.

It may help us to comprehend the power of this passage and of the whole sermon if we imagine a small-ish chamber with a band of a dozen or fifteen first-century followers of Jesus in a city of the Roman Empire, probably in the eastern Mediterranean, listening intently to a reading of the gospel.  They were poor and the worries of life burdened them every day.  They coped as best they could.  What attracted them to Jesus of Nazareth was that his teachings provided them with a better way to cope, a way of living that was something more than a hand to mouth existence.  Trust God.  Do a better job of treating others with the respect and attention that you want from them.  You don't need tons of cash.  You don't have to go through useless rituals.  You don't have to be educated.  Jesus, speaking to them through the gospel, gave them a clear path to walk, one they could place their confidence in; one that, when they thought about it, made a lot of sense—and actually worked.  There was more to it than that, but not much.  Stay tuned.

Matthew 6 - Grasping & Striving

In our last last post, on Matthew 6:1-7:7, I claimed that the point of the passage is that the fundamental issue we humans face, according to Jesus, is grasping after things such as honor  and wealth— in other words, self-aggrandizement.  Looked at from a 21st-century context, I think that is one reasonable summation of Jesus' first century message.  But there is an obvious problem that we shouldn't walk past, which is the fine line between grasping after things and striving after them.

If greedy, self-serving grasping after what we want is one crucial element in human nature, so too is striving after what we want.  When we grasp and grab, we are at our worst.  When we strive and struggle, we are at our best.  When we strive for something, we have set a goal for ourselves to better ourselves or our situation.  Working for a new home or striving to serve our community, these are good things.  We grow, improve, and make a contribution to our society by striving after that which is better than what we have now, where we are now.  Progress is built on striving.

The problem is that there is a gray area between grasping and striving where striving morphs into grasping.  The desire to improve morphs into the darker desire to get what we think we deserve, at any cost.  Striving involves an investment in our self, our ego.  But Lord help us when self and ego are involved because they so easily take over and corrupt even our best intentions turning them into self-aggrandizement.  We end up corrupting the very things we strive after.

Sadly, religion is at least as much a victim of this tension between striving and grasping as any other aspect of life.  That is the point of Jesus' teachings about giving, praying, and fasting in secret (Matthew 6:1-18).  It is good to give, pray, and fast—until it isn't because our goal in doing these things has been corrupted with grasping self-concerns.  When we invest our self in something, that self wants something back for itself.  Invest our self in our nearest Presbyterian church and soon enough our good 'ole self wants to be an elder and sit on the session.  It resists changes the pastor wants to make 'cause it likes things the way they are.  It gets caught up in gossip, petty behaviors, and a fearful protection of the institution of the church. It is after all "my" church.

I don't see any easy cure that keeps our greedy, grasping self in check as we strive to do good things for ourselves, our families, and our communities (including our church).  Humility is hard, and even it can be corrupted by an aw-shucks false humility.  The Buddhist idea of non-self, unfortunately, faces the same problem of the self worming its way underneath non-self corrupting one's best efforts to be selfless.  We have to strive.  We are in so many ways defined by what we strive for.  Yet, what we strive for can end up consuming us and an oily, grasping pollution seeps into the very ground water of our striving.

Jesus said this stuff isn't easy.  Stay tuned.

Matthew 6:1-7:6 - On Grasping

Another way of looking at Matthew 6 is to see it as ultimately being addressed to the early churches, the members of what I've been calling the "Jesus Movement."  It presents a charter for life in the new society they were creating in the first century, which was based on the teachings of Jesus.  Summarized most simply, Jesus taught to cease grasping after things.  Stop grasping after public recognition. Stop showing off your piety.  Stop grasping after wealth.  And in the opening verses of Matthew 7, he taught to stop grasping after self-affirmation by tearing down others.  Stop, in sum, building yourself up so you can feel important and "get ahead" of everyone else.  Jesus' words about God and possessions (6:24-34) sum up the matter: don't stress out over having material goods and enough food.  Stop grasping and grabbing for self-advancement.

In the last posting, I suggested that Matthew 6 could be seen as a dig at the wealthy of Jesus' day who did invest themselves in grasping after just these things.  Jesus himself may indeed have been speaking to the Pharisees and Sadducees, at least in part; but the author/compiler of Matthew would surely have seen that these teachings were crucial to building faithful, loving Christian communities in the early decades of the Jesus' Movement.  Grasping, greedy individuals disrupt their communities; they are a pain to people around them.  They represent what is most reprehensible in human society, and people resent them for their greedy need for attention and the way they treat people around them.

That is why the author concluded with words from Jesus that warned early Christians to stop judging others including each other.  Stop your greedy, grasping self-aggrandizement by tearing down others.  Get rid of the log in your own eye and then help others remove the specks in their eyes.  To summarise this whole point about grasping, the author then quoted Jesus' teaching that we shouldn't give what is holy to dogs or throw our valuables into a pigsty. That is exactly what we do when we "Grab for all the gusto you can get," as the old beer commercial put it.  Grasping behaviors come back to bite the greedy—and those around them.  They had no place in the new society of the early church.  There was a better way of doing things, and it was to that better way that the compiler/author next turned.  Stay tuned.

Matthew 6

One way to read the Gospel of Matthew is to imagine its audience, which would have largely been the urban poor of the first century Roman Empire.  Another way is to imagine Jesus' audience, which would have been first century Jews in Judea and Galilee.  Most of them were poor, too, but not all of them; and  Jesus' teachings recorded in Matthew 6 clearly weren't addressed to poor people who wouldn't have had money to give to the poor (themselves!) whether openly or secretly.  They wouldn't have been inclined to show off their piety since it was a basic tenet of the day that poverty was a sign of God's displeasure.  They wouldn't have fasted, worried about storing up their riches, or had enough worldly goods to be slaves to them.  This is not to say that the poor couldn't have learned a thing or two from the teachings collected in this chapter.  The theme here is that the best way, the godly way to live is humbly.  They were already humbled by their low station in society, so they could have heard these words as an affirmation of their own place in the world.  In a sense, Jesus seems to have been saying that the wealthy do best when they behave as if they are poor instead of showing off their wealth and piety.  Poor Christians could have taken a measure of comfort and gained a measure of confidence from hearing these teachings in the gospel.

If we think about Jesus' teaching crowds of people in his day, on the other hand, the gospels do make it clear that wealthy folks did stop by to listen to him teach.  As time went by, they did more than just listen.  They confronted him, tested him, and tried to trick Jesus into making dangerous statements.  We can thus imagine some Pharisees or Sadducees standing at the fringes of the crowd, listening in to these words of Jesus; and we can imagine Jesus taking the opportunity of their presence to try to reach them with a different way of thinking about their wealth.  His central point was that no one can serve two masters.  If these wealthy folks used their wealth to puff themselves up and to thus serve their own ends, then they became slaves to that wealth.

We've heard this tidbit of Jesus' wisdom so often, we take it for granted:  where our attention is, where our concerns are, the things we lose sleep over—these things own us, enslave us, and separate us from the Spirit.  In the first century, it would have made no sense to the wealthy to include wealth among those things that own us.  The very notion would have been startling and even scandalous to the Pharisees and Sadducees.  God had given them their wealth as a sign of divine approval, so how could that wealth enslave them and drive them apart from God?  Nonsense!  Illogical!  And dangerous.

It's no wonder they finally had him crucified.

Matthew 5:43-48 - Love Even Bigots

In biblical times, there was no divide between religion and politics, faith and the state.  When Jesus taught, he taught in a political context and his teachings had political ramifications.  When he told his audiences to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors, he was talking about the Romans and the Jewish establishment as much as he was about the neighborhood bully.  In our time and context, we can understand Jesus' teaching concerning loving enemies as advocating an alternative political and personal practice aimed at the peaceful transformation of human life.  Love is thus made holy.  It is not just about sex.  It is not just about family feelings.  It is a manifestation of the Spirit working in our lives to help us to walk toward the Kingdom, which Jesus assured us is just around the corner.  It is peace.  It is dharma (ธรรมะ).

The recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the profound, devastating shame Donald Trump has brought on the American presidency by his immoral attempts to place neo-nazis & klansmen on the same level as civil rights protestors throws into sharp relief the fact that faith today is still about politics.  It must be about politics.  And it is still about transformation.  In the 1950s and 1960s, we witnessed the power of the peaceable confrontation of persecution through non-violent resistance.  That resistance, painful as it was, took the United States further down the road toward the Kingdom, if only a little ways.  That was then.  Now, the work has to be done again.  Trump threatens to return us to the 1940s, to give powerful voice to racist bigotry through a shameful play at equivalency between the klan and the civil rights protest movement.  (In late breaking news, A Reuter's report quotes Mike Pence as saying, "I stand with the president and I stand by those words," meaning Trump's take on Charlottesville.  There is no escaping the moment; it is not just about Trump.)  Given the outrage Trump (and now Pence) has sparked, we can hope that the United States, as a whole, does not want to go back to the bad old days of Jim Crow.  But will it discover a new generation of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther Kings to carry it forward in pursuit of social justice and equality—in pursuit of the Kingdom?  It looks like we're going to find out sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, the disciples' memories of Jesus' teachings, as recorded in the gospel, remain powerful and pertinent to our turbulent times.  Thank God for their memories.  Thank God our ancestors in the faith had the inspired presence of mind to get them written down.  Amen

Matthew 5:21-42

Matthew 4:17 quotes Jesus as saying that the core of his message was simple: get your act together, turn our life around, God's rule is right around the corner.  Not in the after-life, but right here and in just a little while.  Then the author starts the sermon on the mount off (Mt. 5:3-12) by setting out the vision of what life in God's coming kingdom will be like for those who follow Jesus and his teachings.  It will be a blessing, a joy.  But, Jesus as quoted in the sermon, goes on (Mt. 5:17-20) to teach that this new life won't be easy.  The vision is a challenging one.  You poor, humble Christians are going to have to live lives more obviously faithful to God than the holiest people (and the most highly educated, wealthiest people) of the Jewish nation.

The compiler/author of the gospel then goes on to quote a series of Jesus' sayings (Mt. 5:21-42) that put real meat on the bones of his message.  They address fundamental sources of human suffering and injustice: anger, sexual lust, family instability, failure to keep one's word, and revenge.  Anger drives people apart and its consequences are serious.  Do whatever it takes, Jesus taught, to escape the ravages of anger.  Sexual lust destroys lives.  It has serious consequences for those women who are its object.  Men are better off blind or mutilated if it will prevent them from so much as looking at a woman with the desire to have sex with her.  Treating the sanctity of the family lightly is equally dangerous, equally fraught with evil consequences.  We break up our family at our own peril.  And, finally, the consequences of the desire for revenge are so great that we must do everything we can to avoid them; we must do anything to maintain good relations with people who oppress us rather than lust after revenge.

The Kingdom that is coming soon, in sum, will be inhabited by a people who know how to control their tempers, treat women with respect, respect the sanctity of the family, keep their word as their bond, and maintain social peace by acting humbly in the face of oppression.  The Kingdom will be a peaceable place.  Its citizens will respect each other.  They will behave in the best interests of the Kingdom itself, which also happens to be in their own personal best interests.

Jesus, his followers remembered, used some pretty extreme language (pull out your own eye!) to make the point that these five values are of fundamental importance.  We shouldn't let ourselves get tripped up over that language.  The points being made are too important for us to let ourselves off the hook by thinking that, "nobody can live up to Jesus' teachings."  That is nonsense.  We can control our tempers.  We can treat women justly.  We can maintain good relations in our families.  We can keep our word.  We can keep from turning others into our enemies.  It isn't easy, and we get caught up in stupid, really mixed up, ambivalent, very human situations all too often.  Jesus, as quoted by the gospel, never said it would be easy.  That being said, the behaviors Jesus called for are doable.  The Kingdom is still just a small ways off.  The issue is whether we want to live in it or not.

Matthew 5 Interlude

There are two basic principles that I have already introduced here but that need to be made as explicit as possible and that we do well to keep in mind as we read the sermon on the mount and the whole Gospel of Matthew.

First, because of the way the Spirit works through human agencies, the text is open to multiple interpretations that may even contradict each other.  We have to discern as best we can those interpretations that seem to make the most sense.  The dangers are obvious, especially that we simply settle in on an interpretation that is convenient to our own personal ideology irrespective of the intentions of the original compiler/author.  There is, however, no getting around this temptation even if (especially if) we choose to think that the text is a holy, infallible text with only one correct interpretation.  Thinking that way is a human choice however much those who make it claim that God inspired them to make it.  And, truth be told, the infallible-ists still fight like cats and dogs over what they think is the actual one true meaning of the text.  The Spirit, rather, works through fallible, broken, gloriously imperfect human agency.  We cannot escape our responsibility to read as responsibly and faithfully as we can, each of us.  Truth is, reading scripture in this way is a challenge and an opportunity.

Second, part of Matthew's message is the way the author arranged his or her material.  Most "readers" of the gospel in ancient times listened to it read aloud as a continuous whole that was not diced and sliced into chapters and verses.  The structure of the gospel carried them along, kept their attention, and made important connections for them.  We have to pay attention to the arrangement of the gospel if we want to understand what the author intended to communicate through it.

In addition to these two principles, I would like to share a personal thought about the gender of the compiler/author of the gospel.  We have no idea who that person was.  It was only later tradition that assigned authorship to Matthew, one of the Twelve.  Some online searching on the subject of literacy in the Roman Empire suggests that upper class women were likely to be well-educated and literate.  Some lower class women, evidently, would also have had some very rudimentary literacy skills.  That being the case, it is entirely possible that the author of this gospel was a well-educated, upper class woman follower of Jesus.  While New Testament (Koine) Greek was not sophisticated, it is still possible that a wealthier woman compiler/author could have used it to communicate her message about Jesus with the churches, which she would have known were composed largely of the poor.  All of this is to say that, however awkward, I will continue to refer to the author as "she or he" / "he or she" in order to preserve the real historical possibility that she was a a woman. (To reinforce this point, I've illustrated this entry with the icon of Saint Nina holding a book rather than the usual one of Matthew.  Using her icon makes the point that the author could be a woman.)

Matthew 5:13-21

Matthew opens the sermon on the mount with a description of the blessings Jesus' followers can expect from their faith in him (5:3-12).  It is important to constantly remind ourselves that Jesus never actually preached this "sermon".  It is a compilation of oral traditions augmented possibly by the memories of those who heard Jesus teach first hand (they would have had to be young at the time).  The key point here is that the compiler/author put these remembered teachings in a certain order.  That order starts out with a vision statement of the blessings of the faith and purposefully goes on with this next section of the "sermon," which contains stark warnings about the consequences of failing to live up to that vision.

So, why did the author put this passage immediately after the vision?  Maybe she or he meant for his or her audience to hear something like this: "You Jesus followers are like salt.  Salt is valuable and useful in a lot of ways.  But there's a danger here. If you only look like salt but don't also taste like salt, you're useless.  If that is the case, you'll get thrown out and be trampled on in disgust!  You're like a bright candle, but you're no good if you can't be seen.  In that case, no one else can find their way to God.  But, don't think living this life in Christ is easy.  It is a challenge!  You have to be more faithful than the rich, educated, and very religious upper class Pharisees and Sadducees!  If you don't live up to this high standard, you won't amount to much and surely won't experience the blessings of the Kingdom to any great extent.  If, however, you do live a quality life of faith, the rewards will be amazing.  But, be warned.  This is not easy.  You really have to be more faithful, more spiritual, and more moral than those who have reputations for such things.  This is not easy, got it?"

We've been reading this gospel for nineteen-plus centuries and have gotten used to it.  It is land that has long since been cleared and plowed over (and over and over and over).  But, it must have been powerful stuff for those who heard it for the first time.  What a vision!  What a challenge!  For most, their previous lives would have been mostly just coping with poverty, trying to get by, while trying to cope with living hand to mouth.  If this gospel's message is any measure, the Jesus Movement looked at them in a very different way, saw them as being valuable (like salt), useful and bright (like light), and worthy of the challenge of being more faithful than the Pharisees and Sadducees.  Worthy!  Not just poor (pick you color) trash.

One other thought:  the very clear warnings of the consequences of failure contained in this passage suggest that there was a need for such warnings.  Some followers of Jesus were not measuring up.  They had lost their flavor and were not leading visibly exemplary lives. Ya gotta walk the walk!  No pain no gain.

Matthew 5:3-10 (The Beatitudes)

Our author had a target audience, namely new and potential followers of Jesus.  The great majority of that audience lived in urban centers of the Roman Empire, and they were poor.  They lived hand to mouth existences.  Life was short, hard, and they saw death up close and personal.  The great majority of them were urban dwellers, and there really wasn't a "middle class" to which they could aspire.  Churches were small and some had wealthier patrons; but the bulk of those who became followers or might become followers were poor.

So, why would they even consider joining a new religious movement that was suppressed (and sometimes violently oppressed) by the authorities?  Matthew's answer is simple: it is a blessing to follow Jesus.  Rather than living in a world dominated by death (physical as well as spiritual), Jesus' followers are blessed with the promise of living in the kingdom of life.  Instead of living in a world of pain and mourning, they will receive comfort; their hearts will be at ease.  Rather than being powerless and afraid, all that is good about life on earth will be theirs.  Instead of living in a constant state of physical and spiritual want, they will be filled—never hungry, never wanting again!  When they live upright lives by being merciful to others, have unselfish motives, and try to spread peace in a violent world—when they do these things, they will gain mercy, purity of heart, and  the peaceable state of being God's children along with Jesus who they thought of as God's son.  Finally, even if the government comes down on them, they will still gain a place in a far better Kingdom.

The Jesus Movement offered the urban poor the prospect of turning their lousy lives upside down.  It was as straightforward as that.  Now, poor people aren't stupid (well not any more so that rich people).  If all of this was just empty churchy rhetoric aimed at hoodwinking them, they would have caught on soon enough.  The Jesus Movement might have gained some foolhardy types—enough to become a looney tunes fringe cult maybe.  But, it would not have sustained the kind of growth that eventually allowed it to become the dominate religious faith of the late Roman Empire.

There is simply no other way to account for the historical fact of the success of the Jesus Movement other than to conclude that people who followed Jesus did experience blessings, real ones in their real world.  They were happier (people of religious faith, as a rule, are).  They were healthier (people of religious faith form habits that are beneficial to them), and so death drifted a little further away.  They experienced the benefits of living more moral lives, which can include improved finances.  Even a little more income would have made a real difference.  And, they experienced all of this in a community that encouraged and supported such living, so that they had the blessing of good friends in a more loving social environment.  They were blessed.  They were happier.  This Jesus thing worked for them.  Now, obviously, it didn't work for everyone.  People joined and then unjoined.  They came with good intentions than fell back into old habits.  They got into fights with each other and not every church was a model Christian community.  And...yet...the "Jesus thing" worked often enough that people did experience the blessings and the happiness of following Jesus and living by his teachings (best they could) just like Jesus according to Matthew said they would!