Twelve Months of Sundays. N.T. Wright
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Matthew 7.21–29
‘These words of mine.’ No wonder they thought Jesus was claiming an authority of his own, superior to that of the scribes. They would never have claimed anything for their own words, merely for those of the text they were expounding.
The house on the rock, arguably, is another picture of the Temple – which Herod Antipas was still building, and against which Jesus addressed some of his sternest words. The whole Sermon has constituted a claim that the way things are going in Israel is a mistake, a disobedience, and that this is the last chance to get back on track, to be the light of the world. Failure now will mean the destruction of the Temple and all that it stood for. The Sermon on the Mount balances Matthew’s final discourse (chs 23—25), where these warnings reach their height.
Jesus, meanwhile, is warning sternly against an easygoing discipleship which, while keeping companionship with him, fails to take seriously the challenge of the gospel, the absolute demands for God-centred holiness and renewed integrity. How easy, then and now, to be around Jesus, to enjoy something of his influence, but to keep options open when it comes to actual choices about behaviour and life direction. Easy, maybe, but about as useless as trying to learn to swim while keeping one foot on the bottom for safety. That won’t do you any good when the floods come.
As come they will. Jesus’ warnings of judgement call up the image of Noah and his ark. Among the many lessons of that wonderful story is God’s promise never again to destroy the earth in such a fashion; but, as Jesus makes clear, this doesn’t mean that God is now taking a more easygoing attitude as far as wickedness is concerned. It still defaces his good creation, and he still hates it as much as ever. We may want to be generous in speaking of judgement in relation to others, but for ourselves we do well to be sober and sanguine. There is such a thing as being close to Jesus but never truly knowing him, and a more terrible discovery it is hard to imagine.
The lectionary makes a Nijinsky-like leap from part of the introduction to Romans into part of its second main section. The result is like a doctor giving a prescription without anyone knowing what the disease is. Only when we have fully appreciated the scale of human wickedness, infecting God’s people as much as everyone else, can we understand just how breathtaking it is to be told that because of Jesus’ sacrificial death God now justifies, freely, by grace alone, all who believe the gospel. Only those who appreciate that the flood – both Noah’s, and that about which Jesus is warning – is God’s sober and proper reaction to human rebellion, neither capricious nor malevolent, can appreciate what it means for God’s saving, world-healing righteousness to be unveiled in the message of Jesus Christ.
Proper 5
Genesis 12.1–9
Romans 4.13–25
Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26
Abraham’s call (Abram, actually, at this stage; but just as we say the Archbishop was born in 1935, even though he wasn’t Archbishop then, so we don’t need to fuss about giving the patriarch the right name all the time). Abraham’s call to go out into the unknown is a fitting start for the long stretch of Sundays after Trinity. Equipped with the new vision of God in Jesus and the Spirit, we are to follow in obedience, knowing only who it is that leads us, and the purpose of the journey.
Abraham was promised the land; Abraham’s family was promised the earth. Or rather, the whole world was promised God’s blessing in and through Abraham’s family. That, after the curse of Genesis 3 and 11, was the point of Abraham’s call in the first place. God now makes a new start, absurd and scandalous as it seemed and still often seems, to create a new creation from within the old, a new human family from within the old, to give new life in the midst of death. Abraham, as far chronologically before Jesus as we are after him, was gripped by the strange presence of the one God doing a new thing. His descendants have been haunted by that presence, that purpose, ever since, especially when it turned into flesh and blood, into wind and fire.
But his descendants are no longer defined, as far as the New Testament is concerned, by flesh-and-blood generation. Romans 4, completing the argument which began in 3.21, explains God’s righteousness, God’s covenant faithfulness, in terms of God’s strange fulfilment of the promises to Abraham in Genesis 12—18, focusing especially on ch. 15. This fulfilment has happened in Jesus Christ, and in the creation through him of the worldwide family promised to Abraham in the beginning. The emphasis of the whole chapter is that Abraham is the father, not of one nation only (as though, as the Galatians thought, one now had to become a fully-fledged Jew in order to belong to God’s covenant family), but of the many nations spoken of in Genesis 17. Romans 4.17 is therefore not, as in some translations, an aside, to be placed in a bracket; it is the climax of the chapter. Through the sin-forgiving death of Jesus and his life-giving resurrection, the covenant God has created a new, single family of Jews and Gentiles together, whose sole badge of identity is their faith, specifically their faith in Jesus’ resurrection (4.24), which shows that they share the faith of Abraham himself (4.19–22).
As so often, the grandeur of the Old Testament, and the fine-tuned arguments of Paul, are distilled into the gospel’s small-scale but sharp-edged human drama. Life comes, in place of death, to a Galilean home (and one synagogue ruler at least, we may assume, followed Jesus ever after). Matthew, like Abraham, obeys the call to follow, he knows not where.
Proper 6
Genesis 18.1–15
Romans 5.1–8
Matthew 9.35—10.8 [9–23]
Take the gospel reading (the longer version) and lay it, like a template, over the life of the average parish. What do you find?
I know, I know. We don’t live in the first century; we aren’t peasants; Jesus’ mission was unique; the disciples’ mission predated Calvary, Easter and Pentecost; the special and urgent ministry to Israel (10.6, 23) was later transformed, by Jesus himself (Matthew 28.19) into the wider and more long-lasting mission to all the nations.
All this I know. But it remains disturbing that the only point of contact between what Jesus told his twelve followers and what the average churchworker does with most of her or his waking hours is that we wander around like sheep among wolves. We know that Jesus told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, but most of us, being after all busy people, find it advisable to specialize.
Of course you can’t lift culturally specific instructions off the page and plonk them down elsewhere. But when did anyone last make the effort to get inside this passage and wrestle with the question: what would be the functional equivalent, the necessary re-application, of Matthew 10 in today’s Church? The fact that we haven’t done this (when did you last, metaphorically, shake the dust off your feet when leaving a house or town?) may of course explain the fact that our gospel, our lifestyle, threatens no one; no one arrests us for doing our job, no one betrays us to the authorities. Unless, of course, certain newspapers count as authorities.
The shock of facing up to these questions is the characteristic shock of the gospel. Life is supposed to be different. Sarah will have a son; yes, it’s impossible, yes, she did laugh, and yes, it’s going to happen anyway. When the great rolling wave of God’s love comes at you, don’t try to fight it; launch out and let it knock you off your feet. That’s what Paul is talking about in Romans 5 (the paragraph ends at verse 11, by the way). God’s action begins with love and ends with celebration, taking in suffering en route; a good trinitarian thought for this time of the year, echoing with memories of the three who visited Abraham.
The narrative of Genesis is effortlessly subtle. Is ‘the Lord’ one of the three men (they have become two angels in 19.1, while ‘the Lord’ has been talking to Abraham)? Or somehow all three together? As in the Emmaus scene, God’s