Matthew 1:18 – 25
Fourth Sunday of Advent:
December 22, 2013
This
is our final week of looking at how the Advent and the Christmas seasons can be
out of step with each other.
The
first week we looked at the contrast between the Christmas season starting
earlier and earlier every year, and the way Advent waits for Christmas and
starts with the end in mind…the end being not just the birth of Jesus on
December 25th, but the very coming of the kingdom of God.
The
second week Jesus was compared to the Santa Claus that judges the naughty and
nice by looking with fresh eyes at the passage about Jesus separating the wheat
from the chaff.
Last
week we talked about how Christmas is more than parties, gifts and Jesus’
birthday. In the midst of that there is
a scandal – that Jesus comes not to the parties but to the poor, lost and
oppressed.
This
week there is a funny twist. This week
Advent is out of step with the Christmas season because we beat everyone to the
punch. Jesus isn’t supposed to be born
until Tuesday night. Advent is about
waiting, but here we have the birth of Jesus two days early.
Surprise!
Well,
I think that surprise is appropriate to our text this week.
Let’s
remember that in Jesus’ day there were many people who were expecting a
Messiah. There were also many, many
different ideas of what a Messiah looks like and what the Messiah would do. In fact, there were people who were already
claiming to be the Messiah before Jesus was born. The Messiah is a big deal for Jews, and many
were willing to risk their lives when they believed they were following the one
God sent.
And
Matthew had decided Jesus was the Messiah.
But what kind of Messiah did Matthew believe in…in other words why did
he believe Jesus was the Messiah and what did he think Jesus accomplished with
his life, death and resurrection?
There
was much agreement in Jesus’ day that
the Messiah would be a descendant of King David. King David was the last King to rule over a
united Jewish nation – it was the golden era.
The Messiah, most people believed, would be a king just like David: a
king that sits on a throne, has armies at his disposal, and leads the fight against
all enemies. Someone pretty extraordinary.
Is
that what Matthew thought? Well, yes and
no. This is why we get in trouble when
we take biblical passages out of their context.
The story of Matthew’s Jesus does not start at verse 18…it starts, of
course, at verse 1. In fact, to read this passage without reading the first 17
verses of Matthew is very misleading.
What he says in the first 17 verses about Jesus and his birth is just as
significant as what he writes about in our passage. Neither can be read without the other without
risking misunderstanding.
The
first 17 verses of Matthew is a genealogy.
A boring, long, passage full of begats.
A passage way too boring to make Montie read during worship – not to
mention all the hard names. But it is an
important genealogy. It is a genealogy of Jesus…and it proves that
Jesus is, indeed, a descendent of David.
According to tradition, Jesus is perfectly suited to be the
Messiah. He’s got the credentials…the
right pedigree.
But
there’s something amiss in all this. If
we were to read the genealogy, we would notice that it ends with Joseph, Jesus’
father. Jesus is tied to David through
Joseph. Well, that’s odd, right? Joseph, Matthew makes a point of telling us in
today’s passage, is not Jesus’ biological father. And in that day, you could not adopt sons
into an inheritance. Ancestry was only
biological at that time.
Jesus’
lineage, if we’re being technical, would have to be traced through Mary, and
that would definitely not fit the bill for a Messiah. Mary has no ancestors of note for
Matthew. He spends no time drawing her
family tree. For Matthew, it seems that
Jesus both is a descendent of David, and is not a descendant of David. He fits with the ordinary expectations, and
yet is completely out of the ordinary as far as Messiahs go – but,
interestingly, he’s out of the ordinary because he comes from out of the
ordinary, instead of the extraordinary royal bloodlines.
Now,
sadly, for those of us trying to figure out what the bible means, we have a
really tricky little word that begins our passage. It’s one, simple, oft used word in the
bible: de. Two letters, but so frustrating. This word is translated equally as a conjunction
and disjunction. In other words, that
word could be translated, “and,” “therefore,” or “now.” But, it could just as appropriately be
translated, “but,” “yet,” “nevertheless.”
In the version Al read, it is translated, “now,” which is a wishy-washy conjunction. Things take on a different hue if we
translate it, “but.”
Maybe
it seems insignificant to focus on one word like this, but for me, there is
something important at stake in its translation, which is what did Matthew
really think about the Messiah. Listen
to how it reads with a disjunction instead of the conjunction that Al read.
Verse
one of Matthew reads, “this is the genealogy of Jesus,” then lists the
genealogy. Then vs. 18: BUT, Matthew
says, THIS is how Jesus was born. Here
is his pedigree, but this is how God comes into the world.
I
think the disjunction is more likely, since we already have the disruption of
Jesus not being the biological son of Joseph.
The ordinary is already twisted into something off/amiss/out of the
ordinary.
Something
about Jesus as Messiah from Matthew, will be unlike the ordinary understandings
of what a Messiah looks like. “BUT,
Jesus came this way.”
And
this way both connects Jesus to Joseph – Joseph is the one who names him…the
act of a father in that time – and disconnects Jesus from Joseph…the baby
didn’t come from any part of Joseph.
Mary alone is the biological parent.
Which
sets up, I think, something Matthew will spend his entire gospel
elucidating: Jesus is both of human
beings and not of human beings. He both
comes out of the ordinary – it doesn’t get more ordinary than being born to a
peasant girl who counts for nothing in society. – and he is out of the ordinary
– extraordinary – from the very beginning; it doesn’t get more extraordinary
than a child being conceived of the Holy Spirit.
For
Matthew this sets up what it is the Messiah came to do…on the one hand he came
to be a new king, but on the other hand he does that by taking the
extraordinary step of living among the truly ordinary: the nothings, the
peasants, the poor in the world. And
then, he does the most extraordinary thing of all: he gives the gift of salvation.
An
ordinary man with ordinary people doing things more extraordinary than any king
could dream of. Jesus, Matthew says,
came to save people from their sins.
Now, remember what sins were in the gospel writers’ minds. Sins were the ways Israel had broken its
covenant with God. The prophets laid
them out over and over: Sin was not
caring for the poor, orphan, or widows.
Sin was to let people suffer while others lived high off the hog. Sin was systemic oppression. Sin was exclusion, judgment of people just
because they didn’t fit the mold. Sin
was hurting the most vulnerable, outcast, least among us.
Jesus
came to save the world from these sins.
And he did so by being as ordinary as the ones who were crushed when the
covenant was broken. He became
poor. He became a part of the peasant,
oppressed class. At the same time, he
acted in extraordinary ways: He didn’t
submit to the authorities. He was
brazen, powerful. He healed, he forgave
people, he declared people clean…when that wasn’t his job. He used his extraordinary power to free the
most ordinary people.
The
Christmas season, the conventional one, looks forward to only one birth story –
the one we all hear on Christmas Eve.
Luke’s beautiful, dramatic story of the birth of Jesus (he certainly
dispenses with all the begats). With
Luke we focus on how extraordinary this baby is…how fantastical the story. This week, maybe we learn that our ordinary
lives can be like Jesus’. Maybe we
realize that out of our ordinary lives, something extraordinary might
happen. We don’t need to be kings to
save our world from its sins. We don’t
need to be powerful to bring down systems of power.
Being
with the ordinary, the flesh and blood people who are the peasants of our day –
the ones the system conspires against, can bring about the most out-of-the-ordinary
things. And we don’t have to wait to be
kings to do this. Jesus, with his life,
pointed out that it’s only when you reject ordinary king-hood that you actually
bring in the kingdom of God…the only kingdom that matters.
The
extraordinary thing about Jesus, in Matthew’s version, is not found in the
beautiful manger scenes – heck, Jesus is born at home in Matthew’s version. The New York Times had an editorial this
morning that quoted Erich Auerbach, a literary scholar who lived in the first
half of the 20th century.
Auerbach wrote that the biblical narrative depicted “something which neither the poets nor the historians of
antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the
depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of
contemporary life.”
The
birth comes in the midst of our Advent season – it slips in quietly and makes
the claim that everyday life is where God is born. Not just on December 25th, but
everyday – in the normal. But there is
nothing normal about what happens when God comes. If we look for God in the ordinary, we will
find ourselves caught up in the extraordinary message of salvation – when we
spend time with the poor, the homeless, the outcast…our lives will automatically
take on the power of Jesus: the homeless
will be given shelter, the poor will be fed, the outcast will be welcomed.
That
is salvation – and it’s the true meaning of Christmas. Amen.
