Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Isaiah 58.1-12; 1 Corinthians 2.12-16; Matthew 5.13-20
Church of Scotland, Costa del Sol, Fuengirola, February 9 2020
Perhaps the best way to think of Matthew’s original audience is as Jewish Protestants.
I say “audience” advisedly. Some of the community for whom Matthew wrote may have read his Gospel, but most of them would have heard it read.
Matthew’s church was most likely a small Jewish-Christian community in Antioch, in modern-day Turkey. In the year 70, Roman troops had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem; and Jews of all kinds were now left asking themselves how they should be Jewish in a world without the temple sacrifices commanded in the law.
The scribes and the Pharisees were already embarking on a line of development that would end in Rabbinic Judaism. This combines the written law found in the Bible with the oral law handed down, as it was supposed, by word of mouth from Moses.
This oral law the Rabbis would codify in the Mishnah and endlessly debate in the Talmud. Their form of Judaism would define the Jewish mainstream until the birth of modern times.
But Matthew’s church dissented from this emerging orthodoxy. They went a different way. They were faithful Jews, but their faith was centred on Jesus of Nazareth. They understood him to be the Messiah prophesied in the Bible, and around him they redefined their Judaism.
Theirs was a minority opinion among the Jews of their day. In Matthew’s Gospel you can see them on the defensive, arguing against the much more influential Pharisees.
Their arguments are not original. They go back to Jesus himself. Jesus saw himself as fulfilling the law and the prophets, not destroying them. He saw himself as fulfilling the hope of Israel and as redefining Israel around himself.
This wasn’t because Jesus was an egomaniac, still less a megalomaniac – those forms of mania he was more than happy to leave to the Caesars in Rome.
He was called by the Father to summon Israel to turn again and be saved. He was the light in Israel’s darkness, calling Israel to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth. He was the nucleus of a renewed Israel. And those who believed in him were his brothers and sisters in the renewed family of Israel.
To those who believed in his name, he issued a challenge, as we hear in Matthew’s verse 20: If you want to be part of this new family of Israel in which all the families of the earth will be blessed, you need to be more righteous than the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.
More just, not less.
*
To see how daunting that challenge is, we need only read through the whole three chapters of the Sermon on the Mount.
Or we can read Moses and the prophets. We can read, for example, our Old Testament lesson, drawn from the book of Isaiah.
Don’t puff your piety by fasting, says Isaiah 58, especially if in between times you are fighting among yourselves and grinding the face of the poor.
The fasting God wants to see, says Isaiah 58, is to share your food with the hungry and provide the homeless with shelter, to break the chains of injustice, untie the cords of the yoke, and set the oppressed free.
And we go, “Hmm. That’s a lot to ask.” How can a small congregation of mostly retired people on the Costa del Sol be expected to do all that?
*
Part of the answer, of course, is that we’re already doing it. We already help feed the hungry on Mondays here in Lux Mundi. We already help the homeless and the poor wanderers without papers in the Casa Sagrada in Málaga. We may feel that these are just two drops in the ocean of the world’s need, but two drops are not nothing.
The second part of the answer is that we are not alone.
We are part of a Church of Scotland and a worldwide church that in the course of our lifetime has come to understand more and more clearly just how central it is to our calling as Christians to break the chains of injustice that condemn so many to misery.
In the 1980s, the World Council of Churches, with its headquarters in my home town, ran an ambitious consultation on the comprehensive theme of justice, peace, and the safeguarding or integrity of creation.
In 1997, I was part of an international conference in Debrecen, Hungary, organized by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, for which I was then working, that focused on two key targets of that agenda. These were economic injustice and environmental destruction, the importance of which has only grown in the years since.
And there are very many outside the churches who are also working bravely against war and injustice and climate change.
But the question remains: How do we in Fuengirola contribute to any or all of this?
I can’t answer for you, but I can perhaps suggest two things.
The first is to pay attention.
The news today is often so depressing that our inclination must be to switch channels or turn the television off entirely. But if we abandon the world to those who are determined to make it worse, we can’t complain when it does duly become worse.
The second is not to be deceived, not to be taken in.
For decades very serious people told us that the best way to raise the poor out of poverty was tax cuts for the rich. Wherever this policy was pursued, it had the predictable result of widening the gulf between rich and poor, making the rich even richer and the very rich absurdly rich.
For decades oil companies told us that climate change wasn’t happening, or if it was happening it had nothing to do with fossil fuels, or if it did there was nothing we could do, or if there were some things we could do we shouldn’t do them too much or too quickly.
We now know beyond a doubt that we face a climate emergency that is entirely man-made. Its consequences are already catastrophic and will only grow in gravity if we allow ourselves to be persuaded that we must change, yes, but we should change gradually, in measured and moderate steps.
Festina lente, as the saying goes: Make haste slowly. Good advice, except when we are fast running out of time.
I leave you to ponder all these things – but not without adding the third part of my answer.
The men and women who met in Debrecen in 1997 in the conference I mentioned earlier issued a declaration. As we might expect from Reformed Christians, they drew on John Calvin’s Institutes and also on the Heidelberg Catechism.
We are not alone, they said. We belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to ourselves but to our faithful saviour Jesus Christ. We look forward to the holy city in which God will dwell with human beings and be their God. We believe in the Holy Spirit who will guide us into all truth. We do not despair, for God reigns. We will continue to struggle against injustice in this world.
*
Matthew is a Jewish Christian writing in the first century. We are gentile Christians – or most of us are – thinking about his Gospel in the 21st century. It’s not always to our taste. Sometimes we look at the menu of the New Testament and our choice falls on Paul.
Matthew is writing for Jewish Christians like himself, telling them to be faithful followers of Jesus in upholding the Jewish law as he and they understand it. Paul is writing to gentile converts in the first century, telling them that to be faithful followers of Jesus they don’t have to become Jews, they don’t have to observe the Jewish law.
We prefer Paul.
But in spite of all their differences, Paul and Matthew fundamentally agree, and fundamentally we should agree with both of them.
Paul tells us that whoever loves others has fulfilled the law:
“The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, ‘You shall not murder’, ‘You shall not steal’, ‘You shall not covet’, and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’.Love does no harm to a neighbour. Therefore love is the fulfilment of the law. (Romans 3.9-10)
Likewise, Matthew sums up the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in a single sentence in chapter 7 of his Gospel, the famous golden rule:
“… in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7.12)
What it means to love others as we love ourselves – this will be the theme of my final sermon next Sunday.