MT 23: 1-12 & 37-39

Matthew in the Margins… 22nd S. After Pentecost…Revised 2017 

For ‘scholars & Pharisees’, try ‘bishops’, ’priests', 'pastors', 'elders', ‘wardens’, ‘church leaders of all shapes & sizes’! Jesus’ use of the term ‘Moses chair’, his ‘kathedra’, again raises the question of Authority implicit in our recent passage about the coin & ‘rendering to Caesar….’! There’s a clashing of far more than cultures here. The ‘A’ question probes much more deeply than that. 

Jesus tells crowds & His disciples in general, "Look at these Pharisees & Scholars! Do what they teach, but don't do what they do!” In saying this He’s underlining the importance of the Authority God delegated to Moses & that those He’s complaining about are heirs to. As we are, too, now. Back then they’re undermining that authority by blurring the lines between God’s Authority & their own. They’re wind-bags. Full of hot air.  As Jesus sees it, some of them are more interested in dressing for show than being clothed in righteousness. Once, long ago, an archbishop asks me to ‘vet’ a ‘nomadic preacher’ wanting authority to preach in the diocese. Sadly, I have to report back that the fellow is a puffed-up windbag! Full of self-importance! Are we, any of us, more interested in being celebrities than servants; rather than getting our hands dirty at ground zero in life’s margins alongside Jesus? 

We all live in cultures using some system of honorifics to mark contributions to civic, political, military, or other areas of life. I take Jesus to mean that any title we’re given needs to be one that indicates a commitment, a) to God’s Authority &, b) to His own Servanthood. Is it time to cut ourselves back to size before God does that for us, one way or another? Perhaps that hymn, 'Brother, sister, let me serve you, Let me be as Christ to you’ could become the ‘Christian Internationale’ for those who inhabit the margins of life & those who serve them out there? Sing it loud & clear in what we do for God & each other? 

Jesus has many harsh things to say about the Hebrew church as He experiences it. Maybe it's just as well we're skipping most of the rest of this passage today in our Christian sanctuaries! Weigh up the stones we’re about to cast before they bounce back on us! 

A mural / icon of saints dancing above & circling the interior of the church of S.Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco¹ incorporates a lot of people as unlikely as Jesus himself! Can we see our-selves there? Dancing round our own churches? Inside them & outside? Blessed, indeed, is everyone who, like Jesus, comes in the Name of the Lord!

¹ You can see this mural / icon through your search engine.

MT 22:34-46 

Matthew in the Margins… 21st S. After Pentecost…Revised 2017 

Pharisees rush in where Sadducees have not feared to tread. Those who live by Law rather than Love seem to slip into that habit rather easily!

In an old movie I once saw, a benefactor donates a rug to make the recreation room in an old-style ‘mental asylum’ a touch less bare & forbidding. But carers insist the patients not walk on that rug! Only walk round & round the outside of the rug so it doesn’t get dirty! So, day after day, patients dutifully circle round & round that rug until it becomes set in law that that rug must be circled. The purpose of the gift of the rug becomes lost on both attendants & patients! Today’s passage raises the whole question of the purpose of the Law of God.

Legal experts, or would-be experts, roll out that same rug in front of Jesus, daring Him to walk on it! He calls their bluff of course! I was about to write ‘in His inimitable fashion’, but the whole point of this passage is that Jesus IS imitable! That’s the whole point of the Gospel! JS enemies are trying to entice Him into mis-interpreting these Laws central to both Hebrew faith & the Gospel by turning them into that carpet on the floor of the ‘asylum’. Embedded in DEUT & LEV, these God-given laws have always been laws at their best because they need no explanation. It's not the interpreting that's the problem; it's the doing! As G.K. Chesterton once put it, ‘Christianity hasn’t been tried & found wanting; it’s been found difficult & not tried!’

Today, many are ignorant of the heritage that is our Hebrew Bible. (Sunday by Sunday listening to passages often lacking context isn’t much help.) If we remain ignorant, though, how are we to recognise the Two Commandments that all the Law & the Prophets hang on? Being a disciple of Jesus involves going on from where the Hebrews left off, carrying their old & precious treasures along with our new ones.

First round of this bout goes to Jesus. He doesn’t dismiss the Pharisees' question despite its clear intent of bringing him undone. Questions need to be explored. Jesus asks His question-ers to apply the ‘Great Commandments’ to Himself & themselves, rather than just theorise about them, or Him! Finding the right questions to ask in life comes before finding the right answers to them!

Jesus appears to change the subject, but if He is the Anointed, David's son, then the answer about the greatest commandment is physically standing in front of them! Unrecognized. The One who loves God & neighbour perfectly. “I’ve done it!” He’ll go on to shout from the cross! Loving God & others that far doesn't come out of Bible quotations or sermons!

The verses about whose son is the Anointed is another of Jesus’ hard riddles. But as long as we get our heart round His question, as well as, even more than, our head, the answer will be revealed! Let’s put following Jesus the Anointed into practice & not just keep circling Him like that rug on that floor.

MT 22:15-33 

Matthew in the Margins… 20th Sunday after Pentecost…Revised 2017. 

Never play Two Up with Jesus! Heads He wins, tails we lose! What do we constantly learn about His enemies in the Gospel? That they never learn! Have we learned from Jesus as we write our own new pages, chapter by chapter, extensions of Gospel today? One essential is never to try outsmarting God!

Which reminds me of one of those old rather unkind stories told against the Irish: Mick & Paddy are stumbling home drunk after closing time late one night. Taking a short cut through the cemetery, they fall down into a newly dug grave. Try as they might they can’t climb out. After calling & calling for help, & with no response at all, they decide to pray! Mick prays, “O God, if you get Paddy & me up out of this hole we’re in, I’ll give you my fine fat pig!” But Paddy says to Mick in a stage whisper, “Mick, you can’t pray that to God; you haven’t got a pig, let alone a fine fat one!” “Will you be quiet, Paddy! Can’t you see I’m only fooling him!” Trying to fool God is like being stuck down in some hole we can’t get out from! Digging our own grave?

Of those who try to trap Jesus with their One Coin Trick, The Complete Gospels¹ has it ‘They were dumfounded'. Of the crowd who see & hear how Jesus bests those who try to trap Him over ancient Levirate law, it translates, ‘They were stunned.' Whether we're a religious heavy, or simply one of God's ‘little ones’, are we as dumbfounded, stunned, by God as we ought to be? Learning to be dumbfounded, stunned, by God may be a helpful jumping off place for the next stage of our spiritual journey.

Whoever it is Jesus tricks (yes, he does trick them!) into producing that Roman coin makes a fool of himself as he would make a fool of Jesus. Such a pious one oughtn't to have such a pagan coin in his possession, except to actually pay the hated tax. Maybe that's what he's about to do when Jesus asks to borrow his coin. Caesar’s coin! Just having the coin is the man's own answer, ‘Yes’, to the question they pose to entrap Jesus. Whether Jesus answers ‘Yes’, or, ‘No’, they’ve got Him, or so they think! We know better! How do we ourselves set about discerning our responses to the big ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions of life?

Pharisees allying themselves with Herodians is an ‘unholy’ alliance. The Sadducees then also join in the game of  ‘Let’s Gang Up On Jesus’ with their question relating to levirate marriage laws [DEUT 25: 5+]. He answers, “You have missed the point again, all because you underestimate both the scriptures & the power of God.”²  Today some are still missing the point of, & under-estimating the Scriptures & the power of God, trying to make their own point rather than God’s! Pray, guided by Holy Spirit, to discern issues as Jesus, God, might see things, rather than pontificating on them to make our own specious claims.

God’s Name isn’t  'I AM' for nothing. So, let’s live for God, & with God, & in God. That’s the way we become who We Are, too!

¹ Polebridge, 1992, ad loc.  ²  Complete Gospels ad loc. 

MT 22:1-14 

Matthew in the Margins…19th Sunday after Pentecost…Revised 2017 

However we discern we should preach this parable / riddle / allegory, & focus on prepared-ness, ex / inclusiveness, light & darkness, whatever, it’s vital, life-giving, that we bring it out of 1st C. Palestine & into today where we live. Vital to bring God out of that Palestine,  out of this Book & freed into our own world, into our lives now. MT starts off, ‘God’s Rule is like…” & essentially that’s what it’s all about. But there are inconsistencies. Not least that God, the King, ends up acting as violently as the earthly rulers whose ungodly acts regularly court God's indignation & condemnation! Perhaps what JS originally says has been tweaked in the telling before it takes the shape we know today? In both LK 14, & TH 64 (it’s often worth checking TH) it’s simply a person giving the feast, & neither contains the ‘throwing out’ bit!

Let’s look at the wedding garment. In an earlier edition of these notes I suggested Jesus Himself is our invitation to His own wedding & that it’s Him we’re being invited, required, to put on; Him we need to be wearing all the time. To reject Jesus, God’s gracious invitation to us, then, is to throw ourselves into outermost darkness. A form of Hell, surely, is meant. Excluding ourselves from loving God & celebrating God day by day is to live in a darkness of our own choosing. But I’m grateful to our son, Andrew¹, for illuminating that approach further based on Augustine of Hippo’s Sermon 90. Augustine equates the missing ‘garment’ with ‘Love’. Not any old common or garden love, but the self-giving Love of the Gospel. Agape Love, Augustine tells us love is both our invitation to the feast & the way we’re to come prepared to join in. To ‘put on’ the wedding garment is to clothe ourselves in love. Let’s be clothed in love all the time. Love isn’t something to be donned only for special occasions! To act like that would be to bring love itself, Love Himself, into disrepute. 

When we give God the brush-off, we’re putting ourself outside God's gracious presence. That is outer darkness indeed. God doesn't put us outside; that’s a choice we make for our-selves! (After saying this I still find myself questioning whether there is anywhere outside God's presence, God’s grace.) Maybe one way to experience outer darkness is just to think we're outside God. We can fool ourselves into thinking we are. But we can’t fool God! In the midst of so much darkness & depression today - outwardly & inwardly - is there a clue here, for how to mount a spiritual counter-attack against the pain such darkness brings? 

It’s been well said that God's wrath is simply God's love experienced from the wrong side! Also worth pondering is the question of whether there’s any evidence God invented outer darkness, or Hell, under any guise. Compared with a great deal of evidence we go on re-inventing it over & over again, for ourself or for someone else. Best to take up the invitation to the great feast - & turn up! Fittingly clothed in love! 

¹ Preaching in All Saints, Margaret Street, London, Oct. 12th 2014

MT 21: 33-46 

Matthew in the Margins…18th S. After Pentecost…Revised 2017  

Can we almost hear Jesus singing Isaiah’s beautiful old love poem about YHWH & His vine -yard to His critics today? His critics certainly recognise the poem. And, like those long before them fail to recognise themselves in it. Can’t grasp that when it turns into a lament it’s doing so because they in their turn have become the villains in the piece.

Rather than holding a post-mortem on what was happening in Isaiah’s time & comes to a head in Jesus’ day, we need to find ourselves in the story too. Today. Are our spiritual ears tuned well enough to God for us to be faithful servants, slaves, even? Can we hear the warning in the lament & heed it if it applies to us? By this stage of His ministry Jesus is identifying with the Son who falls victim to rebellious share-farmers in His Father’s vineyard. The powers-that-be are dismissive of Him because they’re too sure of themselves. Religiously learned, maybe, but religiously ignorant. Best we discern the key Jesus is singing in to us & sing along in the key our part calls for.

Politicians are probably the ones who most obviously appear today as those who have an exalted view of themselves & their self-entitlement. They’re not the only ones, of course, but they’re easy targets when they get their comeuppance - or should that be come-downance? - for rorting the public purse, for instance. The fall from grace & power of those caught out comes to mind as I meditate on Jesus’ yarn. It is a tale, but how well He captures the vineyard lease-holders sense of self-entitlement! There’s no way they’re ever going to inherit that vineyard! Do we have any such air of self-entitlement as we go about whatever job God calls us to do in His vineyard in partnership with Him? If the answer is, ‘Yes, we do have such a sense’, we have work to do! We have work to let God do on us & in us as part of the vineyard, too!

Though portrayed in this parable / riddle as an absentee landlord, God is not, & never has been separated from His world. Creation is a labour of love on God’s part. Labour in which God calls us to be joint-venturers. Faithfully joint-venturing with God keeps us celebrating God, rather than usurping Him in any jumped-up way.

Does God have any more to show for His investment in the vineyard of Creation with us as under-managers, than under the older regime? Let no false sense of entitlement on our part mean we’re simply trampling the grapes of wrath all over again.