William Loader
See also The Gospel of Matthew - an introduction for preachers.
The aim of the following is to offer some initial reflections on the readings from Matthew in the lectionary as an aid to people preparing sermons. The comments are not meant to be exegetical commentaries, although they include exegetical observation. They also include reflections which point to contemporary issues. They are also, by the same token, not sermons, not an attempt to say to people what sermons ought to be about. They are offered as a stimulus only.
This is an experimental resource which I have toyed with creating every year for the last three years and have now begun to achieve. I would value feedback on whether you find it is useful and on how it might be changed/improved, made more useful.
Pentecost 23: 31 October Matthew 23:1-12
Pentecost 24: 7 November Matthew 25:1-13
Pentecost 25: 14 November Matthew 25:14-30
Christ the King: 21 November Matthew 25:31-46
Pentecost 23: 31 October Matthew 23:1-12
This is the chapter of woes. It represents a massive expansion of what Mark brings in 12:37-40. Mark 12 then ends with the account of the widow and her generous meagre offering to the temple. She stands in contrast to the scribes and Pharisees against whom the woes have been spoken and who rip off widows and the vulnerable. Matthew omits the story of the widow. The result is that the woes against the scribes and Pharisees in chapter 23 lead directly to the prediction of God's judgement on the temple and Jerusalem in chapter 24. In the chapter of woes Matthew has expanded Mark with a large block of material drawn from Q (found also in Luke 11:39-52). Matthew's rule of exposition is that there is no room for smugness. Each of these charges may be just as applicable to the Christian community at some stage and history supports him.
It begins with an extraordinary statement about the scribes and Pharisees. They 'sit on Moses' seat' (23:2). That means they exercise authority for the administration of the Law in the broader social context where Matthew and his communities live, somewhere probably in the area of Galilee or southern Syria. There were not many places where this would have been the case, but it was so here in the late first century and the dominant group in Judaism by that time were the Pharisees. Galilee became their power base not long after the destruction of the temple and from there their influence spread. So Matthew's own situation is being reflected in this opening verse. A few other things are worth noting. The authority of Moses is not doubted; the Law, enshrined in Scripture, abides. Matthew and his community believe that, really, they should be the ones sitting there, but, until that is the case, the Law and its interpreters is to be respected.
A distinction then emerges in relation to the authority of those sitting on Moses' seat. Do what they say, not what they do (23:3) . People may need to say this of us at times, but here more blatant hypocrisy is envisaged. There is then another distinction which emerges. These interpreters of scripture also impose unrealistic burdens on people and offer no help to them to fulfil them (23:4). This appears to contradict the exhortation that one should do whatever they say, but the distinction being made is probably in relation to finer points. It is the difference between: here is the Law and this is what it should mean for you in detail. Matthew disputes the latter.
Matthew's whole approach to scripture is to interpret it on the basis of the love commands. Compassion and love dictate the way Scripture should apply, not a kind of legalistic bureaucracy which assumes God is a control freak. When God is our big ego writ large, then people will be abused in the name of purity or holiness or obedience. In every generation we can find examples of destructiveness done in the name of Scripture or even by means of Scripture. The challenges of chapter 23 have a way of coming home to roost.
Verses 5-7 take up the charges found in Mark 12:37-39. People bent on power surround themselves with the trappings of power, which are often designed to reinforce their claim. What we wear, where we sit, how we are greeted - these are elements of the persona we want people to see and respect. Behind it is often a frail yearning for love which has been met by such compensatory strategies. Abuse of others is frequently the result of exploiting others to meet our own stifled needs. The abuse may be as apparently harmless as captivating congregations with our preaching, framing our communities so that we are constantly affirmed, developing dependency on us among other needy people. Sometimes our garments (and what we do and where we sit) may serve the opposite: to remind ourselves and others that we are here to fulfil a task and are not pretending that we are doing it because we have arrived. If so, we will need to be straight about that. We are beggars telling other beggars where to find bread and occasionally it will help other beggars find the way if we wear a red cross, so to speak.
Matthew follows his principle of no elitism by directing similar warnings in 8-12 to the disciples. There is no place for either sitting back in smug judgement of others nor for imagining that being a follower of Jesus automatically protects us from falling into the very patterns we abhor in them. Matthew is very grounded. He hears the word of Jesus for his generation and its has abiding worth. So we, too, are to avoid playing games with titles. It appears that 'rabbi' first became a title of honour in the period when Matthew was writing, so the mention of 'rabbi' is particularly apt. 'Father' and 'teacher' are some of the options; we have plenty more.
If you are in ministry primarily to compensate for a low sense of your own importance, think again. Don't dive into depression and use the thought to put yourself down even further. Believe the importance God affirms in you. Consume it in the eucharist so it becomes part of your being. The more you do so and remain conscious of what you are doing and not doing, the less you will be fussed by the titles and all they symbolise and the less you will stand in succession to the kind of behaviour attacked here. The badges you might have to wear and titles you might have to carry will, like the vestments, be able to serve their true purpose: aids, if needed, to recognising roles and functions.
It is simply not so that Matthew is kidding the disciples that there is no self interest involved in leadership and so fostering the big lie that goes for piety according to which there is no self interest in what we do - a lie which often has disastrous consequences, especially when we are left with our real self interest ignored which is therefore likely to make itself felt subversively. Matthew's Jesus invites the disciples to think about greatness and what it mean to be lifted up. That is the clear motivation in 23:11-12. We want to be great; we want to do well. We want to be what God made us to be. We want to do what God wants us to do. We want to be so connected with God that what we want and what God wants become one. God wants us to be great. God wants us to rise up.
When we move towards seeing God's interests and our best interests and the best interests of others, when we get in touch with God's being as love, when we see that this is not a distraction from life but being truly in touch with life and the life giver, then we will take a big breath and dive. Let us be great in love. The magic is that here true self interest, God's interests, the world's best interests come together as one. It also means that we can stop playing games to conjure up alternative systems of worth where others are made to serve our distorted notion of self interest and where God and spirituality become a powerful weapon in our arsenal. Perhaps seeing all this first in a setting of ministry - the way Matthew leads us - will help us see that the same kinds of issues confront our hearers as much as ourselves as preachers.
Pentecost 24: 7 November Matthew 25:1-13
If you are choosing to use the 'All Saints' reading from Matthew 5:1-12, please see the comments for Epiphany 4.
Matthew 24 has Matthew's version of Jesus' prediction of the devastation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. It draws upon and expands Mark 13. The transition from the charges in Matthew 23 to the prediction of judgement in Matthew 24, heightened by the omission of Mark's passage just before Mark 13 of the widow's gift, is a telling sequence. Judgement will fall on Jerusalem and its people for its rejection of Christ and the gospel. But, as we saw last week, Matthew will not countenance smugness and elitism. Matthew 24 ends with warnings to church leaders to be faithful servants (24:45-51) or to find they suffer the same fate as 'the hypocrites' (24:51).
Matthew 25 continues the challenge to Christians. The image of the wedding recalls the parable of the wedding feast. This is the imagery of celebration, an expression of the joy of the kingdom to come. This remains the focus. The girls have a role to play in greeting the bridegroom when he comes. They need to stock up on supplies and be ready to have their lamps burning brightly on the occasion. The familiar cultural image becomes in Matthew a kind of nightmare. The details should not be pressed - a bit mean of the girls who had supplies not sharing?
The point is readiness. This is not about 2000 years of trying to whip up expectations that Jesus just might come very soon. It is about sustaining the life of faith. It is another version of Matthew's theme of elitism. Having had lamps in hand which burned well once is no guarantee they will burn in future. Having the status of being Christian, even being a light bearer, means nothing if it is not a continuing part of our being. Many who were first will be last (20:1-16). Matthew is interested in enabling people to live in a relationship with God which has continuing significance and continuing life.
The image of the closed door is harsh. It recalls similar imagery in the sermon on the mount and doubtless its use there informs its use here (7:21-23). Those who are disowned at the door there are none other than Christians who claim so much in the Lord's name, including miracles. Matthew bursts the balloons of religious enthusiasm and waffle. Not in touch with love? Then not in touch with love! Much that masqueraded in all sincerity as Christian faith then as now is what Paul would call just a clanging noise, even it had chalked up spiritual successes (see 1 Cor 13). In their different ways both Matthew and Paul put the emphasis on love as the fruit which matters.
The traditional association of oil with anointing and thus with the Spirit allows us to use the language of walking in the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, and bearing the fruit of the Spirit. It is appropriate where such Spirit language is in vogue to note that it is precisely in such areas that Matthew's issue arises. The language and wonders of the Spirit can lead people to be carried away into forms of religion which are full of effervescence but have little to do with the gospel. Paul addresses these dangers in 1 Corinthians 12-14. Matthew addresses them here and in 7:15-23. In Mark a similar slant away from such preoccupations is evident in the way he emphasises the pathway of lowliness and suffering rather than that of wonders and success. John's gospel has Jesus make the same point over against those who followed him primarily because of his wonders (2:23-25). Nicodemus is their spokesperson. They need to be born again to be able to see what Jesus is really about (3:1-3). Religion is frequently a distraction if not an escape from reality. Matthew keeps bringing us down to earth and will continue to do so in the passages which follow.
Pentecost 25: 14 November Matthew 25:14-30
Talents! Talent quests! This passage has left its mark on our language and culture in a big way. It will have formed part of the Q collection, but has undergone significant change. Luke's version of the parable is in 19:12-27. There each servant is given 10 minas. A mina was worth about 100 denarii and a denarius about a day's living wage. Only Matthew's version speaks of talents. A talent was around 6000 denarii. So the first servant was given 30000 denarii. That is a hefty sum! What would it convert to in terms of a day's wage times 30000 today? $5m? Matthew - spinning a yarn! - but seriously.
Talent has so much become part of our vocabulary as a term for natural abilities, that we usually miss the point that the parable is talking about money and what you can do with it. The ancient world did not have our complex finance markets, but it knew about investments and profit. Many of Jesus' parables reflect economic practices of the day and how they affected people. People would know what you could do with such a sum. Money was powerful then, too.
The first parable used the image of oil to light lamps. This parable uses the image of money and what it can achieve. Just as in the first parable the oil comes close to being a description for the Spirit, so here the money is an image for what is potent in the kingdom and for the kingdom. It may also be seen as a way of talking about the Spirit or at least about the life of God within us. It is slightly missing the point to think it is talking about how we use our various natural abilities (talents in the modern sense). It has more to do with how we allow the life of God to flow through us - because it is powerful- like money!
There is a sting in the tail of the parable. The person who refused to let the money work identifies his fears. The owner reaps where he has not sown and gathers harvest that was not originally his. A pretty good description of hard business practice in any age. Fear of being abandoned seems to motivate burying the talents. Matthew's community might think of the controversy over the expansion of the gospel into the Gentile world and the refusal of some Jews to accept that the doors should be flung open so recklessly. God is misbehaving again and they cannot believe it and refuse to support the adventure. In typically Matthean style the text promises only damnation for such lack of trust.
The parable challenges us not to sit on the life of God in us. That is a variant on the Matthean theme of keeping the oil in supply, living from the life of God and not sitting back in complacency on the basis of status or, here, not snuffing out the flame because our narrow values will not allow us to keep up with God's generosity.
If the modern use of talents has any relation to the text, it is at the level of allowing God's life do its adventures with us and putting our talents (our natural abilities) at God's disposal. The talents of the parable are really about God's life and power, not about our natural abilities. But the appropriate response is to allow God's investing hand to employ our abilities.
The tragedy is that many people are afraid of losing or endangering God and so seek to protect God from adventures, to resist attempts at radical inclusion that might, they fear, compromise God's purity and holiness. Protecting God is a variant of not trusting God. Matthew wants his hearers to share God's adventure of inclusiveness. God is bigger than our religious industry. Sometimes we find God is pulling in great profits in areas which we had deemed beyond God's interests. It is a fascinating thing to have God compared to the entrepreneurial multimillionaire. God's mercy never ends is a way of saying grace has capital, love is rich. We need to encourage people to stop putting God under the mattress. As we begin to trust allowing God to move through us, our lives change as individuals and our communities have a better chance of change. There are rich pickings, so to speak, and the harvest is ripe.
| Christ the King:
21 November Matthew 25:31-46
This is the climax of the Church's year. It is also the climax of Jesus' teaching ministry in Matthew. Ancient writers were very conscious of the importance of such a position within a narrative. Here we can expect matters of central significance for Matthew and this is what we find. It is the judgement day. Jesus is present in a semi-parable as the Son of Man. It is still a parable of sorts as the animal images suggest, but it is just as much a vision of the judgement day. In that sense it is fairly close to the kind of visions we hear described in Daniel, 1 Enoch and Revelation. 'His glorious throne' (literally, 'the throne of his glory') is language which also occurs in the Enoch literature in 1 Enoch 37-71, the central section which, though absent from the fragments of 1 Enoch found in the caves of the Dead Sea, nevertheless probably stems from early times, many would suggest at least the time of Matthew. It is a vision of the judgement of all the nations. This is important since it makes it clear that this is universal judgement. It is not just a judgement of Israel or of the church. Ultimately such status, one way or other, counts for nothing. What counts is attitude and performance. 'The least of these' to whom caring is shown or not shown could refer to Christians, since Matthew's community appears to have called itself the community of the little ones and they are Jesus' family. A large number of manuscripts add the words, 'my brothers', which would strengthen the reference to believers. It would be striking to find that the criterion on the judgement day will be how people have treated Christians. Reinforcing such an interpretation is the fact that Jesus identifies himself with these least ones. They are his church. The same thought would be operating here as in Acts where the risen Jesus on the Damascus Road confronts him with why he was persecuting him (Jesus), because to persecute Christians is to persecute Jesus. An interpretation like this might be seen to introduce a new element, not foreshadowed elsewhere. This would be unusual in such a closing piece. On the other hand, the whole chapter is focusing on believers and is addressed to disciples. Certainly it at least includes response to Christians, but the focus of the response is less their status and more their need. There is a logic in Matthew's thinking which makes us think more universally, especially Matthew's denial of privilege both to children of Abraham, and to the church. Just as there is no distinction when it comes to the criterion of caring, whether one is a child of Abraham, a Christian or nothing, so there is no distinction to be made among who should be the recipient of love. Seen in that light, the vision is highlighting typically Matthean themes and echoes the Sermon on the Mount. Judgement will be by our fruit. What matters is not our status or achievements, but our continuing willingness to let the life of God be lived through us, concretely: our love for people. Matthew is not saying: pretend Jesus is in people and that will enable you to love them. Rather the sheep loved people because of who they were as people. The notion that in doing so they were also loving Jesus came to them as a surprise. The loving was real, not a means to enhance their relationship with Jesus. Please love me because I am me, not because you imagine I am someone I am not. Seeing Christ in others and in the needy, especially, need not, of course, be as abusive as that. It has been for many a helpful notion which has in no way diminished their love for the person in question. but that kind of piety easily lends itself to a distraction from person centred care. Ultimately only love matters and Matthew's faith says love is never anonymous. Love is always a participation in Christ's love whether we label it so or not. Again Matthew is down to earth. This simple insight cuts across claims to privilege and all the religious disqualifications which accompany them. It even invites us to identify the love of God when it is active beyond our territory, to use last week's imagery, to see the harvest where Christian hands have not sown. Matthew levels all religious privilege in the name of loving and understanding God as loving. It is remarkable that such insight can also stand beside Matthew's constant strategy of motivation by threat of punishment. The persistence with this strategy always threatens to uproot the seed being sown. It breeds fear and fear tends to bury love in the ground. This is the phenomenon of the Scriptures which offer us old and new, life and sometimes death. Engaging it confronts us nevertheless with God's word. On this day of 'Christ, the king,' we might see in this the different models of Christ's kingship which persist. The image which strives against the norms of all societies is not the imperial lord but the broken servant bearing a crown of thorns. It has been very hard trying to resist the tendency to treat Easter as a reversal of all that Jesus was instead of an affirmation of all that he was. Jesus was not an exception in the life of God, but the rule. His subversive summons to a new understanding human greatness is not to be abandoned after Easter by projecting our imperious will to power into an image of Christ enthroned in military splendour. What we do to him we do to ourselves; little wonder we have sanctioned such power in church and society. The will to destroy our enemies finds its ultimate sanction in a theology that has God do the same; the one sanctions the other. We should not then be surprised to find Christians advocating capital punishment and handling conflicts in ways that abandon the path of reconciliation. Yet Matthew's parable also offers an alternative vision: of one who is ever to be found in loving and being loved, in change and confrontation and hope. Return to Home Page |