The Paradoxical Meeting of Wisdom and Power

In an earlier posting, entitled "The Element of Surprise," I observed how the birth stories in the Gospel of Matthew begins in chapter one with a series of surprises including, for example, Mary's surprising pregnancy and Joseph's surprising willingness to stick with her in the face of the inevitable scandal.  By the opening of chapter two (verses 1-6), surprise has morphed into paradox.  These verses introduce, of course, the story of the wise men of Sunday school pageant fame.

What the pageants miss is the deeper drama of the wisdom of the East seeking the royal power of the Jews and finding that power in an infant, one born to an otherwise inconsequential couple who were not even legally married.  Wisdom found the king, but the king was a kid.  Now, there was no question that this infant was indeed the messiah, the savior king of the Jews.  The star confirmed it.  His residence in Bethlehem just as "it has been written by the prophet" also confirmed it.  And in wisdom's discovery of power in an infant lies the central theological paradox and insight of the Christian faith, which is that God does not come to us in a Solomon, a figure of obvious power and supposed wisdom, but in a child of no particular significance otherwise.

Now, in a formal theological sense, we already know all of this, but there is always a tendency among Christians to forget the scandal and the paradox involved.  We have traditionally tended to prefer the "birth narrative" of John 1:1-18, which clothes Jesus, the Word (often seen as a veiled reference to Sophia, wisdom), in the majesty of creation.  And the story of wisdom seeking power in an infant has been consigned to a more sentimental, Christmas-y purpose, one that carefully never reads on as far is the massacre of the children in Matthew 2:16-18.  The paradox of the baby messiah, however, looms over the whole of the Gospel of Matthew, and in that paradox we see the shadow of the cross and the promise of resurrection.

The Element of Surprise

It's a funny thing about the Bible and local congregations.  Much of it is totally opaque to the average church goer, and this includes passages that are so familiar that worshippers more or less "shut down" while they are being read or preached upon.  The Christmas stories ("birth narratives" in scholar-speak) are just such passages.  This includes Matthew 1:18-25, which is the story of how Joseph decided to stick with Mary even though she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  It's a familiar story, which after countless Advent re-readings is just not listened to by the congregation.

It is ironic, then, that this unsurprising, familiar passage is actually filled with surprises.  For ancient audiences, that may well have been one of the key components of the story.  As the story goes, Mary was mysteriously pregnant (surprise!), and Joseph decided to handle this unhappy surprise judiciously.  But, then an angel shows up in a dream (surprise!) and tells him to go ahead and marry Mary.  The angel also reveals something of the nature of the child.  So, Joseph's marital plans change again and he ends up being married (surprise!) when he thought that he'd lost his prospective bride to an unwanted premarital pregnancy.  Surprise, surprise, and surprise.  Interestingly, the theme of surprise is carried on in the next story in Matthew (Matthew 2:1-12) when the three gentlemen "from the east" appeared suddenly in Jerusalem seeking the newly born Messiah (surprise!).  It is clear that King Herod and the people of Jerusalem were hugely surprised by their appearance and inquiries.

One point we can take away from the prominent role of surprise in the opening chapters of Matthew is that faith and spirituality are not really about certainty and getting control of one's life.  In the Spirit, there is always an element of the unexpected.  Matthew's readers, thus, are warned that if they buy into the Jesus Movement they can expect the unexpected to happen to them.  They can expect to be surprised by the Spirit.

Jesus the Post-Exilic Messiah

The Gospel of Matthew opens, famously, with a genealogy (1:2-17), which is divided into three sets of generations with 14 generations to a set.  The first set of generations runs from Abraham to David, the second from David to the Babylonian Exile, and the last set from the Exile to Jesus.  In the whole genealogy only one historical event named (other than births) is the Exile.  Jesus was, that is, a post-exilic Jew living in post-exilic times.  While biblical scholars may generally understand the power and importance that the Exile had in the history of the Jewish people right down to the New Testament, that understanding has not for the most part reached the churches.  Out here in the real world of the church, we tend to divorce Jesus and earliest church history from its Jewish post-exilic historical context.  We shouldn't.  Again, as we saw in yesterday's post on Matthew 1:1, "Jesus the Messiah," the first verses of the first book in the New Testament highlight the fact that Jesus was situated in a real time and place.  Our faith is that he is God With Us in a unique way, that is that God was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.  Matthew 1 drives home both the centrality and historicity of the Incarnation for us.

The text thus invites the historical investigation of the events recorded in the New Testament including most especially the life of Jesus himself.  That is to say that Matthew 1 and what follows in the gospels and the rest of the New Testament inspires both a theological and an academic response.  Theologically, it drives us in the direction of the Incarnation.  Academically, it invites us to engage in historiography.  In their own way, each of these intellectual responses to Matthew 1 and beyond are faithful to the text itself.  They each reflect the realities of the earliest church's faith in Jesus, namely that he was the "son of Abraham, the son of David" (Matthew 1:1) who was born fourteen generations after the Babylonian Captivity.  For Christian theologians, then, he was God's Son.  For the historians, he was a post-exilic rabbi and prophet.  From our pulpits and in our prayers, we need to pay attention to both of these faithful perspectives on Jesus of Nazareth.  Amen.

Jesus the Messiah

The first verse of the first book of the New Testament, Matthew 1:1, reads, "An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham." (NRSV)  We should not pass over the meaning of this passage as it takes it at once into the core of New Testament faith.  For the earliest generations of the faithful,  Jesus was the Jewish messiah, and this is the first spiritual "fact" asserted in the first verse of the New Testament.  Whatever else Jesus of Nazareth might have been, those who followed him were convinced that he was the one the Jewish people had long waited for—the one to lead them to safety.  The verse, furthermore, drives home the "fact" of Jesus' messiahship by noting that he was the "son of David, the son of Abraham."  He was, that is, heir to the royal power of King David and the powerful faith of Father Abraham, which meant that his messianic pedigree was legitimate and impressive.

In light of the Trinitarian faith that later developed, there are a couple of things worth noting here.  First, in these stage-setting, theme-setting first words in the New Testament there is no hint of the divine Son of God who is the Second Person of the Trinity.  If his generation had believed in these doctrines when Matthew was written, it seems likely that the author would have included something to indicate the divinity of Jesus, even something as simple as, "the son of David, the son of Abraham, the son of God."  At the heart of the New Testament message is Jesus the Messiah.  It took the church centuries to read his divinity back into the record.

Second and in light of the doctrine of the Trinity, this simple verse points decisively to the incarnational nature of the Christian faith.  The story of the divine Jesus begins with a genealogy tying him to a long list of what the people of Matthew's time took to be historical figures.  He was Jesus of Nazareth, son of David and of Abraham.  Historically down to the present, large segments of the church have virtually denied the Incarnation by their emphasis on the Perfect Son of God who shared and shares God's omnipotence and omniscience.  They have also denied the historical reality of Jesus the Messiah by turning him into "Sweet Jesus," the one who offends no one, never has an unkind word or thought.  The Jesus of Matthew 1:1 has long been buried under the weight of our philosophies and ideologies to the point that it has become impossible to see how God was actually in an actual person in the real world of the first century.

Pray for Your Enemies - How Come?

"But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you..." (Matthew 5:44, NRSV)

In the larger passage in which this injunction is contained, Matthew 5:43-48, Jesus taught his disciples that they must pray for their enemies in order to gain the reward of becoming something like God.  He did not explain exactly what that means, which leaves us with some "running room" in our understanding and application of the command itself.

So, why love and pray for our enemies?  Basically, as long as our enemies remain our enemies they own us.  They have our attention and dominate our emotional state.  They infect us with feelings of disgust, anger, hatred, and fear.  They have an internal power over us that can easily turn us into what we think they are.  To allow someone to be our enemy is to give them great power over us.  The same is true even for those that we merely don't like or irritate us—to the extent that we let them get to us, to that extent they own us.

Praying for our enemies, if done with integrity, takes the poison out of us and allows us to be at peace with ourselves.  It also opens the door to the possibility of being at peace with them as well—depending on factors that we don't have control over.  The scales fall from our eyes.  Our hearts are less encased in ugly feelings.  As God is love, so we drift in the direction of love.  As God lies at the heart of peace, so we sink slowly into the realm of peace.  We enable the prayer, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." Yes, this is easier said than done, but it remains doable, and our own peace of mind depends on our being able to love and pray for our enemies.  And, no, we don't have to become naive or overlook seriously bad behaviors, it is just that we no longer let all of that own us and destroy our own sense of inner peace.

And "enemies" here need not mean individuals.  It can also mean an addiction, for example, which for millions and millions of people is their greatest enemy.  It can mean the poisons implanted in us by an abusive relationship, which itself is over.  It can mean our prejudices against another race or class of people.

You Will Be Comforted

The second Beatitude (Matthew 5:4) says, "Blessings on the mourners!  You're going to be comforted."  (N. T. Wright, The Kingdom New Testament)  In context, Jesus was speaking to his disciples and making the larger point that those who suffered under the spiritually and socially oppressive realities of that day would one day enter the Kingdom.  In the Kingdom, they would find comfort, justice, mercy, and peace.  Taken out of that context, the second Beatitude is a powerful reminder of the way in which God's grace is embedded in our lives, whoever we are and whatever we believe.

It is one of the deepest spiritual truths that God, experienced as the Holy Spirit, brings comfort to those who mourn.  The following video clip of Vice President Biden speaking to families of soldiers who died serving their country is not a political video.  It is commentary on the second Beatitude.  The clip runs for about 20 minutes, and it makes the point to families feeling deep loss that one day the memory of their loved one will bring a smile to their lips before it brings tears to their eyes.  The Vice President knows what he is talking about.  In a tragic auto accident, he lost his wife and daughter.  He mentions God in this clip only to as the One with whom he was angry, but lurking in his words we can hear the committed Catholic affirming the truth of God's grace without going pious.  This is worth 20 minutes of your day.

Salt, Light, & Irony

"Sermon on the Mount" by Laura James (laurajamesart.com)

It is almost as if the gospel writers stashed these two sayings away for the 21st century mainline (aka oldline) churches.  According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus said to his disciples that, "You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?" (Matthew 5:13)  He also taught them they were "the light of the world" and observed that, "No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all the house." (Matthew 5:15)

Looking at the two sayings themselves, it seems clear that they are ironical and even humorous, maybe not quite as humorous as modern day biblicists trying to prove that salt can lose its taste or the philosophical debate about whether salt can lose its taste and remain salt—but still humorous.  Jesus' point was that tasteless salt is useless, and so is a covered lamp.  The two images of tasteless salt and a covered lamp are memorable for the ironic way they so aptly make their point, which is why they were remembered.

The point is, of course, that the disciples were called by Jesus for a purpose, and if they failed that purpose they were of no more use than tasteless salt or a lamp placed under a basket.  And when they fail to live up to their calling, they like the tasteless salt will be thrown away.  Instead, they were to "let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven." (Matthew 5:16).

There are many reasons why churches decline, some of them having little to do with the quality of the life of the church itself.  Populations migrate, and churches are closed in one locality while new ones are founded in others.  But, where you find a declining church in the midst of a large population, there is something else going on.  That church in that locality has usually lost is savor and stashed its light under a basket.  This is the case even when the church does good things and maintains an active institutional life.  As long as such churches fail to ask what they can do to restore their savor and light, they will decline.  That is a hard lesson the last fifty years have taught the mainline churches.  The good news is that in many places new expressions of the mainline church are emerging—not as large, structured, and financed as the old mainline, but with a vibrancy also unlike those churches.  In some instances and in some places, we are learning how to put the taste back into salt and discovering that the lamp is a lot more useful if we take it out from under the basket.  To pick up on Jesus' third image, we're beginning to learn how to be the city on the hill again—the one that can't be hid.  Decline thus is both threat and opportunity.