Isaiah 9.1–4
1 Corinthians 1.10–18
Matthew 4.12–23
Was Jesus waiting for a signal?
The Gospels agree that he didn’t begin to announce the Kingdom until he heard that John had been arrested. Something about that sinister moment told him that the time had come. He had fought with the powers of darkness, and had overcome. Now one of their earthly representatives had closed in on the Baptist, the one who had prepared the ground for the Kingdom message. Jesus could wait no longer. The darkness had reached its height; it was time for the great light to shine.
The precedents, echoing down the history of Israel, pointed in this direction. Isaiah addressed the problems of his own day by referring back to the Midianite crisis. The enemy power grew stronger, and God saved Israel through an unexpected deliverer. Isaiah’s theme of the coming child (omitted from today’s reading) provides his own equivalent. Whatever threats the powers of darkness may provide, a child will be born through whom God’s zeal will shine the true light in ‘Galilee of the nations’ (then, as in Jesus’ day, Jewish territory permeated with foreign influences). Matthew, invoking Isaiah, draws on this millennium-old tradition in order to say: now at last the story reaches its complete fulfilment.
The very first thing Jesus did, according to Matthew, was to call followers. The beginning of a community, the Kingdom people; the first sign, earlier even than the remarkable healings, that something new was afoot. They left jobs, they left family – both vital symbols of who they were – and became part of that something new, without knowing where it would lead.
This Kingdom people, called into existence by Jesus’ announcement and invitation, grew quickly into the twelve, and has grown from that into a great multitude which no one can number. But it is still the same family, formed by the Kingdom proclamation and its accompanying summons, formed of people who have seen the light shining in the darkness and have chosen to follow the path it illuminates.
It was out of concern for that family that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. We cannot now tell which, if any, of the subsequent problems in the letter were connected to the warring personality cults in the young Church; but the existence of such groups was itself a first-order disaster. Confused and muddled, the Corinthian Christians seem to have lined up Paul, Apollos and Peter with Jesus Christ himself as cult-figures into whose entourage one might be initiated. Paul insists that his role is simply that of the herald, announcing Jesus, the crucified king of the world. That strange message has created a new family out of nothing, a family whose very existence, and particularly whose unity, was supposed to be shining God’s great light into the dark culture around.
As we prepare to celebrate Paul’s own conversion, and to keep the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 1 Corinthians provides a salutary lesson. What are we waiting for? Is the world not dark enough yet?
The Fourth Sunday of Epiphany
1 Kings 17.8–16
1 Corinthians 1.18–31
John 2.1–11
The third day; it would be. John does nothing by accident. New creation bursts in upon a village wedding, itself a sign of hope. Wine is to water as the new world is to the old; bubbling up, taking people by surprise, confounding expectations, raising questions, raising the dead.
Other overtones crowd in too. Jewish purification rites belong with the old creation, but Jesus belongs in the new. ‘Woman, what is there between us? My hour has not yet come’; then, when the hour had truly come, ‘Woman, behold your son.’ Jesus’ glory was there already, for those with eyes to see; though they only really acquired such eyes when they saw his glory, crowned as it had been with thorns, on, yes, the third day.
From then on, the challenge was to see that glory in the shame of the cross. The message of the crucified King of the Jews and Lord of the world burst upon an unsuspecting world, not least through Paul’s proclamation, and was a rude shock to the system. Jews were looking for signs of the Kingdom, but what sort of a sign is a crucified King? The pagan world was yearning after wisdom, but what wisdom is there in the stark message that yet another rebel leader has met a messy and untimely end? How can this message contain anything that anyone in their right mind will want to hear? Pour the water into these vessels, though, and then pour it out before the world, and watch it bubble up with transforming power. The gospel, says Paul elsewhere, is God’s saving power, God’s dynamite. Part of its point is precisely that it is, in the world’s eyes, upside down and inside out.
This statement of the gospel’s power to up-end human expectations, set alongside last week’s passage about personality cults among the Corinthian Christians, provides an introduction to the main thrusts of the letter. The Corinthians were eager to turn the rich wine of the gospel back into water again, back into another version of the philosophies they were used to. Paul will have none of it. Unless the stewards at the feast are looking astonished, the party hasn’t really begun. Unless the wrong people are crowding into the kingdom, it isn’t God’s Kingdom. If it’s wine you want, pour water from these vessels. If it’s boasting you want, boast of the Lord – Jesus, the vessel that contains all wisdom, and all else besides.
Elijah’s multiplication of meal and oil, like Jesus’ remarkable multiplications and transformations, was not just a matter of providing for people in need. It was a sign of hope, of new creation, at a time of famine and drought. More: as Jesus himself would indicate in Luke 4, it was a sign that God was at work beyond the borders of Israel. New life was bursting out all over the place. But it took faith to see it. ‘Make me a little cake first.’ Now there’s a challenge.
Proper 1
Isaiah 58.1–12
1 Corinthians 2.1–16
Matthew 5.13–20
Isaiah’s stinging rebuke contains the seeds of the Sermon on the Mount. True piety must be part of the outward movement to share your blessing with the world. Fasting is useless if injustice goes unchecked. Look after the poor, and your light will rise like the dawn. God will be present when you call him.
Jesus’ challenge to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world was not simply an agenda for his followers at the time or the Church of the future. It was a direct Isaianic challenge to the Israel of his day. They were called to be the light of the world. God’s purpose for Israel was that through them he would bring his justice and mercy to bear upon the nations. The city set on a hill, unable to be hidden, is Jerusalem, where the nations would come to learn God’s law.
Yet Israel in Jesus’ day was refusing this vocation. Of course there were many wise and devout Jews; but the nation as a whole, as Josephus records, was bent not on bringing God’s light to the pagan world but on bringing it God’s swift judgement, especially that part of it that was currently ruling the Middle East with casual brutality. Understandable, but unfaithful.
Jesus’ call is far more than a set of abstract moral lessons. It is a summons to Israel to be Israel, while there is still time. This is what the law and the prophets pointed to. And if Jesus’ way meant abandoning some of the interpretations (Pharisaic or whatever) which at the time seemed part and parcel of the law, so be it. The call to the higher righteousness corresponds to Isaiah’s summons to an outward-looking piety in which Israel will at last be God’s people for the world.
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