I think that there can be no question that Jesus said more words than this when He was going around Galilee preaching and healing. So, these words are Matthew’s epitome. They are also the way that he summarizes the preaching of John the Baptist at the beginning of chapter 3. When Mark speaks about this same period in Jesus ministry he puts it like this,

The evangelists agree then that this is the heart of the message which Matthew called a great light shining in a dark place and the fulfillment of all the prophecies. In fact, if we look through the New Testament we are driven to conclude that even the bare word, “Repent” by itself is considered a good summary of the Gospel. Over and over, the preaching of the Gospel is described as the preaching of repentance. So, my question is: Is repentance a good summary of what we mean when we talk about the Gospel? Is our message a message of repentance?

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. I have usually not read those words as good news, but as a threat. I’ve taken them to mean something like, “You better straighten up now cause soon it’ll be too late.” Johnny Cash put it like this,

Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin' in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God'll cut you down
Sooner or later God'll cut you down

Go tell that long tongue liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut you down
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut you down
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut you down

Turn or burn. Shape up or ship out. Get right or get left. Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand?

There is certainly plenty of reason to preach that message, turn or burn, get right or get left, into our world. There is plenty of darkness and that message makes sense as a way to bring some light into it. That message and that thinking is all up and down Moses and the Prophets and we have the Lord preaching it here not long before His final trip to Jerusalem. It goes back at least to Noah doesn’t it? But 100 years of Noah’s preaching didn’t save many people, and even the eight souls who were saved still had the contagion of sin deep in them as Noah’s drunkenness and Ham’s dishonor of his father shows. Moses and the prophets were barely known, had sadly little impact on the world, or even on their own people until something changed during this period when Jesus went around Galilee preaching repentance. That change is the reason you and me even know about Noah and the prophets. And I think to see what changed, we are going to have to take another look at “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” We may have to repent of our previous repentance. We are going to have to have a new mind about this whole thing.

Without a doubt repent means to “think differently afterwards”, to “have a new mind” and when Jesus and His apostles bring the imperative “repent” with no object or modifiers, with no limitations, it seems as if everything in our minds must be changed. There really is nothing to be kept. But, when they speak more fully they say, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” or as Mark puts it in his parallel of our text,

“The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.” is the message. Maybe the nearness of the kingdom is not meant to be a stick to threaten us, or even a carrot to draw us in, but the actual content of the changed mind. What I mean is, what if the main things that Jesus intends to change our mind about is that we DON’T BELIEVE that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and that we don’t believe the Gospel?

I live my life like I am going to grow old and die and the main thing that determines my future is me, my actions, my choices, my work. I scrimp and save. I scheme and plan. And I do all of it like the kingdom is far enough away to be safely ignored, like I can just leave it out of my calculations. But how close is “at hand”? It’s close enough that you can touch it right? There will be a time when ‘the man comes around’, as Johnny put it in another song, when His presence is seen from the East to the West like the lightning flashes, but the kingdom doesn’t come with observation. The kingdom is already at hand, close enough to stub your toe on it walking around a dark house some night.

Whenever I say that it feels like just words, just more of Jon’s big talk, but I heard it from an old saint the other day and I believed him. What he said is that he is no longer surprised by his sin. He isn’t surprised anymore when he does something selfish or mean but what does surprise him is his righteousness. He acts in ways that are better than he expected. He is kind and patient sometimes when he expects to be a jerk. He discovers that he has forgiven when his knowledge of himself tells him that he will hold a grudge. The Eschaton, the Lord’s Return, the man coming around, is not a change in His plan or His process. It is just the point when it is safe for Him to let us see what He has been doing to us and through us and in us for a long time. It is the moment when He can let us in on the secret of what we will be because it’ll have got far enough along that our knowing won’t hurt anything. Right now, every time we see any goodness in ourselves it is dangerous. It creates Pride. Every time we see goodness in others it creates Envy. In fact, I’ll tell you, I was recently surprised to discover that envy is the reason that Matthew says the Jewish leaders handed Jesus over to Pilate. He was handed over because of envy. Because people wanted to be as good as Him and couldn’t stand being who they were anymore. It made them sick to be such lowdown good for nothing people when they saw what people were made to be like. But why was He better, because He believed that the kingdom really was near. He believed it enough to say, “Rise up and walk” and to say “Your sins are forgiven” those are things that happen when the kingdom is at hand.

Look He doesn’t say “Blessed will be the poor in spirit, for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven someday.” This is now stuff. This is God reaching into our world to remake our minds because we are nowhere near doing it ourselves. This is God putting boots on the ground, even if they are sandals. Kingdom doesn’t mean a country or a particular piece of real estate or a government. It means literally “the things that a king dominates” and Jesus has been dominating little bits and pieces of your world and your life for a long time. It doesn’t look that way or feel that way and it’s not supposed to. We have tried to use “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” as Law. We have tried to make it a rule or a threat. “Straighten up and fly right while there is still time.” But when you get to Jesus’ preaching in Matthew 4 and 5 the Law is not just in the past historically but He is assuming that it has already done its work in you. We don’t see that because we are asking the Law to do what it was never meant to do. The Law is assumed to have done its work in the ones to whom Matthew 5:3 is addressed. How do I know? Because the purpose of the Law is to bring you into a state of spiritual poverty. It begins with a demand for all of your heart and soul and mind and strength and oh yeah on top of that here’s another six hundred or so demands. Why does God demand a lot of things that He doesn’t need or want? Because the purpose of the law is to show you yourself as a sinner. By the Law is the knowledge of sin. He demands things from us not because having them adds to Him but because when we have them they take away from us. Our riches are a weight holding us to the earth. Our independence and autonomy prevent us from being yoked to Christ. Our righteousness prevents us from receiving His. You have to be stripped of your goodness in order to receive the goodness of Christ. The Law wasn’t sent to make you fat and happy but to make you hunger and thirst for a righteousness that you ain’t got and can’t produce. Spiritual bankruptcy is the prerequisite for spiritual blessing. Not some one and done emptiness but continually being slapped in the face with the dead, stinking fish of your inadequacy. That is the job of a fisher of men and the call to repent is a call to see the things that you are getting right in a new light. Whenever I feel like a contributing member of the church or of society then my conscience comes around claiming my time, my wallet, and my very life and I don’t want to give anybody any of those things. I want to keep them for myself. It is determined to bring me to the feet of Jesus crying, “I’ve done these commandments and I’m worn out. I’m broke and I feel my life slipping away. I’ve been slaving away after eternal life and I’m no closer than when I started.” The Gospel isn’t a cocktail, one part your righteousness and two parts Christ’s. Straight up is the only way. The only cups that He fills are empty ones. He did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance and if you have moved from sinner to righteous guy then the Gospel is in your past not your present.

We have been trying and failing to repent because we only want to repent of the things that humanity more or less universally agrees are wrong. Everybody knows that me being a jerk is wrong and I’m still doing it. I know that it is hurtful and unproductive. I’ve known that for a very long time. That’s not what I need to have new thoughts about. The problem is that the things that I think I am getting right I am actually messing up the worst. It’s the places where I think I am a pretty good dude, it’s my righteousness, that I need to repent of. And that is the insolvable problem. My righteousness is the last thing that I will ever let go of because it seems right to me. The way that seems right in my eyes ends in death but I can’t see anything else so I can never produce repentance.

Listen to Jeremiah’s words. ‘turn thou me, and I shall be turned’ ‘after I was turned, I repented’.1 We can’t decide to repent because the things we need to repent of seem right. We can’t see our actions in a different light unless a different light comes down to us from above. If the Lord restores us and turns us then we turn. And until then all we can or should do is cry out to Him for restoration. We can’t be saved because we are ashamed to cry out, ashamed to be helpless and in need of rescue. No we are fine. We are doing good. The crumbs of grace that have come to us are all we want or need. Making bricks without straw builds character and I like it.

But the command to repent is a command to believe the Gospel. To believe that God is not far away, but near enough to understand and be touched with our infirmities. Near enough that when we get the beating we have earned He winds up bloody like twins who feel each other’s pain. The two statements are equivalent. The kingdom is at hand because the king is present and His presence is the whole of the Good News. No one has to carry a message to Heaven for us because He is close enough that He can’t miss our suffering. Believe that the Gospel is for you, now. Not sometime in your past, not for when you die. The Good News is invading and dominating your life, right now. You wouldn’t, maybe couldn’t, come to Him so He has come to you. You wouldn’t call out to Him so He is calling out to you. God will no more withhold His goodness from you than He will withhold it from the beloved Son with whom He is well pleased. Believe that your suffering, your failure, is salt and light, driving away numbness, blandness, and darkness just as His was and is. You see only darkness because the light is streaming from you outward.

Pre-Communion Address

We have been trying to preach the Gospel to each other and to ourselves. Taylor has led us through the liturgy, the best words that 2000 years of Christianity have come up with to preach the Gospel to you. Chris has led us through the great old hymns of the faith. And I have done my best to explain the Scriptures. But there are a lot of ways that this plan of ours can crash. Anxiety and fear don’t necessarily wait outside the doors of the church or wait for the dismissal to torment us and the problems of your life might have kept you from hearing the Gospel today. Maybe the words we picked weren’t the right words for you today. Maybe I got caught up in my own cleverness or my own self and didn’t bring what you needed. Maybe you are tired or sick and just in that place where nothing is going to land. Or maybe my children were running around like wild indians, screaming nonsense and breaking things. Christ knew and knows that any or all of these might be standing in your way today, and a Gospel that only reaches good people in the right frame of mind, who are having a good day is a pretty pathetic saviour. So, He gave us a better way to preach the Gospel. Taylor will read the words and then Dennis will preach the Gospel in a way that reaches the blind and the deaf, a way that is unmissable for any person living on this earth. It’s simple. You are poor and needy. You are hungry. Christ is the food that you need. You are thirsty. The only drink that will do is the blood of Calvary. We know that we are living in the kingdom now because we eat at the King’s table. He has transferred us from darkness to light and from death to life. It doesn’t yet appear but ‘Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. The old life has gone. A new life has begun.’

We only know the first period of Jesus’ ministry from the first 5 chapters of John. It seems to have happened in two modes. Jesus would teach in and around the Jordan, collaborating with John and his disciples, and at the feast times He would go to Jerusalem and interact with worshipers, that is religiously observant Jews. In saying, ‘Jews’ I am trying not to put anything of my own into the text. Believe me, I know how loaded of a way that this is to speak in our present climate, but this is the usage of the fourth Gospel from start to finish and I believe that John had a reason that is relevant to our text for speaking this way. It was then, in the Jerusalem temple at a Jewish feast on the Sabbath that the first hostilities between Jesus and the Jews surfaced. Although it would take a considerable amount of time for His disciples to catch up, I believe that the dispute over healing on the Sabbath was the moment when it became clear to Jesus, in His human mind, that following Him and the practice of Judaism were incompatible.

Suppose that you had been a passerby at the Pool of Bethesda sometime before the miracle. What word would you use to describe what the crippled man was doing there? You might say that he was waiting. He could have been watching for the water to move so that he could be first. We don’t know if he was praying or not. He might have been grumbling. Maybe we could try and peer deeper into his soul and say that he was doubting or believing? He might have been hoping or fearing. We might say that he was suffering or being oppressed. He might have been doing a great many different things. Which of those things he was doing is not pointed out in the Gospel because nothing about his prior mental or spiritual condition contributes to the salvation that Jesus brings to him. But there are two things that we all know he was not doing. He was not resting and he was not celebrating the Lord’s Sabbath, although nothing that he was doing violated any specific legal code. He was being ridden by his disease. His repeated failures to earn the Lord’s healing were a constant burden that he was bearing.

The miracle at the Sheep Gate really could heal cripples. Well, it could heal the fastest cripple out of the gate. Judaism could heal unless your problems were so embarrassing or isolating that you were left with no one to put you in the water. It could heal the Special Olympic Gold Medalist or the cripple with an inspiring story and a stuffed Go Fund Me, but the cripples who weren’t able to overcome their affliction were stuck with it. The parallel to our lives and our churches fairly leaps off the page. We can heal anybody who can do all of the steps right, with enough faith and sincerity not to mention energy, understanding, and skill and if our plan of salvation doesn’t work then it is the patient’s fault. What really gets me is to have people telling me how easy it is and I keep trying and failing. No, whatever else the crippled man was doing that Sabbath day when he was laying on his pallet, He wasn’t resting.

Our religion can heal the healable, believe the believable, love the lovable and it seems to have been on this day that the man Jesus Christ was walloped with the fact that the only way for Him to save the unsavable, love the unlovable, and forgive the unforgivable would be to leave behind all of the structures of religion and charity which had come before Him. These things were not and are not bad in themselves, the Law is holy and just and good, but they were encumbrances which He threw aside to run the race before Him. Taking care of the 99 sheep who only need a guide, a friend, or an example is a perfectly laudable thing. But the Good Shepherd had to leave them in order to do anything for that one desperate case who needs a full blown redeemer. If it seems strange that good laws and rules and systems have to be scorned and cast away remember that Abraham threw his first born son, Ishmael, out into the desert without even a sandwich or a Gatorade, not because there was any fault in him or because his father didn’t love him but simply and solely because he was the son of the bondwoman and a potential obstacle to the son of the free woman inheriting and obtaining the promise. He will always go outside the camp, outside the church, because you aren’t just a black sheep. You are His black sheep.

When the man took up his bed that was the first rest that he had had in 38 years. Standing on his legs and carrying his bed in joyful obedience was a celebration for this man, not even an ordinary Sabbath but a high and holy feast. The man’s long labor of anxiety and bitterness and failure was over but there has never been a law written that can capture that fact. No rule about what to do or what not to do on which day can get hold of the great relief which being on his feet with a burden in his arms was after 38 years lying helpless on a pallet. Every rule will always miss the Spirit who comes and goes and no one can say when or where, will miss the great truth that the man was laboring when he was on the bed and resting when the bed was on him. When we get to Matthew 5 and 6 we will see that the limitations of the Law were very much on Jesus’ mind not long after this. Long prayers, fastidious observance does nothing to change us, is no good indication of who we actually are.(Matthew 6) He repeatedly suggests in Matthew 5 that the Law stops short of what is necessary, certainly stops short of how far He intended to go.(You have heard it said, but I say to you) In John 3 and 4 Jesus speaks as if His work is to complete Judaism, to finish what was started, but let’s see what I take to be the end of Jesus’ attempt at continuity with Judaism and then we can see what changed and why Matthew picks up the story where he does.

On Good Friday I asked my children a simple question. I asked them, “Who killed Jesus?” and I got three answers. The first answer I got was “the priests and leaders” and I think it is important to see that they were Jewish priests and leaders but not for the reason that that might suggest in our current environment. The second answer I got was “Judas” and the third answer was “Pontius Pilate”. These three answers taken together point to an enormous truth. Judaism, Rome, and one of Jesus’ best, most dedicated friends. It wasn’t the bad things or the average things that failed, that did the worst thing in human history. The most complete rejection of God didn’t come from demons or from wild sinners in some bar. It came from the best representatives of the best religion and the best government that the world has ever known. And it came from Jesus’ best friend, a man who had left everything to follow Him. And I think that Jesus saw the deep truth of that when He was condemned as a Sabbath breaker. John is our only record of this early ministry of Jesus and he ends that record with those words.1 Matthew skips over this entire first period and picks up after the Lord’s baptism and His temptations in this way:

No one tells us when Jesus got to Nazareth or what He did there but Matthew places considerable emphasis on this departure of Jesus. Jesus had been to Galilee and Capernaum before(John 2), He had taught and worked miracles there but the imprisonment of John and the departure to Galilee, the beginning of this second period of ministry is the continental divide for Matthew. Everything before it is one thing and what began on that day is the story that caused him to put pen to paper, is what he desires to give his testimony about and what is fully and properly called Gospel.

This great light that suddenly shone out in these dark places is a light that Matthew connects very much with departures, with leaving. Look at verses 18-22.

James and John left the boat and their father. Peter and Andrew left their nets and Jesus left Nazareth. They all left their families and their ways of life. The act of fishing, the taking of fish from water pictures for us the same thing. Jesus and Andrew and Peter and James and John would live the rest of their lives not just as ‘fish out of water’, not at home anywhere, separated from the rest of men by the Gospel in their minds and their mouths, but as fishers actively taking others out of their lives. To put a finer point on it, to the Rabbis and to laws of kosher a ‘fish out of water’ is literally a dead fish2. The moment that the fish has dry spots on its scales it is considered to be a corpse and the fisherman who touches such a fish cannot come into the presence of God until he has ritually washed and the sun has come up on a new day. A fisherman is unclean, inadmissible to the presence of God any day on which he has handled a fish, his works, his livelihood make him repugnant to Holy God. Only a professional butcher would be ritually unclean as often as a fisherman.3 There are only two times when he can come into the presence of God, on a day when he has done no work or when he has failed utterly to catch fish. Rather than choosing very observant religious guys, Jesus was deliberately aiming for those outside of the camp and His comment about making them fishers of men makes it clear that the thing which had made God less accessible to them was exactly the qualification that He was looking for. On this day, the day where Matthew begins our Lord’s ministry, Jesus wasn’t thinking about the need for shepherds to lead and guide us, to form nurturing relationships. He wasn’t thinking about farmers to plant seeds and patiently water and wait for some future harvest. No. In fishing there is none of that. There is only a continual harvest, a harvest of corpses, of death and departure from all that has gone before. He was thinking about our need for fishers to take us out of our lives, out of our religions, out of our loves and families and successes and skills. The Apostles were leaving their boats and their nets but they couldn’t leave behind being fishermen as that was the basis on which they had been chosen. Now Peter and Andrew had followed Jesus previously because John Baptist had sent them to Him4, but this is the day on which the Lord Himself selected them. This is the moment when He gave up on priests and scribes who were meticulously clean and had followed all of the right steps, brought the right gifts, prayed the right prayers, and called the group who had the least business being in the presence of God of any group He could pick. So you think about that when you are thinking about what a ‘fisher of men’ is and since we have been talking about corpses and death we are ready to talk about the event that triggered Jesus to leave Nazareth at all.

I don’t know for a fact that Jesus had been in Nazareth since the confrontation in John 5. He had done a lot in His early ministry. You or I would have been very impressed with ourselves and doing everything that we could to double down on more of the same but I don’t think that He was at all satisfied. Jesus had sat down face to face with Nicodemus and dropped the biggest truthbombs in history on his head with little to no effect(John 3). If He did that with every one of us, His life and His time would be wasted in His own eyes. All of the words that needed to be said to us had been said long before by Moses and the Prophets and we couldn’t hear them. When He was condemned for healing the crippled man, I think that He saw that even if He fixed each and every one of our problems we would still never know rest because our model of rest was too far different from the truth of rest. Our mental model of righteousness is still too far different from the truth of righteousness. If the best words and the best miracles won’t bring men to the Savior and His truth then what will? If fixing our problems just makes us condemn the Savior, as in John 5, then what is the way forward?

What was needed was a truth that neither Moses, nor David, nor Solomon knew, or rather a truth whose significance they had all overlooked. Matthew identifies John’s imprisonment as the catalyst which began Jesus’ Gospel preaching career. John, of course, was imprisoned for saying something that everybody knew, that you shouldn’t have your brother’s wife. He wasn’t really imprisoned to silence him because he continued to have access to his disciples and Herod would come and listen to him speak. He was imprisoned as a sign, a sign that being irritating to power, rubbing salt in the king’s wounds and a light in his face when he was trying to sleep, would have a steep cost. Jesus got Herod’s message but He saw in it opportunity rather than warning. This was the key He had been looking for. The paradoxical power of persecution to publicize the persecuted message is a key theme early in Jesus’ next recorded words,

Although it is still a bit unconventional to connect Matthew 5:11-12 with Matthew 5:13-16 I’m going to keep banging this drum. The salt is not salty unless or until it is thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. Then it becomes a precious seasoning. No one had understood before that that’s what made the Prophetic voice lodge in the human consciousness and Jesus had a plan to give us a trip to Flavortown that we would never forget. The Light must be on top of the Hill of Golgotha and lifted up on the glorious Lampstand before He draws all men to Himself. And it was the stupid, self-serving persecution of His cousin John that triggered this flash of insight in the mind of Jesus Christ. Telling us the truth about God, trying to go against the flow of our base nature, against our determined stupidity, would always be a losing proposition. Everything we see in our lives, in our hearts, in the world around us screams that God is against us, that He is filled with wrath and armed for our destruction. Anybody who knows my heart and my secrets knows that it is a good, righteous, and holy thing to destroy me. If God loves you then He ought to damn me because I am turning your world into Hell. Once the perfect light of His Law has shown us ourselves then we are flat out incapable of believing anything else. In the persecution of John, Jesus saw what He would do about our opposition, our misunderstanding, and our rejection of Him. No words or miracles could ever convince us that God looks on us as a loving Father looks on His children, words that He meant to be encouraging would only ever come across as threatening, and every body He healed would always fill seven souls with self-seeking, pride, and envy. But then He saw how to set His net right where the current of our sin drives us. We might even say that hearing about John’s imprisonment was the end of Jesus life and the beginning of His death. It was the moment when He began plotting His own murder. He would use the energy of the darkest hungers of our nature to propel the hooks of His Gospel deep into us. You see, its not simply that Jesus is our foundation. His rejection is our chief cornerstone. It is as the Lamb that was slain that God is greater than our condemning hearts. His own, the Jews, Judas, and us, failing to receive Him is the center of our creed. Our inability to trust God, the embarrassment and cowardice that keeps us from accepting His Christ is the very thing that proves His goodness and love toward us.

It is when we are helpless with no goodness of our own that Christ’s death is for us. God’s love could not be demonstrated by dying for good people but only by dying for and saving the worst, the slowest, the dumbest and the weakest even among the crippled losers. So, it is as unclean failures that we are brought near to God; by our killing His Son. So much more, having already been reconciled, we will be saved by His Resurrection. God, then, is no longer a terror and an enemy to us, but through Jesus Christ we have peace and intimacy with God.

All of our righteousness and goodness is backfiring. As long as we are stuck reliving Adam’s distrust we will keep taking matters into our own hands over and over again and all of our gifts to God will keep boomeranging back onto our own heads. But when we see the One Man hope in God, see Him cling to His Father’s goodness til the bitter end that is all changed.

And the gift is not like the knowledge of our selves as sinners which is inside, always accusing us. Our sinful human nature means that we should be damned to hell, but the free gift, not our faith but the faithfulness of Jesus even unto death, transforms the worst sins, even the ones that made the sun dark, into so many reasons for God to take pity on us and heal us. All the power and significance of our sin then has been bent opposite its natural direction. Whatever shame and failure and judgment it can bring us is transmuted into freedom, righteousness, and rest through the free gift of righteousness which has power to make us alive in the One, Jesus Christ.

On its own, our consciousness of sin and failure, although true, only makes us worse sinners and our failures more guilty. But it is where our sin is the worst and becomes deadly that the free gift is irresistibly abundant, and our sin and death is overwhelmed by the gracious power of Christ’s righteousness to bring eternal life.(Romans 5 paraphrased to make the crucifixion references explicit and the application to someone dear to me more clear.)

The Verdict

Galatians: A Pastoral Commentary

This is the first part in a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. I invite you to come with me. Read slowly. Listen carefully. Let the gospel confront not only what we believe, but what we keep forgetting…

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6 months ago · 2 likes · 4 comments · Alexander Chapota

I just want to introduce it to my readers by saying that being ‘the grace guy’ is often a very lonely position. If you’ve been the guy listening to or reading a talk where grace is praised to the moon and then loaded down with enough Law to choke an elephant and you are pretty sure that you are the only person in the congregation thinking ‘but what about evangelical liberty?’ then the way that Alexander clearly distinguishes Law from Gospel and unashamedly proclaims a Gospel which we can neither add to or take away from where our failure is the prerequisite for His victory is probably going to take away a bit of that loneliness and be encouraging to you. Alexander asked me to write something in the way of an interlude while he is studying and preparing for the next bit of his commentary and because I am happy for the opportunity to support and encourage a brother in the Gospel this piece will be published at both Comfort with Truth and The Verdict. To my readers, let this serve as a strong recommendation of Alexander and his substack. For his readers, anyone who enjoys his writing is the sort of friend that I would like to get to know better. Please drop me a line or let me know how I can minister to you.

When Alexander asked me to write something which would fit into a commentary on Galatians I knew very quickly that I wanted to tell you about the confession of Simon Peter which changed the course of human history. No, not that time1 or that time2 but the time he said something really unprecedented and shocking.

This story is commonly presented as Paul and Barnabas going to Jerusalem to have Peter, James, and John judge this disagreement between Paul and the ‘certain men from Judea’ whose identities aren’t thought much about when the story is told that way. These men are almost certainly the ‘false brethren secretly brought in’ of Galatians 2:4 and as verse 24(back in Acts 15) makes clear, they were in fact missionaries commissioned by the Jerusalem church. And despite the attempt in the apostolic letter at the end of this chapter to disavow these men; they and their heretical message were well known and actually well received in the Jerusalem church. Paul didn’t go to the Jerusalem church wanting them to act as an impartial judge. He went to Jerusalem because they were the offending party. I didn’t want to believe that when I first started to see it. It seems like a bridge too far. But look at the following verses.

There was much dispute and disagreement about whether or not Christians must follow the Law, in the bald words that Luke used in verse 1 there was dispute whether uncircumcised men can be saved. This opinion was not current simply in the city or the temple or even the church at large. It was among the ‘apostles and elders’, in the meeting that Galatians 2 describes as ‘private[ly] to those of reputation’.3 When Paul describes this ‘council’ in Galatians 2 he talks about Titus not being compelled to be circumcised and about not yielding which makes it clear how strong the Law faction was in the Jerusalem church elders and apostles. The conclusion is inescapable. Not only the mother church of Christianity but the Apostolic college itself, within twenty years of the Crucifixion, was openly supporting heresy4, fully confusing Law and Gospel. Pauline Christianity was within an inch of abortion, being mutilated by the Law. And then Peter said what may be the plainest words on record in human history.

I can’t keep the Law and so I won’t tell anybody else that they have to. I, Simon Peter, through whom the Lord calls thousands to Himself, works miracles of all kinds, sends angels to get me out of jail, on whom He is building His church, am a total miserable failure at law keeping. These men are hoping to be judged clean in the sight of God on no ground but because they trust in Jesus Christ and that is the only hope that I have myself. And when Peter told them that, every mouth fell silent before the Lord. The Prince of the Apostles could not keep the Law, had no works or purity or goodness or success to add to the finished work of Christ and his plain confession of that fact changed the world. Peter’s confession deserves a closer look. Let’s start at verse 8.

As you read this verse, I want you to think about all of the awful pictures that the Jewish Christians had been painting of what the Galatian Gentiles would do if they were declared righteous apart from the Law. They’d live like hell that’s what they’d do. These were unreconstructed pagans who had never cracked a Bible. Paul had just loaded up a bus at the cathouse and splashed some water on them telling them that the power of Christ made them free from their pasts and free from their character, which was as bad as yours and worse than mine. He told them that they were free, on the spot, in ways I can’t even imagine. But does being baptised and believing really work that way? It takes years of study and hard work and tithing doesn’t it? Don’t you have to break those old habits and put in the work to build up new habits and change your character? You gotta mortify your pipe, your penis, and your pocketbook right? You already know that Peter doesn’t say that but look what he does say. He says that God knows their hearts. God knows that they haven’t done any of the right stuff. He knows that they went to pagan schools and played pagan games. They fit in the trailer park better than the pew.

They don’t really have any clear sense of what is right and what is wrong and couldn’t do what is right if they did. They have whole lifetimes of bad habits that are gonna wreck anything that they do. He knows that everything that the Pharisee church is saying about them is true. And He doesn’t care. He loves and accepts them anyway, not at some lesser level but with no distinction between them and Simon Peter. God has already acknowledged them. Acknowledged them how? Acknowledged them as sons and heirs because He has given them His own Spirit, His own self. There is not anything else that you can add to that. Having the Holy Spirit is having everything good. He alone is more than everything else. He has already given you more than everything even though He knows who you are and how much you are gonna screw it up. It gets better.

The Holy Spirit is given to these awful unchurched people in exactly the same way that He is given to the top of the class Rock on which the whole church is built. His great confessions don’t set him above them and his great denials don’t divebomb him beneath them. There is no distinction, and that lack of distinction, that full grace to absolutely empty and bankrupt people is the true spirit of the Early Church, the true Pentecostal charism. But that isn’t just a foundation on which something else is built, that is the whole thing. Their hearts were purified by faith and yours is too. Not by learning the right things, and building the right habits, and hanging out with the right people, and supporting the right candidate, and putting the right amount on your checks. But by faith? What faith? Faith that God loves and chooses and works through convicted felons like Jesus. Faith that chooses His word over our lying eyes, that is more sure than death and taxes. He has dared all, risked His whole kingdom on the wild gamble that an antisemitic jewish tax collector would make a good apostle, that His worst enemy would be so captivated by seeing Him once on the Damascus Road that he would tear down all the systems of the world, that in between his denials on Good Friday and in Antioch Peter would make another confession as shocking and divinely inspired as the first, that an antisocial autistic jackass will deliver His message today. He’s betting on some real long shots and He wins every time. You won’t be the one that disappoints Him.

Let’s finish by going back to the very beginning of Peter’s confession in verse 7. The people that Peter is talking about are a people who have one distinguishing characteristic. They ‘hear the word of the gospel and believe’. What is the word of the gospel? Well, let’s just stick with Peter in Acts 2,

This is the word of the Gospel, and there really isn’t anything to add to it. To the question, ‘what shall we do?’ the only answer is ‘stop thinking your old thoughts about God and about yourself and instead think new thoughts. Don’t think that God is far off and way up there but be bound to Him. Tie your sins into Christ’s death and burial and your self into His resurrection as closely as might be, in baptism. And you, and all who follow after you, shall receive God Himself within yourself. You shall receive the kingdom and with it everything else that you might desire will be added unto you.’

The call is simple. Don’t test God by adding to His gift. Don’t test God by confusing the human and divine, our works and His rest. Rather believe that the salvation and the Spirit which He brings to us in the waters of baptism and in His own body and blood is no different than the salvation and Spirit which He brought to Peter and Paul.

Two preliminary matters before we get to our text. First, there are only two witnesses to the Temptations, Jesus and the devil. So, I am just going to say categorically that at some point during his earthly ministry Jesus told this story to the Twelve1. We can imagine other possibilities but I really don’t feel like they are worth exploring. No, sometime between Matthew’s call to the apostolate and the Lord’s Ascension the Lord sat down and narrated this episode from His life. My analytical mind wants to know if the devil’s presence and the teleportations of the second and third temptations were physical or psychical events, but it really makes no difference. Jesus of Nazareth has a very pronounced habit of telling just this kind of story2 for it is a bit of a parable, which is to say it is true but a lot of the details which we would like to know are omitted quite deliberately in such a way as to make the story accessible to everyone. Secondly, the timing is very important to understanding the temptations themselves. Immediately after being consecrated to the ministry in His baptism our Lord is led by the Spirit into the Judean desert expressly for the purpose of being tempted. We might imagine Jesus spending the time in communion and prayer or some other kind of preparation for ministry but Matthew and Luke both keep any such activity far from their narratives. They present Christ as coming here for no purpose of His own, through no desire of His own. They present Him as essentially passive or at most reactive and I feel that as we look at the text the most important and often overlooked subtext is the Lord’s own uncertainty about His soon to be begun ministry. To the text itself then.

It seems to me that both the devil, and the Lord Himself, in this text have their minds very much on the question of exactly what it is that Jesus intends His ministry to be and how He will get it done. Jesus’ psychology is beyond me but I think that I can understand the devil. He wants to know who is providing the power to carry out the work that Jesus wants to do. Who is paying the bills? And so, the devil first challenges Jesus to show that He has the power in and of Himself, by miraculously making bread. Jesus’ answer probably struck the devil as a clever rabbinical style evasion and so, still wanting a concrete answer, the devil says, in the second temptation, that He should show that His Father will intercede in a pinch, will backstop and guarantee His ministry.3 The reply not to tempt God must have seemed even more peevish and inadequate than the first. The devil didn’t think that Jesus ‘passed’ these temptations in the sense of overcoming them. He thought that the Lord passed on the challenges, thought that He declined them because He had no good answer. Which I think explains the strange demand of the third temptation. The devil seems to say, ‘If you can’t provide the muscle and you aren’t sure if you can count on dear old Dad then I am really the only other choice to accomplish your goals.’ The devil’s words about bowing down and worshiping shouldn’t necessarily be taken as demanding divine honor, these honors were commonly given to kings or patrons of various kinds and this is how the devil invited Jesus to see him, as an underwriter and sponsor, as a change agent with impressive real world experience doing ministry on the ground. It is only Christ and the prophets who make a big deal out of this sort of honor…4

Besides this pattern, the first two temptations have something else in common. They both contain the challenge, ‘If you are the son of God’. The devil tempts Jesus to see Himself as the Son of God, which obviously He is but it doesn’t mean what the devil thought it did. The devil uses the concept ‘son of God’ to mean someone who is above the ordinary difficulties and uncertainties of life, someone who is autonomous; able to act of himself and for himself; all of the things that the devil is ambitious to be. The point that I missed for so long here is made most clear in the remarkable way that Matthew closes this story in verse 11:

Some translations suggest that the angels brought Christ food, I am inclined to doubt that but the primary fact to get hold of here is the unexpected reality that He was in need. Jesus of Nazareth was and is a man and no more autonomous and independent than any other man, physically, psychologically, or spiritually.5 Being in need and depending on someone outside of ourselves is the most fundamental fact of the human experience and He did not exempt Himself, though I would if I were able. He suffered not merely the physical need of hunger but His time in the desert and His struggle with the devil, as well as the mere facts of His situation on Earth at that time, were causing other needs, psychological and spiritual, to press on Him with increasing intensity. Not long after this Jesus declares that “to do the will of Him who sent me, and to finish His work” is food to Him and I believe that He was hungry not merely for bread but hungry to be about His Father’s business and impatient at the long road of preparation.6 Forty days spent in the desert must have particularly sharpened His hunger to be preaching the Gospel and comforting the suffering. This is a hunger that the devil offers the Lord plausible ways of satisfying.7 The devil tempts the Lord not with evil but with good. He presents Jesus with opportunities to calm His doubts and fears and to accomplish the work that He came to do, or at least a reasonable facsimile of it. And when the ordeal is over, Jesus is still hungry. He remains anxious and skeptical of the path that lies before Him and His Father does not send Him the bread or the proof or the progress that He desires but only invisible, intangible comfort for that is the lot of men of faith in this world. Now we are ready to look more carefully at the Lord’s words.

When we look at Jesus answer we focus on ‘It is written’ as pointing to the sufficiency of Scripture and we focus on the deprecation of bread in favor of the Word as showing the priority of spiritual things over physical and both of those points are true, but there are two points that come first, and are not so well noticed, that I want to focus on. First, when the devil presses Jesus to regard Himself as the ‘Son of God’, special and exempt from ordinary human dependence; Jesus responds by calling Himself ‘Man’, the most ordinary title or name imaginable and an early example of His later insistence on the title ‘Son of Man’, as if there is nothing distinctive or distinguishing about Himself, as if He is merely Joe Average plucked off the street at random. Secondly, Jesus quotes Moses as an authority for His actions. This is only a good answer to the devil if Jesus is in fact ‘under the Law’, if He is bound by common and ordinary morality. For the things that the Law says, it only says to those who are under the Law.8 He places Himself under the Law, exactly like the tax collectors, antisemites, failures, soyboys, perverts, and assholes of all kinds that He came to save.

Everyone else who claims to be a savior makes himself the great man, the man of destiny, and acts like he is justified in doing whatever advances his mission and ambition. Our Lord on the other hand, refuses to work even this rather minor and harmless miracle on His own or for Himself. Why? He says that Man is not autonomous but depends on every word which comes from His Sovereign. And if you will look at the way that the story is told you will see the same point again in the very first words of the chapter. Both Matthew and Luke insist that Jesus wasn’t in the desert because of some plan of His own but because He was led, driven, there by the Divine Spirit.9 On the final journey to Jerusalem He will tell the disciples several times how hard it is on Him to wait, how hard it is for our salvation, His passion, to be delayed and I suspect that this was a chronic challenge for Him. He did not desire to lollygag about for forty days when His sheep were wandering lost and in danger. No He was hungry to be about His Father’s business, about the business of salvation and this hunger is the core of Temptation(for Him certainly for us maybe).10

The devil is tempting the Lord to tempt the Lord. Just trying to think it through makes me dizzy but the Temptation is to see for Himself if His Father will get Him out of a jam. I think that the devil interpreted the first answer as cleverness being used to conceal doubt. It seemed like false humility hiding faithlessness, like a weak point that would buckle under pressure. Perhaps the devil thought that Jesus would give up and call the whole thing off, or leap to His doom in a mad quest to prove Himself? We mostly feel and act as if faith is a kind of poverty, as if there are some chosen special saints who can SEE and have no need of faith. I think that that is kind of the assumption that the tempter is working off of. Like the devil, we misunderstand the relationship between doubt and faith. We imagine that faith shuns and discourages doubt, but it doesn’t. Because faith loves truth more than faith loves faith. Faith would rather believe nothing, cease to be faith, than believe a lie, become a false faith. So faith takes the form of doubt, interrogating and testing the object of faith much more strictly than any lesser belief would. Faith and doubt can only be perfect and complete when they are so together as when Job says, ‘Can a man be more righteous than God?’ and the Psalmist and the Lord Himself cry out, ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’

The devil though tempts Jesus to strong-arm His Father into giving Him proof that He is the Son of God, that miraculous rescue will exempt Him from the ordinary consequences of jumping off a tall building but Jesus already has special knowledge that changes this temptation and that the devil does not understand. It is the knowledge that the kingdom does not come with observation, does not exist sensibly, even to ‘spiritual’ senses. It is supremely hidden like yeast in dough or a buried seed. When something rises up, making a stir and startling the world, it isn’t the kingdom. Jesus refuses to jump on this day not because He fears death or doubts His Father but because His intention is to show that death isn’t in falling but in being lifted up. Death by falling is our great fear and the devil’s but it is the elevation and exaltation that precedes the fall that is truly deadly. Jesus never falls yet He dies when He is lifted up. We never put the ax to the root because we confuse the problem and the solution. The old joke is that ‘it isn’t the fall that kills you it is the sudden stop at the end’, Jesus’ great miracle, His magnum opus, is precisely that when He was lifted up He died not only before He made it to the ground but without even falling. No angels appeared to prevent His death because faith is not an imperfect placeholder for coming knowledge, rather when those things which are imperfect and incomplete are done away with faith remains, for even the completed kingdom can not be perceived or understood but either we believe or we are offended.11 Jesus’ reluctance and skepticism about miracles grows throughout His whole ministry. He knows that whatever He asks for He will receive but He is unsure that a miracle will be helpful and even more skeptical that the miracle being publicized will do anyone any good. Jesus is extremely hesitant to work miracles because He worries that it won’t help anyone get a better understanding of the kingdom but over and over throughout His ministry He is driven to work miracles by our suffering and neediness. Which brings us at last to the third temptation.

To me, it is clear that Jesus was genuinely tempted by the things which the devil presented to Him. He was hungry and bread tempted Him but more so, autonomy tempted Him. He was embarking on His life’s work and so certainty and validation tempted Him. He had all of the cares and frustrations of human life and so being able to deal with them on His own terms tempted Him. From the structure of the story this last temptation should be the deepest and hardest temptation, but what was it that He could want here? Why would the kingdoms of the world and their glory ever tempt Jesus of Nazareth? I can’t imagine Him being tempted to sit on a throne and tell folks where to go and what to do. What crown of gold is a temptation to One who set aside a crown of stars, or what throne compares to the Right Hand of the Father which He abandoned? The only answer, of course, is the one which He left Heaven to obtain.

The ways that we have described the first two temptations are all temptations to do things for Himself or for His own benefit, but surely for this Man the last and sorest temptation was to act for our benefit. He was tempted to save men with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. The answer to why Jesus would ever be tempted by the kingdoms of this world and their glory is to consider how much better off you and I would be with them in His hands. We have seen terrible government. And we have seen slightly less bad government. And you can pick for yourself which is which. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to actually have good government. With King Jesus enthroned in Jerusalem, how long do you think it would take to achieve peace such as the world has never known? Not even considering the use of divine or miraculous power but simply the moral force of this Man ruling Jerusalem I’m gonna peg the timeframe for a radically different world at a few months. What a light it would be to the world if Israel turned the other cheek and beat their swords into plowshares, if striving and distrust could be replaced with quiet acceptance of the will of God! In short order, hunger and sickness would find themselves hiding in ever shrinking corners. Abusers would be chastised, secrets could not stay hidden, corruption would be chased away with a whip of cords. He couldn’t have failed to see how many tears could be wiped away, or rather never shed at all. The temptation to be the answer to so many prayers, to be the Savior that we have asked for so often and so fervently must have come upon Him with nearly irresistible force. I will give His response in the words of a better preacher,

Nothing but the obedience of the Son, the obedience unto the death, the absolute doing of the will of God because it was the truth, could redeem the prisoner, the widow, the orphan. But it would redeem them by redeeming the conquest-ridden conqueror too, the stripe-giving jailer, the unjust judge, the devouring Pharisee himself with the insatiable moth-eaten heart. The earth should be free because Love was stronger than Death. Therefore should fierceness and wrong and hypocrisy and God-service play out their weary play. He would not pluck the spreading branches of the tree; he would lay the axe to its root. It would take time; but the tree would be dead at last—dead, and cast into the lake of fire. It would take time; but his Father had time enough and to spare. It would take courage and strength and self-denial and endurance; but his Father could give him all. It would cost pain of body and mind, yea, agony and torture; but those he was ready to take on himself. It would cost him the vision of many sad and, to all but him, hopeless sights; he must see tears without wiping them, hear sighs without changing them into laughter, see the dead lie, and let them lie; see Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted; he must look on his brothers and sisters crying as children over their broken toys, and must not mend them; he must go on to the grave, and they not know that thus he was setting all things right for them. His work must be one with and completing God’s Creation and God’s History. The disappointment and sorrow and fear he could, he would bear. The will of God should be done. Man should be free,—not merely man as he thinks of himself, but man as God thinks of him. -George MacDonald Unspoken Sermons The Temptations in the Wilderness

The Lord was tempted to save us through winning, to achieve salvation by answering our prayers, giving us what we ask for, curing cancer, getting me to the gym, releasing the Kennedy and Epstein files, locking the Clintons, Trumps, and all of the other bad guys up, straightening out the NCAA bowl system, ending racism, antisemitism, misogyny, feminism, liberalism, conservatism, leftism, rightism, and making various other savior-like improvements. I won’t say that it wouldn’t have worked or something like that, because everything that He does works. If He had chosen to save that way then that salvation would have been great and glorious like everything that He does. Perhaps there are other ways, but the way of the cross is forever and exclusively His way. His choice is invisible salvation, a kingdom that does not come with observation, is not of this world, cannot be fought for, earned, added to or taken away from, a Gospel that doesn’t fix us or our problems. His choice is death and defeat, the descent into Hell. His choice is to be a helpless savior, an unarmed Messiah. For His sympathy is stirred within Him. He will not execute the fierceness of His anger or again destroy His sinful sons, and honestly nothing less will do any good. For He is God and not man, the Holy One in our midst and if He makes Himself great or terrible then we cannot approach Him. The only possible paths for you and I are absolute and complete damnation or full and free acceptance. Anything between these two is just wishful thinking and delusion, and so He will draw us to Himself with gentle cords becoming near to us even in defeat and shame, our natural habitat12.

His choice is for us to be simultaneously sinners and saints, for the outer man, the selves that we and the people of this world know, to waste away unchanged, unredeemed while an ‘inner man’ is hidden with God in Christ, invisible to ourselves and the rulers of this dark world. We are simultaneously dead and alive, groaning for a redemption which is already here and simultaneously does not yet appear, subject to futility and living in glorious liberty. He will not save us by miracles but by enduring the absence of miracles in hope. He will save us by trusting in the Father who does not rescue Him, who dispatches no legions to Golgotha, who gives every appearance of having forsaken Him but sends angels in the wilderness to bless, to comfort and minister to the spiritually bankrupt who are starving for righteousness. His choice leaves Him hungry and alone, in pain, anxious and doubting. And He is comforted with the same invisible, insensible comfort with which we are. Our Brother has become like us to the deepest and last degree.

To someone reading the New Testament straight through, or who like myself believes that Matthew was the first Gospel, Matthew 3:15 is a great moment, the first words in red. The Savior speaks! If inspiration includes not merely the composition of the Scriptures but their arrangement then we should expect that our divine Author has prepared something especially punchy for our hero’s first bit of dialogue, something full of meaning and pregnant with foreshadowing would be nice. I try not to wave the flag of my minuscule knowledge of Greek if I can avoid it but here I am left with no choice, because our translators have chosen to soft-pedal the first word that Jesus speaks in this verse but I think that we should hit it hard. The first word that our Savior speaks is ἀφίημι(af-ee’-ay-mee). ἀφίημι or some form of this word occurs 146 times in the New Testament which makes it very common. The root words mean something like to ‘send away’ or to ‘leave’. If we are looking for something indicative of the direction the Lord will go then ἀφίημι seems very promising, because although it is sometimes used in other ways this is the typical New Testament word for forgive or pardon.

ἀφίημι is the exact word that Christ calls out to His Father from the Cross when He says, ‘Father, forgive them.’(Luke 23:34) and also the word in Matthew 6 in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’ and the command to forgive others which follows it so we might expect that when He says this in chapter 3 at this foundational moment He is interceding to obtain forgiveness for us or exhorting us to forgive the debts of others. Finding that Jesus’ first word is forgive we feel ready to shout it from the rooftops, but when we look closer we see the reason why no one is.

ἀφίημι is translated in verse 15 as permit which is minimizing the word about as much as you can. I think that we should read these words something more like, ‘Forgive this immediately. This is how we are gonna fulfill all righteousness.’ But what is there for John to forgive, what initially offended him and what is its connection with fulfilling all righteousness?

To answer that we will have to step back a little, back to the very difficult prophetic fulfillments in chapter 2 and back to who John thought Jesus was and what he expected Him to do. When we look at Mathew 2 my first observation is that Matthew didn’t set out to write a history of Jesus. Yes, Matthew’s facts are accurate but Matthew is not a historian. He is an Evangelist and it is as evangelism that we ought to study his Gospel. He is not trying to prove anything about the historical Christ but rather to bring us personally to a place where we see the Jesus that he knew and are able to trust Him.

Accordingly, the things that he makes a big deal out of are the things that our evangelism ought to focus on. Most of the Gospel Presentations that we have heard begin by telling us how bad our sin is and how offended God is at our sin. But when Matthew wanted to show people the Christian religion he definitely did not begin that way. The theme of our need for forgiveness begins to emerge in the Sermon on the Mount(chapter 5) but it is surprisingly absent before then. He sets the stage with a genealogy which is explicitly focused on death and resurrection,

he moves on to Joseph’s deliberate failure,

and then in chapter 2 I see him trying rather hard to help us get over, to move us past being offended at Christ. Yes, when offense enters the story it is not God being offended at us or our sin but us being offended at Christ.

Matthew cites three prophecies as being fulfilled in his Infancy Narrative1, ‘out of Egypt I called my Son’ in verse 15 is a clear reference to Hosea 11:1 which unfortunately looks nothing like a Messianic prophecy in its context. It looks for all the world like a reference to the Exodus leading in to some complaints about idolatry. Then verse 18 presents Herod’s murder of the children of Bethlehem as a fulfillment of Jeremiah 31

but Jeremiah was talking not about infanticide but about children being carried off to captivity from a completely different city, Ramah. Ramah is a city of the tribe of Benjamin and Jeremiah appropriately calls that city ‘Rachel’s children’ whereas Bethlehem of Judah would be children of Leah, Jacob’s other wife and Rachel’s rival. Also, Jeremiah’s prophecy details the captives taken from Ramah being returned to their homeland as the children of Bethlehem never will.2 So, both of Matthew’s references here are quite a stretch and he ends chapter 2 by referring to a prophecy that is nowhere in the canon of Scripture. For 2000 years every serious student of Matthew has been bending over backwards trying to explain where the prophecy that ‘He shall be called a Nazarene’ might come from or what exactly it might mean and while a lot of energy has been spent and cleverness displayed nothing solid and reliable has been said. If Matthew was trying to make a case that Jesus was the Messiah with these prophecies then I have to say that he hurt his case more than he helped it. Reading these texts as prophecies is pretty weird and the fulfillments seem ad hoc at best and are unattested outside of Matthew.

But our author actually does know what he is doing. The difficulties that these passages present as evidence for an intellectual assent that Jesus was the Messiah are irrelevant because that isn’t Matthew’s goal at all. Rather, for us to see the Christ that he is beginning his portrayal of, we must begin by seeing the cosmically unlikely fact of His incarnation into humiliation and defeat. The heart of Matthew’s Infancy Narrative is Christ’s passivity towards sin. Would even our most progressive and transgressive artists depict the Lord of Hosts as a refugee in a foreign land? The One who terrified Pharaoh now hides in Egypt from the wrath of a third rate king. Even two thousand years later very few other writers have caught up to the idea of painting Herod’s hate-filled power unanswered and unresisted by the Lord. It is amazing that at the end of chapter 2 Matthew, a Jewish writer writing on a religious subject, would mention Herod the Great’s death but then neglect to tell us about the way that Herod desecrated the Temple and how quickly an unprecedented and hideous death fell on him afterwords. At the time of Josephus, the death of Herod was still considered by all of the Jews to be an obvious judgment for blaspheming the Temple but because Matthew is determined to show us a God whose response to sin is ἀφίημι, to pass over, to let go and forgive, we have comparatively a lot of detail about the visit of the Magi which occasioned Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and the steps taken to evade and avoid his fury but Herod’s hideous death is passed over in the most minimal possible way.3

To Matthew the Baby Jesus is every inch the Lamb awaiting His slaughter peacefully. We cannot see the Jesus that Matthew knew without seeing that He left His weapons in the sky. Whether as a baby carried to Egypt or as a Man in the Garden His response to evil is fundamentally the same. He permits it. If it is certain, and it is, that one cry from the Infant could have summoned flaming legions to His defense then it is equally certain that He has deliberately disarmed Himself. And we cannot look on God disarmed without being offended.

Matthew knew that his message was offensive, knew that Christ’s behavior would not fit at all into our understanding of the divine, and so he meets the offense with the answer that this was all prophesied, fore-ordained, and predestined, even if confusingly and obscurely. Perhaps, Matthew’s answer to the difficulty of these prophecies would be that the truth of Jesus was so contrary and offensive to our ways of thought that even in the prophets it is confusing and obscure?

Here, an objection arises. We don’t feel as if Christ offends us. A fellow listening to a sermon about being offended at Jesus feels as if it is others who are offended at Jesus and not Him. It seems to be something that applies to other people or other times and not ourselves right now. So, let me tell you a little about why I am offended by Christ. Having confessed myself a sinner deserving of the wrath of God it seems like I would be glad to hear that God is disarmed and perhaps I should be but I am not. I have heard all of my life that God has been neutered and whether we believe it or not we hardly wake up when it is said. I don’t want to believe it but mostly I do. But our sin calls out for a God of judgment and wrath and I feel in my bones that justice is in our best interest. Consider this Scripture:

This is Scripture that makes sense to Jon. I live in a country where one faction of the government is using riots against its enemies and the other is using the military against the rioters, when this used to be a pretty good country.

I have a cousin who used to be a pretty good dude and now he isn’t sure if he is a dude or a chick.

I am pretty sure that some of the people that I work with are demon possessed.

And I firmly believe that the Lord could fix all of these problems quite easily if he took a notion to. If we have a duty to do something about what is happening to our selves, our families, and our country and we have stalled way too long and are addicted to half measures then isn’t it doubly true that the Lord has let the problems with this world go on a lot longer and with a lot less excuse? God refuses to execute justice speedily and so I get worse and worse and I’m not the only one. For all of the reasons that any father ought to discipline a wayward son quickly and clearly the Lord God ought to discipline us all. We have been left to ourselves for so long that the necessary punishment to put us back onto the straight and narrow is starting to look like a vertical asymptote. God won’t clearly distinguish for us the righteous from the wicked or even make it clear when we are right and when we are wrong. Neither righteousness nor wickedness has any obvious payout attached to them if you look around you. The world would be a much nicer place if He would at least train us, reward the good and punish the wicked. We can make it work on dogs would it be so hard for Him to make it work on us? And honestly, I think this offense at the divine passivity is the reason for the deliberately transgressive behavior(whether human or demonic). And I think that a great amount of the flamboyant transgression is a way of screaming at Heaven, ‘What is it going to take to get you off your divine derriere? Don’t you care what is happening to us?’ The divine patience with sin and sinners is why we aren’t getting better. He not only refuses to fix the problem; He interposes His own body in the way of anyone who tries. And religion often is an opiate anesthetizing us to these facts. He’s like the dad who is ‘just about’ to get something done and never does. For 5000 years He has been ‘fixing to’ get around to it. And with the Psalmist and the martyrs under the altar I cry out, ‘How long Oh Lord? How long until you do what only You can do?’ Which brings us nicely to chapter 3 and John Baptist,

John had been straightening up the crooked, bringing down the high and raising up the low, to us he seems like a Holy Social Justice Badass making Pharisees and kings step back but he knew that he was just a small time local boy. The heart of his message was that Daddy’s truck was pulling into the yard and He was about to give out butt whoopings like tootsie rolls at a parade. John wanted Jesus to do some chopping, and some sorting wheat from chaff, and some burning. John saw the evil around him and wanted Jesus to do a lot of burning. And so do I. Just as John was wrapping up his apocalyptic diatribe of wrath and turning his attention to the line of still unwashed, still heathens in need of his special services he noticed One of the fellows standing in line and said to Him, ‘Don’t you think you are taking this a bit too far?’(or something to that effect) Jesus coming to be baptised was proof positive that God’s plan was apheimi, to pass over, to allow the world to continue without Him intervening in any of the obvious straight forward ways that John and I have been looking for. Why do I think that John saw all of this when he saw Jesus standing in line to get baptised like an ordinary schmo? The best proof is the moonshiner's turn that John Baptist does. We have to go to John 1 to see it.

Before the baptism, John’s message is that God is going to cut down and burn everything that is not acceptable to Him. Afterwards his message is that God is going to take the sin of the world into Himself sacrificially and before John said this, in this place at this time, nobody ever clearly voiced the sacrificial nature of the Messiah or centered His mission as reconciliation to the exclusion of all of the other good things that we hope and expect from Him. John is the first to apply lamb imagery to the Messiah and it is as far from his message before Christ’s baptism as it is from, well from everything else that happened before that moment.(I know it surprised me too.)

So back to Matthew and Jesus’ amazing first words,

What Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 8 is true. You know it and I know it. John Baptist was excited that God was about to stop monkeying around and get the job done. I pray for the same thing pretty regularly. But in these words there is a greater than Solomon or me or the Forerunner. You see, God has cleaned us up before. When God got rid of all of the bad guys in the days of Noah, it was literally during the ‘We survived the flood thank you God’ party that He had to kick Ham out of the covenant community. Isn’t this an unmistakable demonstration that getting rid of the bad guys is a flawed approach? Noah’s son proved that the Flood didn’t kill enough people to really make a difference.4 So, if God had only put seven on the ark, if He had stewed Ham, would the result have been different? I think that we have to answer ‘no’. I don’t know who would have been the scapepig5 but if cleaning the earth of all but eight souls wasn’t going far enough then nothing short of wiping out everybody and starting over will do it. If God had saved only Noah himself it still would’ve been too many people to fix the problem. And, that scales in the opposite direction too. Getting rid of all of the bad guys except the church or any ‘getting rid of bad guys’ is nothing more than an inferior copy of the Flood. Frying the bacon is no way to fulfill all righteousness.

Maybe you are offended at something different about Christ than I am, but the lesson of Matthew 2-3 is that our offense at Him is the real obstacle to salvation. Christ didn’t suffer and die because God has an otherwise unresolvable problem with us. A God with such a problem would never send Christ to suffer on our behalf and a God who is so shackled to some system, whether you call it Law or Justice or Righteousness, that He would murder His beloved Son to appease that system is a poorer father than many men that I have known and no god at all. I can at least imagine sacrificing one of my boys for another person but sacrificing them to make the books balance is pagan bull.

No, Christ suffered because we are filled with hate and mistrust of God. We can’t stop believing that He is out to get us. The problem is not on His end. It is that we are dead set on believing, come Hell or high water, that He is holding out on us. We can’t imagine Him outside of the role that we have cast Him in. That hate and mistrust has gone on so long and is baked into us so deeply that only the death of each man can accomplish its end, can fulfill all righteousness. That death was revealed at Bethany by the Jordan when John drowned each and every one of us in one fell swoop that preached peace to Jerusalem and the end to our war as nothing else ever could.

Matthew doesn’t even stop to make it clear that it was John who saw the Spirit at peace and finally able to rest on the Lord(as is obvious from John’s Gospel) as He emerged from the Jordan’s flood, as the One True Ark in whom we are all hidden.6 He’s so focused on his message7 that the things that the Son does at a specific place and time are exact and perfect representations of the things that God does outside of space and time. There is no daylight between the persons of the Trinity. What happened at Golgotha or Bethany by the Jordan didn’t change anything about God. These actions revealed the unbelievable truth about who He has always been and that knowledge changes everything about us, even when it doesn’t seem to change anything. The Word made flesh seems bizarre, alien, and offensive to us, because He is the One and Only, Triple Alien, Triple Holy God. The forgiveness and grace that He offered once when He drew all men to Himself is the eternal, unchanging, root, and foundation of the deepest, truest will of God. When He was drowned for all men as the Second Adam that is when the sky was torn apart by the beaming smile of the Father.

Jesus’ mother shows up pretty frequently throughout the ministry of Christ making it clear that she was very much a part of what He was doing. No doubt the Twelve had opportunity and certainly interest in hearing the story of the Lord’s birth firsthand from His mother and so Matthew must have been very familiar with Mary’s story, the Christmas story which Luke would commit to writing.1 Mary’s story of an angelic visitation and John the Baptist the Fetus leaping in Elisabeth’s womb and Zacharias’ amazing prophecy, and the Magnificat, and the Stable and the Manger isn’t something that I would have left out to tell Joseph’s story, as Matthew did, but then I’m not a tax collector called to be an apostle.

Mary’s Christmas story tells of the praises that were sung, the wonderful signs that attended the pregnancy and birth, the journey and care of the baby, the difficulties and providential resolution. Anyone who has loved pious women feels their heart warmed by her presence behind that story2. On the other hand, Joseph’s story that Matthew gives us, is the memory of dilemma, danger, and death. It is the frank recounting of a man who would have lost his family three times if left to his own plans and abilities. The cruel devices of Herod and the feel of a skin of the teeth escape to Egypt led by nothing but dreams reminds us of the Patriarch Joseph’s own escape from death to Egypt, for the New Testament Joseph is quite as much of a dreamer of dreams as his namesake and every bit bold and decisive enough to be a worthy Son of David, so why is he almost universally minimized and ignored or even actively disrespected and degraded?

If you look at a Nativity, Joseph is an enigma at its very center. It feels as if we know more about the shepherds and the wise men or even the animals than we do Joseph and it might be because he is the most major character in the entire Bible who is completely speechless.3 Not a word of his is recorded. Do we push Joseph to the margins because he is unintelligible to us? The more that I consider it though the more that I am convinced that Joseph is really the kernel at the heart of many of our legends and stories. Echoes of his story are in Arthur Pendragon and the Prince in the Tower, the so-called Pretenders of the House of Stewart(hat tip to my friend for directing my attention to Bonnie Prince Charlie and the hidden line of the Stewarts with his fine rendition of Will Ye No Come Back Again), the Man in the Iron Mask and Anastasia Romanov. In fiction, we find a bit of it in the Horse and His Boy’s Corin of Archenland and a lot of it in Bard son of Brand from the Hobbit but perhaps nowhere is the truth of Joseph so well depicted as in Arathorn, the shadowy half-remembered father of Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings.

The laconic carpenter of Nazareth had been born and lived his whole life in hiding. Certainly some of the Nazareth folk were in on his secret, but his whole life was a cover story. Like Joseph, Arathorn, the Hidden King, had a treasure, in his case a broken sword that was useless to him but handing it down to his son was his most sacred duty. Perhaps he thought his son and grandsons for another thousand years would do the same thing, but one day one of them, he must believe, would reforge the sword which proved their kingship and reclaim their birthright. Joseph was the protector of a power that he could do nothing with but that moved Herod to mass murder upon the mere whisper of its reappearing. We don’t realise that it is a secret treasure because it is something that we usually skip over as not worth our attention. Here is the secret for which the children of Bethlehem were murdered:

Joseph, Son of David4 might build picnic tables or remodel kitchens and live as simple, honest, and rustic a life as ever a man did if that’s what he wanted to do. Or if he chose he could get dead drunk every day and lie in the gutter. But he had one task that he must fulfill, one sacred duty. He must add his line to the list. He must produce a clear and unimpeachable heir to the House of David and pass on to his legitimate Son the treasure, the legal right to call Himself, Son of David, and the precious genealogy which proved it. Here is how he chose to fulfill that duty:

In any legal matter, what is crucial is that everything be clear and unambiguous. There should be no asterisks, no explanations needed. Everything must be in the open, public and objective with no private interpretation or subjective knowledge needed. I can only say of the line which Joseph did add to the genealogy that it is about as clear as mud and as full of holes as swiss cheese. It’s a difficult enough bit as theology where mystery and subjectivity are the nature of the beast, but placed in its native context of contract law it is a catastrophic failure. With this line in the genealogy there can be no Davidic Retvrn of the King. It smells of a cover up. It slips past, I have to say it weasels out of, telling who the father was, because as we know He is not descended from David. Joseph’s choice brought an unrecoverable end to his branch of the Davidic line. I said that this was the one task at which Joseph absolutely must succeed and, I am forced to the conclusion that his failure is intentional. And the thing that I’ve brought us all here to say is that Joseph’s choice to deliberately bring to an end the House and line of David would be the first and one of the strongest circumstances which would push his illegitimate Son towards the course of indirect ‘left handed’ power, success through failure, and Life out of Death which is the absolute core of His testament and legacy to all of Creation. I guess it goes without saying that I think this is what made this story indispensable to the Tax Collector.

Let’s pick up the story a few steps back though and follow it. Luke tells us(1:39) that Mary quickly went to visit Elizabeth after the Annunciation and stayed there for 3 months, apparently leaving not long before the birth of John.5 It must have been an uncanny house to be in with a 9 month pregnant senior citizen, a mute, and I think deaf, priest, and a pregnant young virgin occupied with figuring out how to tell her mom, dad, and Joseph while she conquered her fears for herself and her baby.

The Paradox, the Sacred Inversion, must have been so thick that you could cut it with a knife, but it couldn’t last. Mary had to go back to Nazareth and face the music, which was looking to be her funeral march. Matthew says that Mary was ‘found with Child by the Holy Spirit’. I try not to get excited over a strange turn of phrase but no one else in Scripture is ever ‘found with child’ or anything like it. This is not how pregnancy is described in any other case. Was she ‘found out’? I have trouble believing that Mary was caught without having confessed this momentous matter to her parents and Joseph. Is she ‘found with child’ because the Virgin’s womb is such an unlikely place to find a child? Is He found in a time and a place unlooked for, unsought, unimaginable? But enough of that, this is the story of Joseph’s dilemma.

What did Matthew mean when he called Joseph a ‘just man’? If ‘just’ means fulfilling the letter of the law then Joseph could not be called a just man in this situation. The letter of the law called for Joseph to announce to the town authorities that Mary was pregnant and that he had not ‘known’ her, trust his beloved to the hands of the Law and the Lawgiver, and assist the investigation to find out who the real daddy was and whether Mary consented or resisted.6 Had she not been engaged to Joseph this would’ve ended in a shotgun wedding to the real daddy7, but since they were contractually engaged, and she was a very willing participant, it would mean that Joseph, the injured party, would have to literally throw the first stone. That would be ‘making her a public example’ as the Law demanded.

Joseph was more inclined to door number 2, but what exactly would be involved in ‘putting her away secretly’? Joseph could ask for a divorce, the contract being canceled, without specifying a reason. From what I have read, in Jewish law at this point it was fairly easy for a man to terminate the marriage contract. He could simply wash his hands of the problem, like Pilate one day would, and leave mother and Child to fend for themselves. Even though he wouldn’t be making any accusations against Mary she would become isolated and a pariah, forced into the difficult life of a single mother and Jesus’ childhood would have taught Him that a father is one who is absent, who cares much for his reputation, his glory, and his own righteousness but little for pursuing lost sheep or restoring ragamuffin widows and tax collectors.8

Some commentators suggest that in calling Joseph ‘just’ that Matthew was implying that he was merciful and kind-hearted but none of our author's other uses of this word have a meaning anything like that.9 Rather I see a contrast between being ‘a just man’ and ‘not wanting to make her a public example’. Joseph’s justice and Joseph’s love are pulling him in opposite directions. We might do better to read the verse with an adversative conjunction, ‘Joseph her husband, being a just man, but not wanting to make her a public example’. Joseph had a fixed intention to follow the Law, he believed, rightly, that a permissive, laissez faire attitude towards sin would cause the land to ‘vomit them out’ as Leviticus 20 has it. He believed that ‘righteousness exalts a nation but sin is a reproach to any people’. He knew that this law was holy and just and good. Joseph’s duty to the community of Nazareth and to all of Israel was clear. But this was the woman on whom he had set his hopes for love, for family, and yes for carrying on the Davidic line and he did not want to bring about her violent and untimely end.

I can’t say how long Joseph was left in this state, but as bad as things got one idea that never crossed Joseph’s mind was to take the Mystery Box, to claim responsibility and have everybody in town think that he had had pre-marital relations with Mary. It’s hard to say how much of an outcast this would make him in very rural traditional Nazareth but it would be pretty bad. In modern America, this might not seem like a big deal, on the other hand, if traditional ages for Mary and Joseph are even in the right ballpark then our society would convict him of corrupting a minor, and of statutory rape and cancel him as a pedophile. The names that we call failures change but in the end nobody gets off in this town.

Joseph’s dilemma seemed to be between Law and Mercy, to bring down the hammer of justice on his beloved, doing his duty for the communities to which he belonged, or to help her skate with minimal cost and involvement to himself. But the angel cuts through all of that to the heart of the matter. Joseph is only even considering these choices because fear has walled off the choice that he actually wants to make. Joseph actually wants to marry this girl and raise this Child10 but the cost has terrified him.11

In part 1, I went into some detail about all of the death and resurrection in the genealogy with which Matthew begins. We’ve just seen that to ‘make a public example’ of Mary in this text refers to death by stoning, and chapter 2 is about the Flight into Egypt to evade Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents. So, the already blood-drenched context demands that we think of Joseph’s dilemma in terms of death. Joseph’s choice seems at first glance to be a choice between his good name, his reputation, and the life of the woman that he loved and her child. The choice seems so facile in our world that we can’t see any dilemma at all, but there is plenty of cause for dread, for fear and trembling. Joseph’s situation is perhaps best understood by comparing it with Abraham’s test when he was called to sacrifice his only son whom he loved. Joseph’s trial was to weigh two little lives against the whole of the covenant. In Abraham’s case the Messiah, the hope for Abraham’s salvation but also his whole family’s salvation, was cryptically present in Isaac and would be eliminated by the stroke of his father’s blade, so for Joseph the hope of Messiah depended on his protecting and passing on the lineage of David.

Hidden in the angel’s little words ‘you shall call His name’ is a command every bit as awful as any in Scripture, up to and including tricking your son into climbing a mountain so you can knife him. For it is the father who names the child. To name the child is to claim to be the father, to confess to doing the deed. By calling Joseph not son of Jacob, his father’s name, but Son of David the angel makes explicit what is required of him, to legitimate, as the Son of David, the Boy whose Father is unknowable, but certainly not a natural part of the precious genealogy. Joseph knew that the hope which all of his family, his neighbors, his country, and yes all of humanity and all of Creation were searching for was the Son of David. Then the death that Joseph faced was the death of the House of David, implying the failure of the ‘sure mercies of David’, the failure of the everlasting covenant with Israel, and the failure of the hope of Messiah. It was also his death to his family and to the village of Nazareth. As Rahab assisted the spy who would destroy her hometown so Joseph must become the instrument of his own destruction. He was called to willingly leave the company of righteous and respectable Israelites and empty himself to become one of the whores, the foreigners, the fatherless, and the antisemites. Thus, he is truly an earthly father to Christ, not just by reputation but by imitation and likeness.

After this, we find Mary in Joseph’s house(Matthew 1:24) and traveling with him(Luke 2) while Luke says that they were still ‘betrothed’. I don’t think that this is simply Luke’s way of letting us know that he ‘did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn Son’ but is a description of the fact that their contract of marriage had not been legally executed. What then is the situation where Joseph has taken responsibility for Mary but their marriage is still pending or perhaps on indefinite hold? Had Mary’s parents withdrawn their support of her, leaving no one but Joseph or did the young couple choose this road willingly? I can’t say, but I do feel that Joseph’s family had withdrawn their support for the marriage. ‘What do you need me for Joe you already got what you want?’ his father might have said. Joseph was seen as a shame and a failure, whether he was incorrectly accused of producing a bastard or correctly seen as giving the legal descent of David to one who’s Father was not born of David and being a ‘cucked beta’.

The Child who came forth in this way was named Jesus and we are usually told that He was named after Joshua the great Conqueror of Canaan. Matthew 2 references the prophet Hosea’s words about the prophet calling his son out of Egypt as a fulfilled prophecy in a way that has always struck most readers as out of place and a bit forced, but I think that all of this talk of accepting sinners has driven the mind of our author to that Hebrew prophet whose name is only one letter different from Jesus and who was famous for his divinely ordained marriage to a whore.12 When we get to chapter 2, I hope to spend some time with that prophet’s amazing chapter 11 where the quote comes from and its breathtaking words about God’s stark refusal to give us the hell that we deserve. But for now let me just say that in His life on earth Christ acted rather more like Hosea than like Joshua, becoming sin for sinners and death for the dead, emptying Himself of righteousness and honor in the same way as Joseph but much more completely

Matthew sets the stage for His hero with pictures of accepted sinners, pictures of death conquered and twisted back on itself to bring new life. The kingdom begins with Beta Joe terminating the House of David. That which began with Samuel’s divinely ordained oil, and was preserved and protected for centuries by almighty power was ended for the love of a girl on the strength of a dream13. And Jesus called the man who did it ‘dad’, proudly I suspect, a man who ventured on invisible faith, who dared all on the slimmest and most unlikely of premises. Christ’s call is to die to all that seems probable or plausible, to leave behind every method of success or salvation that makes sense. He didn’t come to save His people from Giants, or from Pagans, or from corrupt and treasonous leaders, or even from their own vices. He didn’t come to save us with mighty power or great wisdom or even by righteousness but as He Himself repeatedly makes clear by the death of the only One who has standing to condemn us.

Preachers rightly say that it is against God that we have principally sinned, that the hurt that we have done to our neighbors is small compared to the infinite insult that we have given to God, but what we must always bear in mind with this is that God is dead to that insult and no one else has standing to take up that complaint on His behalf, the offended party who ought to throw the first stone has chosen instead to take our shame onto His own shoulders, to be numbered among the transgressors and if He will not throw the first stone at us then no one else can. Joseph gave up his right to complain when he named the Boy and said ‘I do’ to the mother, and in the same way the One to whom He has appointed all judgment left the complaint against you in an otherwise empty grave. It’s just too late in the day for God to condemn on the basis of vice or give credit for virtue. God, in Christ, has left behind his counting table and He isn’t going back to it. He is not a man that He should repent. He doesn’t want us for an income producing asset but as His passion project on which He pours untold favor and attention knowing that He will never receive a return on investment. Not one dime. More than that, we are His prestige and His glory. To save the filthiest, most incorrigible sinner for absolutely nothing, to display new grace more shockingly out of all proportion than the last, is the challenge that wakes Him to the new day. His one demand is that we leave behind our accounting, assets and virtues as much as liabilities and vices both for ourselves and our neighbors, as Levi did and as Christ did, that we die to success as Joseph did and live in the freedom and death of ‘nothing left to lose’.

When we read Luke’s Gospel, he doesn’t give us Jesus’ genealogy until the end of chapter 3. He first tells us about Zacharias and Elizabeth, and the whole Christmas story, and quite a bit about John Baptist and Christ’s baptism, he begins with Joseph and traces it back to Adam. Matthew does it very differently. Matthew gives the genealogy top billing, his ‘begots’ are the first words of the New Testament and he uses this absolutely prime real estate to set the stage for his whole story. Starting with a genealogy might feel traditional or old fashioned to us, like some aristocratic story that begins by reckoning up the impeccable bloodline of its hero, but actually Matthew is doing nearly the direct opposite. Matthew probably wrote for a Jewish audience which fits with mentioning Abraham as Jesus’ most prominent ancestor. But he then immediately launches on a tack which must have been confusing and upsetting to his readers. In such a genealogy we would expect to find few, if any, women and those only when they are significant, prominent, or important to the story that the author is trying to tell. In a genealogy that is royal or Jewish we would expect, frankly, for the tree to be a bit twisted together, to find more than a bit of inbreeding I mean. We would look for some sort of heroes of the faith here, and the people, especially the women, that Matthew chooses show us exactly what he sees as Good News and worth telling.1 Matthew passes by all of the respectable ladies in the line without notice to instead take the narrative in an unexpected direction in verse three when he introduces Tamar as the first maternal figure in Christ’s line. If the genealogies set the tone for the whole book then Tamar’s story deserves to be told in full and we need to consider why the tax collector turned apostle would set the stage for his Gospel in this way. She comes into the story of the Twelve Patriarchs immediately after Joseph has been sold into slavery, in fact her story is as shocking and out of place in Genesis as her name is in Matthew. She is an ellipsis, a digression, a distraction and interruption of the heroic story of Joseph. From Genesis 38:

Moses doesn’t tell us why Judah left his family at the beginning of this story and married an outsider but rabbinical tradition says that Jacob blamed Judah for the supposed death of Joseph in the last chapter, when his brothers sold him into slavery. When we read Genesis we see that the Patriarchs were very particular to select wives from their own relations and country. Abraham sent back to their homeland to get a wife for Isaac, Jacob worked 14 years to get wives with a suitable pedigree. But this story begins with Judah marrying a Canaanite woman probably without Jacob or his mother Leah’s knowledge or blessing. Banished from his home and forced to marry outside the tribe and thus raise children who were not matrilinearly Jewish, Judah is the first of the many people in this story who are basically dead. He is dead to his family and dead to the covenant. You might think that I am reaching a little but the theme of death is about to become unmistakable.

We might feel that in referencing this story Matthew is doing his level best not to connect with his audience but to insult them or perhaps to show them that their own line and history was not so pristine as they would like to think, but although Matthew’s listeners and Matthew himself had Judah and Er and Onan in their history, our writer presents this as the line of Christ and so we must not ask what this story says about the jews in general but what it says in particular about Jesus. That leads us to a different reason why Tamar’s name is in this list. Seeing the real meaning of this story and its connection with all of the other strange names in Matthew’s genealogy started for me with noticing that there is an awful lot of death in these few verses. It begins of course with the death of Er. Er is, in fact, even deader than you might notice at first glance because his brother’s choice to deny Er an heir means that not only is Er dead but his name, his legacy, his generation, is also dead. As a widow, Tamar is nearly as dead as her husband. She has very few rights or prospects her one real chance to reenter society and life is by obtaining a son. There is nothing more beautiful than watching a mother with her son, but in Tamar’s case a son frees her from her widowhood, her enforced grieving and exclusion from society, a son brings her back from the dead. And Onan knows this when he treats Tamar as a mere object for his pleasure. Onan’s actions say that Er needs to stay dead and Tamar might as well be a corpse because she is just a body to him and he has no interest in raising either of them up. This is why the Lord strikes him dead.

I can’t say what Tamar’s marriage to Er was like but obviously Onan treated her like garbage. I’m not sure if she saw it as a blessing or a curse when the Lord killed him. I guess a bit of both but in any case she found herself now completely unmarriageable, back in her dad’s house with her best years gone; alone and nothing to show for it except a promise from Judah which was kind of the absolute bare minimum that he could or should do, and by the way he wasn’t planning to keep that promise. He had already decided that Tamar was some sort of black widow and she wasn’t getting his last boy.2

Tamar had gotten into a bad situation and she was about to hustle her way out of it. Traditionally, we would blame Tamar for her feminine scheming and seducing and I guess the modern world would praise her toughness and self-reliance, praise her for saving herself using the assets that she had available. I notice that all of the people who praise such qualities in women seem to specialize in putting them in situations where they don’t see any choice but to be tough and self-reliant and hustle. To me, it is sad that she found herself in a situation where she seemed to need such things, it would be nice if someone had raised her up had given her some hope but no one in this story had any of that to give. They were all just about as dead as she was. Anyway, Tamar is about to fix this tragedy in a pretty desperate messed up way.

Tamar’s act was the act of a hopeless woman. I think that she just wanted to force Judah to see that he had killed her. And as for Judah, could self-righteousness be painted any more clearly? Judah thinks nothing of going in to a whore but when he hears the news that Tamar has conceived, while he was keeping her on a leash, denying her a husband or freedom, he immediately jumps to burning at the stake. Not that she didn’t deserve it, but you know it famously ‘takes two to tango’. Oh and also, MORE DEATH. But for the first time, we see something else coming out of the death.

It might seem like I am trying to import a lot into Matthew 1 based on a single name which he wrote but Matthew has a pattern here and he begins to make it explicit when he mentions both of the twin sons of Tamar, Perez and Zerah, although Zerah is not biologically in the lineage of Christ at all. This double mention of the Palestinian mother who conceived through an act of prostitution might seem to direct our attention to the sinfulness of man but by mentioning Zerah, about whom virtually nothing is known except this fact of his birth, he underscores that we should definitely be looking at this story and asking what about it sets up the story of Christ. So, back to Matthew 1:

Looking at the women in these three verses it might seem that the theme has shifted to prostitution and adultery. Despite her other virtues the way that Ruth snagged Boaz in the middle of the night isn’t something that David would have enjoyed hearing about his grandma in detail, which may explain the very modest way that it is told in Scripture.3 But in the first six verses of the New Testament we are presented with two prostitutes, an adulteress, and a woman with fairly loose manners, all Gentiles, doing what they do with high status Jewish men. Why would Matthew choose to open the story of Jesus Christ this way? And what possible connection do they all have with the fifth and final woman on his list? When we look at this through a lens of death though we can’t help but notice that of these four women three of them are widows and Rahab watched her hometown, and her many Jons, be mercilessly slaughtered.

From the spring of ‘23 until summer of ‘24 I taught the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew 5-7. I’ve recently been sort of revisiting and editing what I wrote then since I didn’t really understand what Jesus was going on about until I got to Matthew 7, which is of course the end of the sermon. So as I was looking back to see how the insights that I had towards the end might change the beginning, I began to see something different, something potentially much bigger. The best way that I know to begin to explain it is to read this passage from Matthew 9,

The few verses of Matthew’s calling is packed with about as vivid of pictures of Jesus Christ and His Gospel as you will find anywhere. The more that I think about it, the more that it seems to me that we leave an essential bit of the story out of everything that we read in Matthew’s Gospel, the fact that it was written by a tax collector who was called to be an apostle. So as I began looking I started to see that the distinctives of Matthew’s Gospel sort of do seem like they might be connected with the author’s history and calling. And so, not knowing how this will wind up, I decided to start at the very beginning, with the outcast, disreputable widows with whom Matthew begins his Gospel as kindred figures to the tax collector who was found by Grace, because they were all living a life that had become a kind of death.

Matthew seems to have been given the name Levi at birth, perhaps he was from the priestly tribe, perhaps he was not but he was certainly Jewish. Before he enters the story he had come up with a pretty good chunk of change to buy from the Romans the position of tax collector. Although I always imagine sort of going house to house demanding payment, Levi seems to have been mostly collecting Roman tariffs on the boats that landed in and around Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, counting up the value of their cargo and imposing a fee for Rome. And for this he was absolutely despised. The general feeling was that he was betraying his own people for money, he was working for the enemy.

Any Messiah who was interested in leading the Jewish people wouldn’t have touched Matthew with a 39 1/2 ft pole, much like his ancestors wouldn’t have touched these widows if they had had any self-respect or a moral bone in their bodies, but they didn’t. In the eyes of the Pharisees and Zealots who led Israel, Matthew was dead to the covenant. Even in 21st century America speaking or thinking against the State of Israel can get you in trouble fast, not just with the government either but, we are told, with God. Levi the tax collector was a Jewish anti-semite in first century Palestine. In the mind of many jews, Jesus’ little tea party with the tax collectors might as well have had a swastika hanging from the ceiling. After that, He was dead to them.

The strange thing about this story is that neither Moses nor Ezra(the Chronicler) nor Matthew mentions Tamar because of the sin or the death in her story. They mention her because of what death begat, Resurrection is the theme of these begats. The Israelite army was death to the people of Jericho, pitiless and relentless, but resurrection came to one woman when a spy named Salmon entered her house. The widow Ruth and the old bachelor Boaz raised each other up in the same way. David’s sin in the matter of Uriah and his wife and the death of that baby boy killed him and Bathsheba but the begetting of Solomon was resurrection to them.4 And of course, as the last woman in Matthew’s genealogy of Christ Mary is the final nail in the coffin of that story. Sometime between Jesus’ twelfth birthday and His passion, Mary became a widow though we hardly ever think of her in that light, and then her Son’s rejection, suffering, and death was the ‘sword which pierced her own soul’. But the Mater Dolorosa is not at all a tragic figure because the death is so thoroughly swallowed up in Resurrection. Christ’s line is a line continually brought down to death and Hell and continually raised up to new life and Christ’s call that transformed Levi into Matthew is a call to all of us to leave behind our lives for the death and resurrection into which He was born.

Levi was just trying to get by hustling in the world’s second oldest profession when a guy who should have never been talking with a traitorous mooch said, ‘Come follow me’. The Gospel is particularly for the untouchable, for whores and tax collectors and I think that as we go we will see that the way Christ came to these is Matthew’s particular focus. How appropriate that the tax collector had the name of the priests of the Law, that he who lived by collecting every last penny, wringing the blood, sweat, and tears from his brethren was transformed into Matthew, the Grace and Gift of God when he left behind his bookkeeping.

Now it came to pass, when Jesus finished commanding His twelve disciples, that He departed from there to teach and to preach in their cities.

² And when John had heard in prison about the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples ³ and said to Him, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”

⁴ Jesus answered and said to them, “Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: ⁵ The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. ⁶ And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”⁷ As they departed, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? ⁸ But what did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? Indeed, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. Matthew 11 (I make some use of the parallel text in Luke 7.)

When we look at the first half of Matthew 11, we are struck by a lot of strange questions. It isn’t that easy to understand why John would send disciples to ask if Jesus was the Messiah or if we should look for another, when John already knew for certain and had testified clearly that He was. Jesus’ own questions about who John is and why the people went out into the wilderness to see him are puzzling and difficult. Why is He concerned with their opinion of John? Why is the Word directing them to look at and think about John instead of pointing them to Himself or His Father? We can infer answers that fit into our theological frameworks but it’s a lot harder to see what John and Jesus were actually thinking and intending by these questions. As I read this chapter with its difficult questions, I am struck by two difficult questions of my own which I intend to look at a bit in the hope that this will help us understand Jesus and John and their questions about each other. My two questions are these. First, why was John in the desert to begin with? Second, who did Jesus think might be offended by His healing and preaching Good News?

Surprisingly to me, no one seems to have ever thought much about the question of why John was in the desert. Luke tells us that he was in the desert until his manifestation to Israel as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I’ve covered the Judean Desert at some length in an earlier portion of this study of John.

It was a very harsh and unforgiving place, very sparsely inhabited and so I think the question of why a man would choose to live there is a significant one and might go some way towards helping us answer Jesus’ question of who it was that the people went into the desert to see. And the first thing that we should see about John’s wilderness abode is that there is somewhere else that we should have a strong presumption to find John living and working but don’t.

There is so much that we don’t know about John but one rather surprising thing that we can say definitively about him is that he was not serving as a priest in the Temple, offering sacrifices and teaching and officiating ceremonies. Well, we could say that about almost anybody, but about very few Sons of Aaron.1 John’s father was without any doubt a priest serving in the temple, which means that John should have been as well, and neither Moses nor the Prophets nor any Rabbinical or historical source that I can find give us any ground for thinking that the Sons of Aaron can opt out of their responsibilities.2 Now we just don’t have enough information to say why John left the Temple for the desert, but it seems clear that he did so deliberately, but did he leave spontaneously or did something trigger his departure? The only text that I can find that addresses this is Leviticus 21. There are several ways that a priest might ‘profane himself’, contact with inappropriate women or corpses for example, but most of them are temporary and would only impede service until the problem was gone and perhaps a few days more for purification. The only thing that is listed that would permanently disqualify a priest is physical defect. Was John in the desert because he was disqualified from the priesthood?

I have no idea if any of these apply to John, even if they did then this would not necessarily have driven him from the community.3 Why wasn’t John serving with the other priests of the division of Abijah like his father did? I have always viewed John as very independent, a sort of rugged survivalist above the cares of this world, with some kind of sanctity and holy wisdom that exempted him from the normal cares and concerns of life. But a man may be outside of society by being beneath it just as much as he can by being above it. I guess I have always seen the Forerunner as a pioneer, like a cowboy from an old movie. In front of him there is only a trackless wilderness but he cuts a straight and level road for others. You almost get the feeling that he makes the road with no tools but a steely gaze and flinty personality. The idea that John was ‘broken’, that he was ‘defective’, whether physically or mentally or spiritually is new and strange to me. I’m not trying to tear John down or beat him up when I suggest that we should consider the possibility that he knew brokenness and failure from the inside. He wasn’t in the wilderness like Batman in his cave brooding on his next assault on the forces of evil. We don’t have enough information to know exactly why he was in the wilderness to begin with but he may have seen himself as in some sense a fugitive, a failure, a disappointment to the high expectations of his parents and no doubt others. What did the people go out into the wilderness to see?

In asking if John was ‘a reed shaken by the wind’ or a man ‘clothed in soft garments’ Jesus sort of paints John with just two quick but very clear brush strokes. The reeds beside the Jordan river are really nothing more than tall grass. They have just enough structure to stand until something pushes on them and then they immediately go where they are pushed. John is, somewhat ironically, in a king’s house when Jesus says this, or rather he is under the king’s house in the dungeon, invisible but impossible to forget, like salt in a wound, buried like a seed.

I don’t know if he was still in his camel’s hair britches or if Herod got him some striped pajamas but whichever would have been about as far from ‘soft clothes’ as can well be imagined, which implies that he is about as far from a ‘reed shaken by the wind’ as can be. This is how John was throughout his career but Christ’s comment was inspired by John sending his messenger just before to ask Jesus if He is ‘the One or do we look for another.’

John is intractable. He is immovable. He is stubborn. Unlike most people on the world stage John never ‘came up’, he never learned the ropes of being a celebrity preacher. John had friends in low places but with people in high places, whether political or religious, he caused friction even at the best of times. He speaks to Herod and to Jesus the way a sincere, plain spoken, desert hermit speaks to the other inhabitants of the desert. Moral earnestness drives John to speak plainly, the absence of social grace leads John to address even Christ with this very country, blue collar sarcasm, for when John asked if Jesus was the One or they should look for another he wasn’t asking for information or engaging in some passing the torch ritual. He was asking in his rough way when Jesus was going to do some plain, straight-forward messiahing, when He was going to get down to business, when He was going to give Herod and the rest of the wicked world their due and most especially when He was going to bust righteous John loose. There is no compromise in John, no tact, no deference, his personality is hard and angular, rough and sharp, shaped by the desert sand and wind. This is the character of so many of the prophets that we might say it is generally the prophetic character. Moses says that he was ‘slow of speech’ but that is a rather tactful way to describe many of his heirs in the prophetic office. No doubt the people of this world find their message offensive but let’s not kid ourselves we find the messengers’ blunt and tactless personalities at least as offensive.

I can’t escape the conclusion that from a pragmatic point of view Christ’s message would go much further in the world if he chose communicators who were more personable, more winsome, more electable. But he has gone in the other direction, hard. From Elijah, to Ezekiel, to the rough fishermen of the Apostolic College, to Athanasius, to Luther the heroes of the faith are fundamentally iconoclasts. The religion, the order, and the society that other men meticulously pile up the prophets impatiently pull down. Jesus said that it is Jerusalem that stones the prophets but really anywhere that men have built a society and a religion they fear and loathe the men who will pull it down and mostly distinguish prophets from berserkers only when the time comes to bury them.

One secret though to these men’s unearthly faith is their great doubt. They have asked the hard questions, in the hard ways, and they never relent. They have spent their lives pulling off Santa’s beard, finding the man behind the curtain. John pulled on Christ’s beard, looked behind His curtain and it is for that reason that his testimony to Christ’s genuineness must be received. Although John had identified Jesus in the womb and his mother had no doubt been very clear with him on who ‘the mother of my Lord’ was and who his Lord was. John said, ‘I did not know Him’ until Christ’s divinity and His messianic office was manifested to him in the waters of the Jordan.

Even afterwards, John’s iconoclastic character pushes him to challenge Christ about His mission and the way that He was going about it. John didn’t doubt that Jesus could get him out of jail, but he was starting to doubt that he would. And while I have said that his question of whether or not Jesus was the One was sarcastic behind it lay an absolutely sincere prayer that we might phrase something like, ‘Are you really the One?’ He might add, ‘Is the long wait really going to end? Are you another fake, like all the rest? Can there be someone who both understands and cares, and is actually mighty to save, willing and able to upset apple carts and tear down walls for us? Is there a Shepherd who will leave 99 well fed happy righteous sheep to find one chronic screwup out in the desert or singing the blues in Herod’s dungeon?’

Luke says that before Jesus sent the messengers back to John that He healed many sick on the spot. Imagine the ecstatic worship that must have broken out when He began to cure all of the peoples’ infirmities. Everyone would have been praising God, feeling the nearness of the kingdom and salvation like we can barely imagine. But John is shut off from the hope that the rest experience not just by Herod’s big house but by Christ’s words, warning against offense. Later, as the Cross began to overshadow the healing and loaf-multiplying, many people would be offended at Jesus, but on this occasion there is no one but John who might take offense at Jesus. The people being healed weren’t offended. The people receiving good news weren’t offended. At this stage even the Pharisees were still trying to make up their minds if they were offended or not. The only offense in sight is being left in jail by the One who is proclaiming liberty to every captive but John.

What kind of savior would heal everyone except John? Despite John’s sarcasm, his plea for help from Christ is certainly as sincere and as heart wrenching as many which the Lord tenderly granted. I can’t help but think of Teresa of Avila’s words that the way Jesus treats his friends is the reason that He has so few. Jesus made the blind see. He made the lame walk. The unclean became clean. The dead were raised, the poor heard good news. Sinners are given an unlooked for, unearned, unimagined forgiveness and restoration. Jesus was unfailingly kind to drunks, whores, tax collectors, and hypocrites like me but when His faithful prophet questioned Him, he is told that if he is offended by Jesus rather pick and choose approach to messiahing then he better watch himself. John is offended by a kingdom that does not come to the most deserving but to the most needy. John is offended by a salvation that didn’t set men free from prison but left them in the hands of Herod’s whim and lust. Though Jesus had hard words for John, do not imagine for a moment that this was because Jesus was displeased with John. Let’s look down to verse 9 to see how Christ felt about John:

What a strange backhanded compliment! How can a man be the greatest out of all of those born yet least in the kingdom of Heaven? Isn’t it strange that Jesus would choose this rhetorical flourish, ‘those born of women’ which we don’t find Him, or anyone in Scripture, using anywhere else.4 That it stuck in the minds of both Matthew and Luke should be our clue that there is more here than meets the eye. But isn’t ‘those born of women’ just another way to say ‘everybody’? Followed up by the strange humbling of John, in the second half of verse 11, where he seems to be excluded from Christ’s kingdom, this makes me think that Jesus has in mind a birth that does not come from women. John said that he should be receiving baptism from Christ rather than giving it and he was right.

Jesus never baptised John with water but his words and his actions here are fire and spirit to John, cutting him off from all ordinary freedom, hope, and life, leaving no hope save in the God who raises the dead. John was called to believe in a God who lets prophets rot in jail before they are killed in stupid and pointless ways. The great sign of the Messianic kingdom is not tyrants being overthrown or injustice set right but men dying and rising again. If in this life only we have hope then we are of all men most to be pitied. If John’s need for fire and spirit to kill him and make him alive was not past then how much less is mine or yours! John had told his followers before that he needed to decrease and Christ needed to increase; this was not some very pious, humble statement but a plain declaration of emptiness, of inadequacy. At the time that John said those words and at the time when he sent the disciples from his prison to Christ, he was sending them from a broke down, empty man who could do nothing for them to the fountain of living water, the True Baptiser with fire and the Spirit. We often feel ourselves excluded from blessing, failing in ways that Christians ought not to fail, wrestling with enemies that should have been decisively defeated years or decades ago, having chickens come home to roost from ancient mistakes. We find ourselves spiritless and cold, but so did John the Baptist! How Elijah cried and bitched and moaned about his righteousness and his loneliness when Ahab chased him into the desert! Didn’t Jeremiah pant for living water when he was in the muddy cistern? Isn’t this the continual cry of the psalmist? Those that we revere as saints or fathers, even one who is ‘a prophet and more than a prophet’ are so far from being a supply of grace to us that they are rather in the same desperate need that we are. Even for the Baptizer, there is no other way than inside the darkness and death of the Cross.

Luke reports this event in almost identical words but adds this as verses 29 and 30:

The ‘sinners’, the failures, the poor in spirit, the ones who couldn’t make it and had mostly given up trying heard what Jesus said about John gladly, just as they had gone out into the wilderness to John gladly. They heard that he was rough and stubborn. They knew him for a man like themselves, a man with weaknesses and failures like their own, who had been given Good News, had been given the call and the meaningful labor that we all long for. Luke has plainly divided for us mankind into two camps. Mark carefully what they are. There are those who justify God and condemn themselves, men who live in Romans 7 and 8, and those who justify themselves and reject the will of God for themselves. Let us always see ourselves as sinful, see our actions as inexcusable, our choices as indefensible. If we instead see ourselves as right, see ourselves as victims, as those who did the best that we could with a bad situation, then we inevitably reject the will of God for ourselves, reject the forgiveness of sins and the dark and lonely death of the self. I have not at all been trying to tear down John the Baptist, but to find out what it was that men tramped through the desert to see and what that tells us about his God. He didn’t look in the mirror and see a saint, a holy warrior, the tax collectors and sinners never would have confessed to and received hope from such a man. They saw him as one of their own and thus received the Good News that God calls and works through ordinary people, failures and sinners. As long as we are trying and hoping to ‘get it right’, we are seeking to justify ourselves. The only way to justify God is to leave both our liabilities and our assets at the foot of the Cross and receive the gift that He offers us in Christ. Our call is to be washed by Him because we are dirty, to be fed by Him because we are hungry and thirsty, to be forgiven by Him because we are sinful, to be warmed by Him because we are cold, to be breathed into by Him because we are spiritless, to be buried by Him because we are dead.

So, when Israel was wondering in the desert after the Exodus the Amalekites fell on them, as far as we know with no reason or provocation, and there was a fierce battle.  During Moses' last sermon he commands the people that when they have settled down in the Promised Land they are to annihilate the Amalekites.  The Amalekites continue to be jerks to the children of Israel for the next few hundred years, and finally Saul is given the command to wipe them out...completely.  Now, I think that people are basically people, and that Saul must have had the same confusion and reservations that you or I would about murdering noncombatants including children, and destroying animals as vengeance for something that was perpetrated hundreds of years before by people who are obviously long gone on people who are likewise long gone.  The destruction, I imagine, seemed useless and wasteful to Saul.  Of course, I don't really know what Saul thought or felt, but in any case he was willing to wage an aggressive war on a neighbor to try and obey this command.

So, Saul went and did it.  He didn't do it halfway, he not only beat them he chased and hunted them and killed all of them that he could.  He didn't kill the king, I expect Saul would say that he was waiting for an official execution, a deliberate judicial act, but that’s just speculation.  Saul also didn't act thoughtlessly, he made sure not to kill the innocent Kenites along with his targets. He also spared the best livestock, he is gonna claim that he spared them to offer as a sacrifice to the Lord, a lot of people claim he intended to keep them for himself but I think that he believed that when he said it. Things didn’t turn out that way though.

Saul's conscience is clean.  He is glad to see Samuel.  He expects congratulations for a job well done.  I feel sorry for Saul, anytime we think that we have done right and our works are gonna be accepted by God we are in for a very bitter disappointment.  The news of our rejection is the first step in telling us news that is much better than our works being accepted could ever be, but the sting of that failure is no less bitter for all that.

Saul's conscience is still clear.  He doesn't think he has done anything wrong.  So, they saved "the best", to sacrifice.  Before we judge Saul’s sincerity we need to go back to the last chapter, which curiously has him about to make a sacrifice which seems a lot more significant than these sheep.

The story leading up to this is kinda long and complicated and I don't want to read the whole thing but here is the Cliffnotes version.  Saul and some of his soldiers are camped out not far from where the Philistine army is, and it wasn't like modern war; the armies would just sit there watching each other lots of times and unless they got a good chance there may not even be a fight.  But Saul's son Jonathan decided to go over there with his armorbearer, and just see if anything would work out.  He said, "Hey, the Lord can save Israel by the two of us just as easy as he can by a whole army." and it worked out.  They started whooping up on the bad guys, and it turned into a big thing, and the whole Israelite army started chasing and killing Philistines.  And Saul told the people if anybody stopped chasing and killing to get a bite to eat that they were cursed, basically I think that means he was gonna kill them.  But Jonathon didn't hear all that cause he was busy kicking tail, so he stopped for a bite to eat.

So Saul is trying to figure out whether or not to keep chasing the Philistines but God wouldn't answer him.  Another proof that Saul was a pretty good king at this point is that as soon as there was a disconnect between him and the Lord he immediately sensed a problem.  When he didn't get an answer he knew that something had happened.  So he asks the Lord to show them where the problem is.

So, it comes out that Jonathan screwed up and Saul is ready to kill him.  Saul has no problem making sacrifices.  He is determined to have things right between him and God whatever it costs him, to say anything else is to bring a lot of charges against the Lord’s elect that the writer of Scripture declines to make so let’s not.

So Jonathan didn't die.  And Saul caved into "the people", which maybe he does again with the Amalekites.  And a lot of people would find the moral of the story there.  But it doesn't ring true to me.  I keep looking everywhere trying to figure out what and where Saul's failure is, but maybe this story isn't about Saul failing.

Saul knows he has made mistakes by taking matters of sacrifice into his own hands in the past so he is determined to get everything right this time.  He didn't do it himself, He brought the required items to Gilgal, where the tabernacle was, where the ark was, and waited on Samuel, the right guy for sacrifices.  He is doing everything he can to get this all right.  Saul is interested in reasonable sacrifices.  He is interested in giving something up to get something better.  He wants to bring a good sacrifice to God because he wants God to be happy with him.  He is even willing to give up his son for the same reason.  But those aren't really sacrifices, they are good deals.  Saul is trying to buy God’s favor and he considers the life of his son and heir a fair price.  Say what you like about him but I have been worse than that. By a long shot. The sacrifices of the Gospel however, are very different.  They sacrifice what is of greatest value to obtain nothing at all.  To sacrifice Christ to get me is a moronic trade, even if we throw you(and you and you and you) into the deal.  It is a testament to riches, to one who has nothing to gain, whereas our sacrifices testify that we lack all of the things that we seek to obtain.

Saul sees his sin as a picadillo, a minor technicality, because he sees righteousness in terms of righteous or unrighteous acts.  He is condemned not because of what he did or didn't do but because he doesn't understand God.  He sees God's favor as something to be obtained by righteous behavior, he thinks God can be bought, thinks God is pleased with sacrifice.  He still hasn't got it.

Look at verse 17 again.  "Samuel said, “When you were little in your own eyes, were you not head of the tribes of Israel? And did not the Lord anoint you king over Israel?"  Saul thinks that he has something to offer to God, but Samuel reminds him that his place is to receive from God not give to him.  He has inverted the relationship and thus destroyed it.  Our offerings to God might just as well be offered to Satan as witchcraft.  Viewing ourselves as givers and God as a receiver is just as backwards.

Sometimes when we read things in Scripture we take what is really extraordinary as commonplace.  We see Samuel telling Saul that he has been rejected and we focus on the why of the rejection and all of that.  But it certainly isn't extraordinary for a man to fail, not extraordinary for us to fail God, not extraordinary for a king to make a mistake.  But what is extraordinary is for God to send a personal ambassador to a man.  To understand the message we have to ask ourselves why the messenger was sent at all.  Is God sending a prophet to deliver the news, no he is sending him to deliver Saul.  So what was the affect on Saul?  Well it wasn't moral improvement.  Saul begins this story as a good king but it doesn't end that way.  After this day, the delivery of this message, Saul and Samuel never saw each other again.  The next chapter starts with Samuel doing the Lord's work in secret because if Saul finds out he will kill Samuel.  Saul becomes more and more autocratic, more and more despotic.  God had a plan for Saul but it wasn't moral improvement, it wasn’t living his best life now.  Saul's legalism led to complete rebellion against God and His law.  When Saul realised he couldn't obtain God's favor he stopped trying, he threw off all restraint.  When he saw David being accepted, David who was even worse at keeping the Law than Saul, he completely lost it.  God's word always accomplishes what he sends Him out to do.  The purpose of sending Samuel, was to convict Saul of his failure as a lawkeeper.  Open rebellion against God, when God is seen as merely a personification of the Law, is a step closer to Christ compared to lawkeeping.  Saul perceived I think that there was more than law in his rejection and David's acceptance.  He caught at last a glimpse of a God who is above the Law, maybe even a God who is a man, who can relent and forgive sin.  The rejection of Saul's works is necessary for Saul to be accepted without works.

 Saul, and his son Jonathon, were not afraid of the enemies of Israel, the enemies of the Lord.  As David would later say of them they were faster than eagles and stronger than lions, and they set out bravely, valiantly to do the job which Saul had been made king to do.  David’s single combat with a Philistine giant is the stuff of legend, but we think little of Saul leading a tiny nation and a tiny army to fight a giant nation and a giant army. How is this so much less of a sign of faith?  But, Saul didn't just pick a fight with a superior enemy, he picked a fight and then sat down right in their faces and waited on the Lord, represented by His Prophet Samuel.  

Samuel had promised to be there, had promised that the Lord wouldn't leave Saul to fight on his own.  Saul was trying to keep the army together until the Lord showed up, and when He didn’t come at the appointed time, things got really dark and scary for Saul and for Israel.  He had brought all these men to the place of life and death depending on a divine appointment and promise.  To Saul, and his band of farmers turned soldiers the enemy was overwhelming and irresistible, but Saul believed that having the Lord of Hosts on their side would make nonsense of the odds.  He wasn’t afraid of the enemy, only of facing the enemy without God. So, Saul rose to the occasion and called on the name of the Lord.  No matter how much time I spend with this text, I still find it very disconcerting that this is where and how he went wrong.

Saul had enraged the Philistines and then stood there in their faces for a full week.  Maybe it wasn't so bad until his army started slinking away.  But every morning he woke to find his army smaller.  He was unintentionally following in Gideon’s footsteps. On the day in question, Saul’s army was down to about 600 men with 2 swords between them. The Philistines had 6000 horsemen and 30000 chariots, all well armed, and infantry beyond counting. In another day or two, it would be just Saul and Jonathan standing by themselves. The Philistines were confident that once they crushed Saul, no one in the Twelve Tribes would stand up to them for a long, long time.  Saul saw what the Philistines saw, but he also believed in a God who fought for Israel, who could save by the hands of a few just as easily as by the hands of many.1  So Saul, the Lord's Anointed, Chosen by God to lead Israel for Him, showed the people that His hope was in the Lord.  He didn't think of fleeing or negotiating with the enemy, He didn't, as far as we can tell, focus on some kind of unconventional strategy to even the odds.  He begged the Lord to come and deliver Him, by offering a sacrifice.  He put his money where his mouth was.

I don't know if Saul understood where he had failed so badly.  I have a hard time seeing it myself.  It's true that Saul wasn't technically a priest, but he had been anointed by God, the Holy Spirit had fallen on him and he had prophesied.  Where was he so wrong?  Another story, this one is from chapter 21 of 1 Samuel.

When this story takes place, David was a captain in Saul's army.  When the priest saw David he assumed that he was there on a mission from Saul, but David didn't have his soldiers with him except for a handful.  So, David pretended to be on some kind of covert mission, but the truth is that he was on the run from the king.  Saul had become so jealous of David that he tried to kill him, actually he tried to kill him several times, and now David had finally had enough, he was fleeing the country.  So David completely lied to the priest.  But he’s just getting started. 

So the priest gave him holy bread; because the only bread there was the showbread which had been taken from the altar in the tabernacle. The priests changed the bread out every Sabbath to replace it with fresh bread.  When the bread was taken down the priests could eat it.  Nobody else, only the priests.  The law was very clear.2  The showbread was ‘most holy’ and the bread and its special golden table are always listed right after the Arc of the Testimony when the Tabernacle or Temple is discussed. If the bread had indeed been consecrated ‘this day’ then David’s action left the Tabernacle defective until the next Sabbath. But David didn't care.  He comes up with some bull to justify taking it and that is what he does.  If Saul trampled on the office of the priests by offering sacrifice then David usurps their privileges for himself, as boldly, as presumptuously as I can well imagine.  Saul acted out of a desire to save his army and repel an enemy from Israel, seeking to obtain God’s favor to provide a public good to the children of Israel. David acts only for his own private benefit. Have we found at last in Saul an act that remains unjustifiable even if undertaken for the national security of the State of Israel? How strange and singular that with all of the oathbreaking, fraud, murder, rape, and betrayal that can be justified on these grounds, offering a burnt offering to the Lord of Lords without the proper credentials cannot!

So, David takes everything that he thinks will help him in his flight unhesitatingly.  If he gave the Lord or his law a second thought it isn't recorded in Scripture.  To me, to every way that I know to look at it, David doesn't look any better than Saul, in some ways worse.  To give away the punchline, Our Lord says out of His own mouth that David is right.  And that problem, the problem of Saul's rejection and David's acceptance is why I brought us here.

So, Jesus says plainly that David broke the Law, but says that he is blameless.  He points out a problem in the Law, that work in the temple doesn't stop on the Sabbath but that the priests who work in the temple on the Sabbath are guiltless.  So, I think this sets up the problem pretty clearly.  Why is one wrong and seemingly everyone else is right?  Why does the Lord justify everybody but Saul?  Every way that I try to understand this is to work out how what Saul did was worse than what David or the disciples did, but that’s not really the direction that the Lord takes this. Let’s instead look a little deeper at His words.

Let's start with his comment about being greater than the temple.  It seems that what He means is that the temple is more important than the Sabbath, or the Law generally, and that He is greater than the temple.  Serving the temple was sufficient to justify breaking the Sabbath, and the whole Law with it.3  Why?

Two things happened in the temple.  Sacrifices were offered and sins were forgiven.  And we connect the two because they both happened in the same place.  There is often a correlation between sacrifice and forgiveness but we must always remember that correlation is not causation, just because two things are often seen together does not mean that one causes the other.  If we wish to say, that something that we sacrifice causes the forgiveness of sins then we must consider how and what sacrifice is and how it would cause God to forgive. Now we have moved on from bloody sacrifices of animals, in Christianity we have sacrificing of time, and money, and whatever, we sacrifice our way, sacrifice doing what we want for what God wants, any kind of changing, getting our life straight, any kind of working for the Kingdom, the church, whatever is conceptually a form of sacrifice.  There is a connection between our sacrifices and forgiveness but I question if there is a causal link. 

Rather, sacrifice is essentially confession.  It is saying to God and to ourselves that we quite literally have blood on our hands, that we are lawbreakers and failures.  When we offer sacrifice, when we do anything to try and obtain God's favor in addition to believing the proof of His favor we already have in Christ, we have moved into pagan territory.  Sacrifice is the confession that we need God's grace, but the sacrificial act cannot in any way move Him.  His reasons for being good to us are all internal to Himself and don’t in any way depend on who we are or what we have done, rather He is good to us in direct defiance of who we are and what we deserve.  Sacrifice cannot go up into heaven to bring Christ down, sacrifice is the knowledge of our own evil, and when separated from that confession and used as a form of propitiation it is a denial of God.  There is nothing that we can do to make God propitious to us.  Sacrifice is good when it shows us our need for grace, when it teaches us that we deserve a death that God is avoiding inflicting on us, when it reminds us that He has accepted a substitute in our place.  But He doesn't delight in the death of the substitute, He is grieved by the death of the substitute, and to sacrifice needlessly, or worse to sacrifice, whether life or self or whatever, as if God enjoyed death and would favor us because blood is on our hands, because we have destroyed one of His beautiful creatures, is to sin against the temple and against the One greater than the temple and the offering He made of His own body.

So, by sacrifice, by the Law is the knowledge of evil, of our sin, and God does not desire sacrifice.  He desires mercy.  The Pharisees didn't understand what it meant that God desires mercy and not sacrifice and we still don't.  The proof that we don't is that we still condemn those that God has justified.  The proof that I don't is that I still condemn myself, that I still see myself, and you, as unrighteous when God has declared us just by the resurrection of the Second Adam, Our Head, His Son. 

 I have an idea where we go wrong though.  Saul offered sacrifice the same way that Pharisees engaged in acts of mercy to try and please God, just like we do today.  And they were wrong and so are we.  I have already said that God doesn't desire us to offer sacrifice but He also doesn't desire us to engage in acts of mercy.  I mean He isn't against us being merciful but this text isn’t telling us to be merciful.  That isn't what this is about.  Our misunderstanding comes from the idea that what He desires, He expects for us to provide.  But He doesn’t.  He doesn't want our merciful actions or our sacrificial actions.  He wants to BE merciful.  We should read: I desire to be merciful and not sacrificial.  I desire to offer true grace, to be actually forgiving, not just to shuffle blame around but to actually do away with it.  I desire to condemn condemnation, to tell damnation to go to hell, to rob death itself of its sting, to lock captivity, enslavement, and addiction up and throw away the key and freely give gifts to men. 

Saul is condemned, ultimately, because he sought God’s favor, counterintuitive but true.  His seeking success was the cause of his failure, seeking victory was the cause of his defeat, seeking life was the cause of his death.  David on the other hand trusted that he already had the favor of God, he took God’s bread like a child taking crackers from daddy’s hand, certain that it was his for the unimpeachable reason that it belonged to his Father.  And that is how I want to invite everyone to the communion table, know that it is yours, because it is Christ’s.  Know that God’s favor rests on you because it rests on His Beloved Son with whom you have been united in death and will certainly be united in the Resurrection.

Having talked about John’s birth:

and John’s ministry of baptising:

it sort of seemed obvious that next I should say what I see in his baptism of Jesus. When I started thinking about it though, I was very quickly bothered by a difference in the way that Matthew’s Gospel and John’s Gospel present the baptism. Matthew presents John as recognizing Jesus and being pretty shook up to see Christ calmly standing in line waiting His turn to be baptised just like everybody else.

The Gospel of John on the other hand, shows the Baptiser as being unaware that it was Jesus who he had been seeking.

I tried to fit the pieces together several ways before I saw what was actually happening here. I think that what we should see is that Jesus being baptised was just so far outside of John’s idea of who Jesus was that the two concepts wouldn’t go together. For those of us raised on the Bible, familiar with the stories for decades, a place of strangeness especially in the life of Christ itself, presents a unique and valuable opportunity to see what we have missed about Christ, which is what this event did for John. John saw Jesus as the One who sent the prophets, as the One who commissioned him with this new mission and equipped his ministry with this new sacrament of baptism. When Jesus presented Himself for baptism, John didn’t understand why Jesus was there. But when Jesus went into the water, John received an absolute theophany, he saw God as he never had before. This was the moment when John saw what was New and Good about Jesus’ presence and I want to try and recover a little bit of what he saw.

For me, the way to start is by asking: Why did John want to prevent Jesus from being baptised? John knew that Jesus had no sins to repent of, Jesus ought to be the cleaner not the thing cleaned. And that was the protest that John made. Jesus not only had no sins but Jesus couldn’t possibly have a new mind, His mind is the unchanging standard of perfection, the Image of the Invisible God. I don’t know how much time that John had to think about what was going on between seeing Jesus standing in line, and protesting and the moment of truth arriving, but I think that he began to realise that Jesus’ intention in being baptised was about connecting and identifying with sinners, that He was planning to roll His sleeves up and get in the mud with us, to radically and irreversibly shorten the distance between God and man. And it isn’t the right thing to say in church, but I understand why John would want to prevent that. You might call it the Law of Conservation of Dirt. You see, cleaning isn’t the elimination or annihilation of dirt. It is only transferred from the person being cleaned onto the one doing the cleaning.

I am a very proud man, I see myself as tougher and more accomplished and smarter than most anybody else. I am also a greedy man. My greed mostly is basically in two forms. First, hating and fearing my debts. Second, my career and my ability to bring in a paycheck. I know that these are where my hope is because when I feel like I am failing financially I feel despair and dread about my future. I have other sins, addictions that I am embarrassed to talk about because I want to contain the filth. I don’t want my dirt winding up on anybody else and I want to be big enough that no one else is hurt when I screw up. Knowing that my failures hurt my wife and my kids and our church is bad enough. But the thought that they affect Christ is the worst of all. It feels like if God at least is aloof, is impassive and untouched by my sin then I can sort of continue to function in my regular hopeless scumbag way. I can keep going. Sinful, fallen men want an unfeeling God, a transcendant far away God. I want a God who is quarantined from my sickness, even if I have no hope it seems to put an upper limit on the damage that I can do. Let’s keep God in a nice, clean box in a nice clean church and not let anything or anybody that is dirty within about twenty yards. I’ve already screwed everything else up. I can’t risk infecting Him too. I don’t want anyone else, especially God to ever see or have anything to do with my sin. I think that John saw Jesus as the only clean thing in the world of filth that he lived in and didn’t want Jesus to be in the mud with him. If that’s what it was then I get it.

Jesus standing in that line was a sign that those days were over. The Law was God standing at maximum range cleaning dirty children with a spray hose and it started to end right then and there. Luther says that His baptism is the moment when Jesus became our sin. He got in our dirty bath water and wound up dirty himself(with our dirt just to be absolutely clear). Baptism is God grabbing a filthy child and getting the mud and the blood and the slime and the shit all over Himself. It seems that Jesus stood there and was passively dunked or stood still and had a bucket poured on His head or whatever the going method was. But while He stood there Luke says that He was praying, and when John saw Him praying he saw the heavens open. What did he see in this man standing in the river praying? I think what John saw was that Christ was not reluctant or hesitant about being our sin but rather that His muscles were tight with the effort of holding Himself still. His prayer must have been something like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s go. Finally. Finally, I am gonna finish this.’ John saw the great truth of the New Testament, that Jesus was raring to go.

John saw Christ’s passion for washing sinners prefigured in His baptism, saw Him diving in headfirst, getting up to His elbows in our crap, and it scared John. THIS is the Son who pleases the Father, a Son champing at the bit to rescue the worst of the worst, a Son so eager to save sinners that the dignity of God and our lack of worthiness, everything that we have gotten right or gotten wrong, all Law and justice, all fitness and appropriateness, everything that we have and everything that we lack are all just chaff before the storm of His grace. John’s great theophany was a vision of God no longer content to sit in the holy place in a nice clean box, unable to content Himself with rescuing the good people who came to Him for help, but determined to go out into the highways and hedges and compel the lost to come home, to drag our prodigal asses back to our Father kicking and screaming if necessary. Above our sin and the flood of wrath which it necessitates, the divine passion to save stands above all of this like a tree where the Spirit of God might find rest and an abiding place. The Father, who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, cannot be pleased until the Son stands up mighty to save and takes on Himself the cause and the sin of the Last, the Least, and the Lost.

All of Heaven was opened all veils torn asunder for John when he beheld Christ as the Lamb. John might have been scared by this vision as I say, but it was only a short time later that he produced the new and distinctive description of God’s salvation which has stuck ever since in the deepest part of the Christian psyche.

It is surprising to me how little Moses and the Prophets spoke of Christ as a lamb. In the Binding of Isaac we find an allusion to the lamb which God would provide and the ram in the thicket. In Isaiah 53, we are told that He would be silent as a lamb. But there is shockingly little connection made between the Messiah and the lamb however until right here, Bethany beyond the Jordan, shortly after the Lord’s Baptism. It was then and there that this idea began to take center stage, and that’s why I insist that the core of John’s theophany was not a bird or a voice but a recognition of the passion to save sinners of the Man in the river with him, which deservedly became the cornerstone of Christianity. ‘Look at Him!’ John yells to everyone in earshot. ‘See Him! God Himself wrangling His filthy children, transferring my dirt onto Himself!’ He didn’t call men to DO anything, but only to see what was right in front of them, God dusty from seeking and dirty from saving that which was lost. Although John had known who Jesus was since before they were born, after what he had seen in that river nothing was the same. John says, ‘I did not know Him’ until I saw Him identifying with sinners. I did not know Him until I understood that He was becoming sin for me. Everything that I thought that I knew about God was swept away when I saw that no sin or stubbornness or stupidity, no virtue or vice, neither life nor death, Heaven nor Hell would be allowed to stand between Him and the salvation of His children. He wasn’t baptised with fanfare, with pageantry, but just like one of the crowd. Probably only He Himself and John realised that something extraordinary had occurred. But when I think about what John saw when he looked on the Lord, I am reminded of the 49th chapter of Isaiah,

As John says, He takes away the sin of the world, He bears in Himself all of our dirt, our filth, our stubbornness, our stupidity, our weakness in toto. He saw then that the whole of God’s wrath must be drained, that all of our sin and all of its consequences must be taken away. Nothing less would ever satisfy Christ than for the whole to be finished, once and for all. You and I can’t keep our sin inside. It’s leaking out everywhere. Our secrecy isn’t protecting anybody or anything. It’s just keeping us away from freedom. Your family is already covered in their own filth. You, protecting them from yours is just a prideful illusion. Jesus has already become sin, become filth, been imprisoned, tortured, and died. There are no barriers to confession and to authenticity. They are all finished all in the past. The Lamb of God is here, present to take away our sin. His commandments aren’t burdensome. Behold. Look. See what is plainly set before you. And then, Take. Eat. Drink. Be washed and be clean.

Highway 1 in Israel begins more or less on the Mediterranean coast, at the political capital of Tel Aviv, formerly the port of Joffa, and climbs 2600 ft in 39 miles on its south-southeast journey to western Jerusalem. It makes sense that the road connecting these cities would receive the iconic designation of Highway 1, but the way that that road continues is a bit strange. If you continue on Highway 1, you will pass north of the old City of David. You will pass north of Mount Scopus and turn east not far from the Mount of Olives as you leave the well watered east and over the course of ~19 miles descend 3625 ft to Beit HaArava, the House of the Desert, over 1000 ft below sea level and then a short northward jag ends the road in the town of Jericho. The Judean mountains, upon which Jerusalem sits, create the familiar rainshadow effect, meaning that the lands west of the mountains receive plentiful rainfall from the Mediterranean Sea while the east is rightly called the wilderness or Desert of Judea, a rugged wasteland stretching from just east of Jerusalem until you reach the banks of the Jordan River outside of Jericho1. These days you can get from Jerusalem to Jericho in 35 minutes in an air conditioned car but it used to be a rough hike through a dry and burning desert. It was a land of wild goats, rock hyrax(which seems to me something like a prairie dog, though biologists claim that it is close kin to an elephant), leopards, ravens, and vipers. But the oddest and arguably least domesticatable inhabitants of this desert have always been the prophets.

We learn from the close of Luke 1 that John was ‘in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel’, which seems to be referring to this eastern wasteland between Jerusalem and Jericho. It wouldn’t quite have been just John and the prairie dogs and the ravens. There were several communities of essentially Jewish monks that we call the Essenes who made their home here. Men who are hiding have chosen this broken, punishing terrain as their hiding place since time immemorial so there were probably outlaws here as well. And there were travelers passing through. We don’t really know if or how much John interacted with any of these groups, but in any case it was not the way that most of us would expect or choose to begin a worldwide ministry. We can’t be sure if John’s career began preaching and debating with the(other?) Essenes, or ministering to the outlaws who may have been hiding from Rome, Herod, or the Jewish leaders in somewhat the same way that David hid in this region from Saul, or if he simply accosted travelers. But we can say, to some extent at least, what was both compelling and liberating about John’s ministry. It’s simply that the combination of John’s words and the water of the Jordan was a solvent separating men from their sins, from their compulsions and addictions, from old grudges and fears. The Gospel that John preached was an oasis in the desert and a plain path home to the lost, but what was it about it that made it that way?

John’s words and Jordan’s waters, taken together, made people see things differently, made them freely, loudly, and spontaneously shout the things that they had previously been too ashamed, too afraid to say. Our word ‘repent’ comes from the Greek metanoia, literally a changed mind. And so, perhaps the first thing to see in John’s preaching is that ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ could be well paraphrased as ‘Stop thinking that things are going to stay the same! Recognize that very soon God is going to act in our lives and in our families and our countries, be prepared to live in the new world that God is making for us!’ All of John’s preaching is based on the imminence of divine intervention, so is the whole of the New Testament, but we don’t believe it. We are still compromising with the world, because we expect to be together for the long haul. We believe that we have to gradually, incrementally point men in the right direction without differing too much from our environment or being too radical but surely we have been at this long enough now to know that this is a dead end? We ought to be called CINOs(Christians in Name Only) and our weakness is caused by our cast iron belief that things are staying the same, that God isn’t going to intervene on our behalf. This is what led Zacharias in Luke 1 to be rebuked by the angel for unbelief. It is rebuked more strongly yet by Peter in his second letter.(2 Peter 3 first few verses)

I have said that John’s baptism caused men to confess, but he never tells them to confess. Rather, he begins by confessing himself. Law and the conviction of sin can be preached by anyone at anytime, by angels or mute stone tablets, but Gospel must be presented by a peccator qua peccator, a sinner speaking deliberately in the character of a sinner. John leads with his confession of his own unworthiness and inability.

¹⁹ Now this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”²⁰ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” ²¹ And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” John 1

His preaching was a confession of his own insufficiency. Christ calls John the greatest of the Prophets, but John’s message is almost comically humble. ‘I’m not the Christ’ ‘Well then are you Elijah?’ ‘Are you the Prophet?’ ‘Are you this?’ ‘Are you that?’ ‘C’mon you’ve gotta be somebody!’ ‘I’m just a voice yelling in the desert that this road is terrible and has us all mixed up and worn out. We stink and we are nasty and and we really need a bath. I can’t fix it but get ready. Christ won’t leave us hanging!’ He confesses his own inadequacy and seeing his inadequacy we see our own, but the point of it was so that we will all see that our needs will shortly be met by the Lord making good on His promises. Whether we think that we are traveling to God or running from Him, the hills and valleys of our works and our lives and our righteousness are exhausting, killing us. The tortuous windings of the schemes that we have sought out to save ourselves will end in dehydrated husks in the desert. There’s got to be a better Way. He told them what he was like and what they were like. He preached to them Law, anthropology, the knowledge that they were all sinful men. And then he preached to them Gospel, a God full of grace and truth, theology. He preached the coming of a Savior who was mighty, whose washing would not be a washing of the body but of the inner man. This twin confession of our emptiness and Christ’s abundance is the pattern that we must always duplicate.

To John’s listeners, their descent from Abraham and inclusion as his covenant children was the only possible foundation for relationship with God. But the new mind, the kingdom which John preached depended on the end of the Jewish Church. So, I’ve been traveling to Chattanooga since 2007, I don’t go as often as I used to but when Chey’s family was up there we went quite a bit. One thing that has remained the same during that time is that they are always, always, doing road work on I-75 between the state line and the I-24 interchange. Going through downtown Chattanooga during the daytime adds 2 hours of sitting in traffic to any trip. I don’t know when they started but after going at it everyday for a minimum of 17 years they are currently on Phase 2. I can think of one thing about the road that has changed in that time, they reworked the East Ridge exit a bit. Other than that, they just seem to knock out concrete and put it back in the same place over and over. I don’t know how many phases there are but if its more than 2 I don’t expect them to finish in my lifetime. Jesus Christ isn’t like that. He begins a project with a definite end state in mind. He finishes on His timeline and then He stops. Whether He works on it for 6 days, or 1500 years(the approximate lifespan of the Mosaic Covenant), or 33 years or however long the Church Militant winds up existing, its end is coming and is not cause for fear but hope. The Church is now very much in its old age. Purity and sincerity have given way to corruption and nonsense. Unity and clarity has given way to schism and senility. The Church in this world is largely impotent and frankly incontinent. Just like the Jewish church in John’s age, we have used our keys to shut up the way to salvation long enough and thanks be to God that soon He will take matters into His own hands.2

To the question of, ‘What shall we do then?’ John’s answer is a bit startling. We might expect John’s moral advice to be deeply insightful or display an incredible grasp of his listeners’ cultural context and penetrating psychological wisdom but it doesn’t. Rather, his moral advice is as awkward and off key as we would expect a hermit in a crowd to be. The sort of people who think that Christianity is socialism, or anarchism, or pacifism find what they were looking for in John’s words, but none of those things are noticeably there. Saying, ‘Clothe the naked and don’t let folks go hungry.’ is not the same as any of our ‘social justice’ programs. It is stock and rote in a way that pulls me up short. John’s speech throughout the Gospels is marked by vivid metaphor. When he speaks he is mystically ‘a voice’, his listeners are vipers, or they are trees which are in danger of being felled and burned. The One who he preaches is a lamb with a dove on His head who plunges men into fire and the Holy Ghost whose shoes are so high up that John can’t even reach them. But, when it comes time to moralize John is out of his element. He doesn’t address soldiers or tax collectors with preternatural insight but with Sunday school answers, with copybook maxims. Did they really slog up and down the trackless desert to be told not to steal and that bullying is bad? No, they didn’t. Although John calls himself ‘a voice’ it is time that we see that he didn’t really come to speak, much less to pontificate or reason about virtue and vice. It is not some new revelation about what is right and wrong, about carrots and sticks which freed the men who went out to John. It wasn’t John’s words that built a highway in the desert. He is not really John the Preacher. He is John the Baptiser. Through a sacramental washing, he empowers people to leave their old ways of thinking and living behind. John dunks a guy in a river and its a whole different person who comes out of the water. Why?! What did he baptise them into?

What we need to see about baptism is its very suggestive, meaningful passivity. What I mean is that I would not let a desert hermit with grasshopper legs in his beard, simulate drowning me. The only way that I would let this wild man give me a bath is if I was both completely unable to do it myself and absolutely disgusting. And that is what we are. In baptism, we do no work, make no contribution, because we can’t. We do not wash ourselves but rather another washes us. Whenever and however we come to the baptismal waters, we are like newborns. And I should point out that as baptism is the beginning of the Way of following Christ, it is plain that we cannot continue in any way except the way that we start, or rather the Way in which another sets us. If we begin with helpless, passive reliance on a Divine Savior with no contribution of our own then the entire course of progress must be helpless, passive reliance on a Divine Savior, Christian growth is not a growth in either works or virtues but in dependence on and faith in Christ. If it moves even a step away from this first love then it is no longer founded on the Rock but is another gospel soon to be swept away.

But why do we need either washing or a Savior if the only objective is to change our minds, as the word ‘repent’ implies? It is an assumption of modern society that a superficial act of the will changes what we believe, that we can believe whatever we choose or wish to believe, and change our beliefs as easily as we change a shirt. Thankfully, that’s nonsense. Our minds are deep and out of our control, or even ordinarily our awareness. They are complex structures shrouded in mystery, deep and dark, not to mention desperately wicked, driven by fears of death and failure and rejection. As the Prophet asks, who can know his own heart? A belief is like a load bearing member of this structure and we may say that the weight atop the belief, the degree to which we rely on it to protect us from the world and to underwrite our success, wedges the belief in place, which is a necessary survival mechanism. If we could, as we are so often told that we can, simply pick up or discard beliefs as the whim strikes us, then wouldn’t all of the structure which they support come crashing down?

The only time, generally speaking that someone changes a core belief is when they are forced, beyond their ability to rationalize, to see that something they have believed is untrue and when this happens the parts of the mind which depend on that belief become unsupported, and the whole mind becomes as we say unhinged, liable to fall into madness at any moment. We have wrong beliefs, about who we are, who God is, and what is necessary to be reconciled to Him as the very foundation of our fallen minds. Belief in our autonomy, in our ability, and in our own personal goodness are not beliefs that you or I are capable of discarding. To preach repentance then isn’t so much to notify men of what they ought to do as to put them on notice of what God has done and is doing for them and in them.3 It is to call men to ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world4’, making the low places in our minds high, straightening out the twists and turns.

There is one element of this story that we haven’t given proper attention to yet. We have talked about ourselves, about the desert of our lives and the serpentine road of our religion. We have talked about the Prophet, his preaching and his baptising. But we have not talked about the river itself. About 120 miles north of the site where John baptised stand the mountains of Hermon, about 4000 ft higher than the highest point in Jerusalem. Snow, pure and perfect falls from Heaven here; it melts and rushes down in surging cataracts to form the river called the Descender, or Jordan. But almost all rivers begin in mountain springs or in snowmelt and rush downward, so why is it this river that is named Descender, what is different about it?

The road from ordinary life to religion, like the highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is a steep ascent5. It is a climb undertaken with the goal of becoming right with God. It is a road that leads to virtue and accomplishment, to a form of respect and success. It is perhaps not so well traveled among us as in some other places and times but it is by no means unknown. But what to do if we have climbed to Mount Zion, to the Temple, and we remain in our sins, if we find that we still think the same thoughts, practice the same things which we hate, the hate of which caused us to climb to begin with? The descent down the other side is even steeper than the climb was, and where we once climbed happily and purposefully, this path is downward in every sense. We climb down from accomplishment, down from respectability, down from confidence and self-sufficiency. The road east out of Jerusalem is a pilgrim road, a lonely road, a road into depression and despair, into solitude and suffering, to literally the lowest point on Earth. Just a few miles south of John’s baptismal site the Jordan rushes into a great void, a gash in the land, perhaps even a still festering wound where the Cities of the Plain were struck. At over 1000 ft below sea level there are ship wrecks on the bottom of the sea that are higher than you are when you stand on this shore, but the lake is another 1000 ft deep. You would need binoculars to look up and see the bottoms of graves. Modern geology tells us that here two great tectonic plates are pulling apart within the earth, leaving unsupported land above to droop and sag, the Jordan pours into this hole and has nowhere else to go, its course ends just a few miles south of where John baptised in a lake in which life is impossible6.

The Jews were sick of their religion, sick of fighting a fight that they could never win. And so they trooped through the trackless desert seeking the great Descender, for John to plunge them into it only a few miles before it itself plunges into the Dead Sea. What I mean by all of this is that it was not simply John’s words or even the ceremony of baptism that was preaching to these men. The road and the river were speaking eloquently to them, telling them that it was the One who Came Down that they were being baptised into and into His impending death and descent into the earth. The Christian life has been rightly called the practice of dying. It is also the practice of failing and the practice of being rejected. Freedom in Christ is to willingly walk into all of the things that men fear most and…be thankful for them. This is the message of the Cross, that we can die His death now, today and everyday, and yet live. We can come to our own and not be received by them, and thereby be received into the company of the saints. It is this that took away fear and caused men to confess.

I’m gonna tell yall today about a buddy named Zach. When I told Cheyenne this story, she thought that Zach was me. If I tell you about how a dude thinks and feels that comes out of me and so I guess I imagine him like me, but he’s not me. He was a real dude. What he was was old and tired. He was also something of a failure, he seems to have been fairly depressed with his life, a man who felt helpless and hopeless. I say hopeless but in one sense he had a lot of hope it was however a dried up, worn out hope, a hope clung to despite not feeling it for a long time. He was stuck waiting, and that’ll take the fire out of any man. His homeland had become a cog in a global machine. Zach’s people had a sort of empty show of freedom. The last vestiges of actual popular government seem to have gone away about 70 years before. As old as Zach was, even he probably only knew about the ‘good old days’ from listening to old cusses when he was a boy, but even the good old days would’ve left Zach unsatisfied, hungry for more. To Zach, there was nothing new under the sun. The new boss always turned out to be the old boss.

The smiling, happy parts of society would’ve called Zach disgruntled and disaffected if they couldn’t avoid noticing him. The folks doing well by hitching a ride on the global beast would say that Zach was just complaining about the ‘good old days’ because of his personal failures, that the problem wasn’t with the country but just with Zach as a man and there’s some truth to that. You see, Zach had never been able to give Ellie a baby, never able to have a family of his own. The two of them had tried for years, hell decades. I don’t know the details of what the two of them had done, but they had gotten to the point where there was nothing left to try. Their hopes having dried up wasn’t metaphorical anymore. They would die in an empty house. One of them would go and then the other would sit staring at nothing until it was their turn. True love would go the same way that true hope had gone. Turns out sad people have reasons to be sad.

I expect that the loneliness and the emptiness would bother Zach more than the thought of dying. You see Zach and Ellie were believers. They had some comfort about death, some promises that they held onto. Zach had spent his life waiting for the Lord to step in and fix things for himself and Ellie and his people and like almost every believer from Adam down to ourselves, he had sadly concluded that the Lord wouldn’t be coming during his lifetime. Actually, Zach was a minister and he filled that role in a way that appeared to be faithful but was anything but. I don’t mean that he skimped on the incense, or that he stuck his hand in the collection plate. He didn’t find comfort in the arms of a lady from the congregation, or have too many beers forgetting the too many disappointments of his life, at least as far as I know he didn’t do those things. His faithlessness was much worse. His faithlessness was a true faith that had been hollowed out. It was just a shell. The form of his faith survived intact but there was no more belief inside. His faith had just sort of run out of gas. He carried out his duties but he no longer believed that he would see God set his home free. He no longer believed that God would give him a child. Zach still believed that one day the long night of the world would end and day would break, but he no longer expected to see it.

When I get in a place like that, I blame it on circumstances. ‘Life just isn’t very hopeful’ I say. ‘There’s no signs that things are getting better.’ I sort of scorn and look down on people who are hopeful. I think that they are putting their hope in things that will disappoint them, things that won’t really make any difference. I feel like all of our hopes are superficial, they only scratch the surface and miss the roots of our misery. I hate half measures and so I wind up doing nothing. I guess that you could say that I prefer an open wound to a bandaid. I dunno. I’m not gonna try and justify the way that I am. Willy Wonka says to Charlie, “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. He lived happily ever after.” but that isn’t what happened to Zach, at least not at first.

Zach was inside burning incense, while the people were outside praying. Zach and the people were praying for their church and for their nation. They were praying for God to stand up and do what only He can do. Or at least they should have been. Zach was just there because he drew the short straw. Zach was burning incense because he was a professional incense burner, that was how he paid his bills. The twist to the story is that Zach really was waiting on Christ, he really in the deep parts of his soul longed for his people to be free with the true freedom that could come in no other way. He really wanted to see his wife holding their baby too, but decades of disappointment had made these hopes too painful to live in everyday.

Hope and prayer are two names for fighting against darkness. To hope or to pray in the face of overwhelming darkness, is really to resist the evil and it leaves you as worn out, sometimes even as sweaty, as a wrestling match. Zach had done that for a long time, but there just wasn’t enough of him left to keep it up. He no longer spoke to Ellie about having a baby because those wounds were closed in both of them and he didn’t want to open them again. He no longer prayed for the Blessed Hope in his heart because the decades of watching his people crushed under the heel of Empire, of seeing the best crushed by the worst, of seeing Good compromise with relentless, uncompromising Evil until it was swallowed up and became evil itself, was all just too much for an old man to fight against every day. Zach was too sincere, too authentic, of a man to not know that this made him a failure. His failure sickened him. It stuck to him thick and oily and disgusting like tar. He tasted the sharp, metallic bite of failure in his morning coffee. He washed his failure down with a nip of bourbon before bed so that he could sleep knowing what he was. His failure was like a faint odor, barely noticed but never gone tainting everything that he did, when he offered up a mechanical prayer as the incense burned with no hope or faith just because his name was on the calendar.

John is now the most common name among the European languages, but there is nothing common about what the name expresses. It means, ‘God is Gracious’. God gives undeserved gifts. When all reason, all law, all common sense, all decency and decorum says, ‘No’ God sometimes steps in and says, ‘Yes’. The only reason why is because He is good, and merciful, and forgiving to people that we think that He shouldn’t be. God heals wounds that I think should be left to fester. God makes rotten men do heroic things. God hears our cries and stands up for our defense, even when they don’t ‘come from the heart’. You see, it is when we aren’t faithful enough, or loving enough, or hopeful enough that we need an answered prayer the most. He acts according to our need not our worth. God forgives and it is wonderful in our eyes.

So, Zach was given about the best news that any man ever received from the mouth of an angel sent from the Lord Himself and he didn’t believe it. His words don’t look that bad to us when we read them, but they revealed a hope that had burned out. He was trying to figure out if he had fallen asleep and was dreaming or if he had a brain tumor or what. He had dreamed about the Lord visiting Israel, standing up for His lost and forsaken people a couple thousand times. He had dreamed about the Lord giving him a son about a million times. The angel saying, ‘Your prayer has been heard and answered’ is the equivalent of saying that you are accepted and beloved of God, and oh yeah, your dreams aren’t just coming true in an ordinary way. However big Zach thought this news might be it was much bigger. It is quite literally the beginning of the Gospel. Zach would finish his rotation in Jerusalem, go back to their village, and about six months later Mary would come knocking, and babies would be jumping in wombs. However you count it up, it would be less than two years before angels would be singing, shepherds’ jaws would be hanging open, and Joseph would be trying to convince the goats to eat out of the other manger. Zach got everything that he had been hoping for and when it happened he didn’t believe a word of it.

This sounds like punishment for failure, but here is why this is Gospel. Zach’s unbelief, his sin, and his failure didn’t actually change anything. Gabriel didn’t say, ‘Well since you don’t believe God, I will take this baby boy on down the street to another couple. The Jones’s will believe me.’ He didn’t say, ‘Well, I guess Israel and the world will have to wait a few more centuries until we can find a priest who has sufficient faith. The guys who have to redo the celestial mechanics for the star are gonna be pissed.’ He just said, ‘Hush. When you see the Lord’s salvation, and you have something worth saying, then it’ll be time for you to speak.’1

The Gospel comes to old people and to old peoples. It comes when hope has withered on the vine, like Zacharias’ or Sarai’s, like first century Judea or 21st century America. Twenty centuries make no difference to the ever alien gift of righteousness and peace. It comes when it cannot reasonably be expected as it came to Mary. The Gospel comes to those who do not believe. He comes to the conquered, the beaten, the broke, the faithless, the helpless, and the hopeless. He comes to atheists and pagans and antichristians and believers whose belief has become hollow. He comes to the gay and the grim, to the hurting and the numb. The healthy have no need of a physician but the sick do. Does your physician refuse to see you because you have the flu? Does the surgeon kick a patient out on the street because of a broke back? Rather, does the undertaker refuse a body because it is dead? Then certainly Christ will not let our sin and unbelief prevent Him from visiting us.

At the beginning of Luke 1, Zach and Ellie are declared ‘righteous before God’ by the author of Scripture yet we see quite plainly Zach’s unbelief. How can a man with unbelief be righteous?2 In verse 77 Zacharias uses a phrase that is, I think, key to understanding John the Baptist. The phrase is ‘remission of sins’. It refers to our sins being released so that they no longer stick to us or we no longer stick to them. If you studied much chemistry then you know that generally only things that are alike stick together. Polar things stick to other polar things, and nonpolar with nonpolar. Small molecules stick to small molecules and big with big. Velcro won’t stick to marble but you can’t peel it off another piece of velcro. I am trying to get at two points. One, there is something in our minds that mates with desire and turns the regular ebb and flow of life into obsessive, destructive addictions. I hope, next time, to talk about John’s Baptism and how it began transforming minds such that sin no longer stuck to people and they were no longer stuck to their sins. But the second point, and the one that I want to close with, is even bigger. There is nothing in God’s mind for your sin to stick to. He isn’t stuck on your sin. He doesn’t desire to hold onto it, but to hold on to you. Remission of sins isn’t needed so that God will let go of our sins. He is not one of the pieces stuck together but the solvent separating them, a sword come to divide not merely brother against brother but a man from his own sinful self. We cannot get loose from the worst parts of ourselves because we think that they are the best3. Zacharias unbelief wasn’t so much punished, and it certainly didn’t interfere with the progress of the Gospel. He just needed to hush and be still until the Lord peeled him apart from his unbelief.

To the Chief Musician. Set to “Lily of the Testimony.” A Michtam(jewel -jc) of David. For teaching. When he fought against Mesopotamia and Syria of Zobah, and Joab returned and killed twelve thousand Edomites in the Valley of Salt. from Psalm 60

I have spent a lot of time in a really dark place lately. A lot of people that I care about are having health issues, both physical and mental, and some that seem to straddle the border between the two. It seems like I can’t ‘get a win’. All of the things that I keep hoping will make things better come along and the don’t seem to do any good and almost everyday new problems seem to fall on me. I suspect that my baseline ‘moderate depression’ is trending more towards ‘severe depression’ which is a bit depressing. I have wrestled with depression all of my life and the depression and the inability to hear a word from God or to feel His presence feed off of each other, a vicious cycle like going round and round the toilet bowl that I feel like I am being flushed down. I decided to drag myself out of the toilet one more time and I thought that maybe a Psalm would be the way to go. I didn’t want a cheerful sort of ‘young shepherd all is well with the world’, nor a prayer for vengeance(though that is sorta called for too), but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I landed on Psalm 60, I don’t know how exactly, and the heading in the NKJ caught my eye, ‘Urgent Prayer for the Restored Favor of God’ and that sounded about right so here we are.

David is speaking urgently here, as the NKJ suggests. He doesn’t stop to consider the rights or wrongs of the situation. He doesn’t bring before God his merits or his sins or his repentance. He doesn’t bring with him any flowery speech but only a bare statement of fact and a cry to God His Provider. As he will say later in the Psalm, God is not ‘going out’ with his armies. He is deprived of the protection and favor of God. The Holy Warrior who is used to His enemies running in terror from the living God finds himself alone on the battlefield.

If we justify ourselves; if our hopes and expectations depend on our works and worthiness, then we can never speak honestly to God like this. We find ourselves stuck in that ‘church’ mode where everything is great and God is just blessing us left and right and our whole lives make heartwarming facebook posts and it is all so damn fake. There is nothing harder and darker than to confess that God is against you, and nothing more humiliating and lowly than recognizing His opposition to us, to beg Him to turn back to us with nothing to offer, without anything that we can deliver or even promise. We are eager to blame our problems on circumstances, on bad government, bad jobs, bad people, bad self but David ascends higher. He acknowledges that he is broken down because God has broken him.

I have plenty of personal problems. My dog is dead, yes I am still greiving him a year later. My grandmama, who was still visiting and taking care of ‘the old people’ just a few years ago has become an old woman herself1. She wants to be done with this world and is ready to see the One who has walked beside her for so long. And, I know, that those of us who are left behind will feel as if the earth beneath us has become unmoored from its foundations. I can’t even cope with losing my dog. It seems clear that when Grandmama passes I will be a nonfunctional lump of human misery for an extended period of time, and to be honest my life and my family can’t really afford for me to spend years in a place of dark uselessness. I don’t see anyway around it though. My dad is either being persecuted by the Deep State or has slipped deep into delusion.2 He imagines that I am his enemy, trying to get him locked up. My mother has been fainting without warning. We have begun to find out about the heart problems that seem to underlie this and I am very afraid. My wife has had sickness that won’t go away for two years. We have seen many doctors and tried many things and none of them seem to help. There are a thousand other worries. Just this week we noticed that a huge tree that hangs over the house has begun to lean toward that house. This is all in addition to every bill being higher than it was the month before. Do others have it worse than I do? Yes I am sure that many people do. But let’s speak plainly, it is getting pretty dark for all of us.

When I was a kid, or even a few years ago, sick people got better. Now sickness sort of flares up and calms down but never goes away. We are all chronically ill and no root cause ever seems to be found, or if found no solution is forthcoming. It seems clear that many of us are simultaneously obese and malnourished. Dude, that’s messed up. No one even speaks of honesty or integrity anymore, whether in personal dealings or public. Rather, on all sides we admit that our preferred leaders are men of poor character, but we point out that they are intelligent or patriotic or effective scumbags and move on to other issues. We are at war on all sides. We don’t even know who our enemies are or why we are fighting them in many cases. So many things that used to be safe, used to ‘just work’ have become unreliable or dangerous. The world around us is broken. It is shaking. Can there be any doubt that ‘our Rock has sold us’, that we, both individually and as a people, are experiencing the wrath of God, and that it is only the One who shakes the earth who can heal its breaches?

Is there a sadder sight than the modern church? Brother divided against brother, we reel about like drunk men throwing punches at our allies and embracing our enemies, with no clear idea on what we ought to do or how to do it.

To attribute all of this to ‘the liberals’ or ‘the commies’ or the Devil makes sense but we must ascend higher. We will remain confused until the Lord gives us a banner, a rallying point. We stumble about like a headless chicken, fighting fights both old and new, remembering neither our goal nor the Way to it. It is for our Saviour that we must cry out, not because we have done right or deserve any good thing but only because of His ancient love for us. Only the One who has struck us can heal us and all of our hope sits at His righteous right hand. We have no other hope, no other banner, no other one to trust or to name on Earth or in Heaven.

When David wrote this song it seems to have been sung to a tune called ‘Lily of the Testimony’, now that song is long lost but the Testimony is not. What testimony was David referring to? To the monuments of the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan, giant stones stacked in the midst of the Jordan3, to the Word which his father had taught him when they went in and when they came out and when they walked along the way4. He was referring to Law and Miracles and Provision set beneath the Mercy Seat. What Testimony is it that we call to mind in our darkness and depression? Wherever about us we look, we find evidence of our sin, our failure, and of God’s righteous exasperation with our stupidity. All of creation testifies against us that it is right and good that we should suffer and be miserable. It is only when the Creator Himself breaks through the frame of the world to open His own sacred mouth that we find hope.

The Scriptures cannot be broken and here we find solid ground in our distress and depression. Our rescuer is not far away that we must go and find Him. There is no quest or errand which we must accomplish before He will stand up for us. No complicated theology or difficult puzzle to solve.

No membership in any club or church is necessary. Our one task is to believe in the resurrection of Christ and to testify to that truth. Everything else is gravy on the biscuit. It may be delicious, delicious gravy but it is not the biscuit. To believe that an innocent man died for our sins and was raised for our justification, to believe that despite all of the legitimate reasons to give up and leave us to our own devilish devices that God in Heaven still thinks fondly of us, is still willing to set omnipotence in motion on our behalf, to believe that estranged Fathers never stop pursuing their children is our one calling.

I spent the morning crying out, ‘Take not thy Holy Spirit from me!’, I mean I yelled other things at Him too, but all of the suffering, all of the depression doesn’t matter so much when I can feel His presence. When His Gospel is like fire in my belly none of my problems overwhelm me. When it’s ‘just Jon’ I am not man enough to deal with my life.

He has claimed us for His own, and He will make good on His promises. The encroachment of the world on us, whether physical, mental, or spiritual, whether individual, corporate, political, whatever is a temporary thing. He will again say over us, ‘Mine!’

Those who seem to triumph over us, who laugh at our confusion and our weakness, those who call us ‘beta’ or ‘Christcuck’ are saying more than they know. For despite being men and fathers, we are also virgins and brides and it is not with us that they must deal but with the Bridegroom and though He waits long His arm is not shortened. He will stand up for our deliverance. We have not been a people with one language and one king in a long time but that day is coming back, coming with the thundering hooves of the White Horse; the universal and Everlasting Gospel that goes out into all of the earth.

Oldecop- pupil of Dungersheim, early opponent of Luther " he never learnt to live at peace and being disputatious , he was always desirous of coming off victor in differences of opinion and liked to stir up strife . "

Quoting a man’s enemies, saying nothing of substance but merely maligning him is known as ‘the facts’ if you like.

O’Hare, as we say in 2024 ‘says the quiet part out loud’ on page 66 ‘Was this great scholar a prophet ? Whether he was or not matters little , but of one thing we are certain , events justified the estimate formed of him . ‘ It doesn’t matter to him if Luther were a prophet sent by God, he says. The truth or divine origin of Luther’s teaching aren’t questions that interest him. He is merely a partisan.

An actual look at indulgences as they existed in the Middle Ages is beyond the scope of the present work, but a very able and readable one is found here. Suffice it to say, that while the actual official documents never quite promise complete and plenary absolution that was what was understood to be preached. The forgiveness of sins was sold loudly and the fine print stipulated that the purchased product was actually pretty nearly nothing.

Perhaps it would be uncharitable of me to ask if the monseigneur is familiar with ‘the thief on the cross’ but the question forces itself from me. What satisfaction did that rebel and insurrectionist make?

That people paid different amounts for it proves that it wasn’t for sale…when we defend a bad cause we are driven to such lengths.

These are the facts about Luther quoted to convince us that he is no reformer. Unfortunately, due to a lack of proper citations I can’t trace these men or their works. But they don’t really say anything of substance anyway. Any reader of the 95 Theses knows that they are not a treatise and it is hardly a surprise that a faithful son of the church should be propelled to harsh words over her abuses and sins and yet remain loyal. I am beginning to suspect that I am the first person to ever actually read this book. I am told that it abounds in Protestant condemnations of Luther and scandalous revelations about him, but so far the actual facts don’t amount to anything substantially negative. He was not personally to the liking of Romanist priests, as if John Baptist or Christ or any of the prophets was beloved of the religious leaders of their day, but no actual facts are brought against him so far just gossip and innuendo. It seems very much as if a man who wishes to whitewash the church is complaining about a man who wishes to wash the church.

I had gotten the impression somewhere or other that the Gospel set men free from the requirements of the Law(perhaps the entire Epistle to the Church at Rome and also the Epistle to the Galatians?). If we have again a rabble shackled and bound crying out for freedom, then perhaps the yoke that they are bearing is not the light and easy yoke of Christ and His Gospel?

This is the sort of ‘Luther’s own words’ with which O’Hare seeks to pillory him. We are given no idea what topic he was discussing or what the context is. It leads one to wander if O’Hare has actually read the works that he references because he never gives the least discussion about them but only some bare quotation as if he has been spoonfed.

For something that was never bought or sold, a great deal of money changed hands and these transactions, which were definitely not sales, were promoted with all of the zeal, not to say greasiness, which usually attends the sale of a used car. The merits of Christ and the saints were freely given out, in exchange for a fixed donation which went into the Vatican coffers. We know that they weren’t sales because to sell such a thing would be sacrilege and so it can’t have been a sale because the Pope was involved which means that if it was a sale then the See of Peter is in the hands(once again) of prostitutes and thieves which is impossible. Oh, if only this impeccable logic had a weakness somewhere!

How does O’Hare know this? This seems difficult to prove and uncharitable to assume.

Where is this reasoning false? What, other than God ought men to believe implicitly and undoubtedly? As Romans 3 has it, ‘Let God be true but every man a liar’. It should be here pointed out that the first thing with any resemblance to an indulgence is not found before the 6th century, and that it isn’t until the 13th that the church’s ‘treasury of merit’ was first mentioned. So, on this point Luther cannot be charged with disagreeing with the religion of Christ, the Apostles, or the Fathers but only the Scholastic and Medieval theologians. Western Christianity before Thomas Aquinas and the reforms of Gregory VII and Western Christianity afterwards are simply not the same creatures. The relationship between Lutheranism and the older catholicism is analogous to the relationship between the Ante-Nicenes and the party of Athanasius. Where it is different it is an organic development and growth called forth by the world around it. It is against the Scholastic theology and its children, and against the Gregorian reforms that the 16th century Reformers protested so fiercely, not 1500 years of Christianity.

What is this other than to elevate a man, or even more ridiculously an office, to equality with God? As we know from Galatians 2, even Peter himself was not infallible in matters of faith and practice, but ‘played the hypocrite’ and ‘was not straightforward about the truth of the Gospel’.1 Since no stream can rise above its source, how can we ever be certain that the Pope is not doing the same things that the Apostle Peter is documented in Holy Scripture to have done?

The monseigneur complains that some statements are attributed to Luther without sufficient support and in the next sentence assures us absolutely of a counterfactual as if it is beyond dispute. This is not a serious writer. He wishes the veneer of scholarship but in the next breath presents the baldest speculation as indubitable fact. I hardly know what to say.

I reproduce this letter in full as O’Hare tries to use portions of it to accuse Luther of duplicity. Judge for yourself.

What is deceitful about this? It was what Luther openly claimed from beginning to end. Even O’Hare admits this. He makes much of Luther fleeing, as if he had no reason to fear for his life. Luther continued at this point to believe in the Pope, to believe that once he knew the truth of the matter that he would step in and use his power to save the day. Love hopes and believes all things.

This is a bit misleading and inflammatory even for O’Hare. Try these descriptions of the event from the catholic encyclopedia entry for Miltitz and his wikipedia page.

O’Hare throughout depends much on de Wette, one of the fountainheads of ‘destructive Biblical criticism’ and the originator of the Documentary Hypothesis which is essentially that the Pentateuch is a forgery. This, I suppose, is the sympathetic Lutheran source that I was promised?

That about does it for chapter 3. Throughout, Luther’s words convict him as sincerely desirous for the glory of God and the salvation of men’s souls. They convict him as believing God and knowing that in every human heart is error. They convict him as passionate and plain of speech and that’s about it. I could use O’Hare’s words to say worse about him.

Despite O’Hare’s obvious desire to cast aspersions, not just on the reformer but on his parents, he has little bad to say about Luther’s youth. He admits that he was talented and grateful to all who were kind to him. After telling us what a hard and awful man his father was he admits that he became so admired for his thrift and industry that he was made burgomaster and that he was filled with pride over his son’s great talents such that his great pride was when he was able to pay Martin’s tuition rather than depending on public generosity. O’Hare cannot understand why a man such as Luther, with a brilliant career ahead of him in the law, an accomplished musician, and a man with a great enjoyment for the pleasures of life would choose to enter the cloister. He points out the dismay that this brought to his friends and the disappointment of his father. That a man might take his own sin and the judgment of God seriously O’Hare takes as a sort of mental illness simply being incapable of understanding or having sympathy with a more serious and eternally minded nature than his own. O’Hare is desperately convinced that Luther was unfitted for monastic life, but no one at the time seemed to think so. He progressed rapidly and was remarkable among the monks for his learning particularly, and to us unexpectedly, his rapacious desire for the Holy Scriptures. His seriousness and talent so impressed the superiors of his order that he was elevated to the priesthood after only a year. The monseigneur endeavors to make Luther’s fear and reverence seem like the characteristics of a heresiarch but I remain unconvinced as at this description of the first time he said Mass,

Is being stricken with a sense of the mercy and forbearance of God towards sinners a sign of a hardened and obstinate man?

The same sentiment of course occurs throughout the Psalms. Can the Monseigneur bring himself to make the accusations against David that he does against Luther? On the occasion of Luther’s first saying of the Mass his father, formerly painted by O’Hare as a violent and stubborn man of low and common sentiment, is now transfigured by O’Hare into a divine messenger. His anger at Martin’s having given up worldly success for the ministry is seen as utterly righteous, which simply proves that for our author there is no stick which isn’t good enough to beat Luther with. But it isn’t just Luther, anything that surrounds him has to be discredited as even the town of Wittenberg must be the most drunken(I had to look up ‘bibulous’. It’s a good word so I owe some debt to O’Hare.) in all of Germany!

The blade of grass said to the oak, ‘You’re not that tall.’ He was reverent of God and unimpressed by men, and this if you like made him unqualified to be a reformer. His contemporaries recognized genius in him and gave this man the pulpit of the entire city after hastening him into the priesthood, for exactly this purpose as it seems clear. If Luther made a mistake at this point it was in submitting to the pressure of his ecclesiastical superiors, a mistake he amply corrected later.

Chapter 2 really contains little else of interest. It is simply a recapitulation of what previous Romanist historians have said with a bit of invective and a bit of eulogizing of the Roman church thrown in. But honestly, it is mere background material and not much more should be expected. O’Hare throws a little shade but nothing sticks. He throws it inconsistently and with no particular plan. There is very little reference to sources but very little to dispute in this chapter. The monseigneur starts with the assumption that because Luther left the monastery that he was never a true monk and tries to shoehorn facts to fit this narrative, but the feeling of deep contrition and melancholy seems poor evidence of a false vocation. Luther’s superiors evidently felt differently from the rapid way that they promoted him. It’s a bit of a shrug. O’Hare didn’t make much of a case for anything and their isn’t much to refute. Onward to the Reformation!

In a recent conversation with a gentleman by the pseudonym of Lifelong Reader on the subject of Martin Luther he and I agreed that I would read The Facts about Luther written by RT . REV . MONS . PATRICK F. O'HARE , LL.D. the Rector of St. Antony's Church, in Brooklyn around the turn of the last century and that he would look through the 95 Theses and let me know which ones he found unworthy of a Christian man and teacher. My comments on that work are primarily for him1 though I suppose that they might be of some interest to other of my readers and so post them here.

Monseigneur O’Hare describes his book as

It should be noted that ‘the bulk of mankind’ never was in communion with the Church of Rome and from 869 at the Fourth Council of Constantinople it would not even be accurate to say that the bulk of Christians was. As for Luther inaugurating Reformation, while we sometimes say that by way of honor and to notice that it was Luther who led the success of Reformation, even the Roman Church acknowledges that the preceding two centuries were times when the laity and clergy in communion with that church were crying wildly for reform of both ‘head and members’ seen even in papal councils such as Vienne and Constance. In these councils the curia made token gestures to the popular(again a cry of both lay and clergy) cry for reform while condemning the actual reformers, as the Lollards and Hussites, both of which groups within the church while lacking the clarity and force of Luther were in substantial agreement with many of his complaints on matters of both faith and practice. Msgr. O’Hare proceeds,

He would have done better to meditate on the words of Paul,

I mention this not to be argumentative but to point out that none of us naturally love the truth. We are in love with lies. Our problem is not so much that we cannot discern truth as that we are in rebellion against it. That which is pleasant to us is untruth and so to anyone seeking the truth of this matter I ask that you stop and ask for grace to love the truth and to hate error, for it is only then that we might see the truth. The same thing that I ask you to do I am now doing myself.

The question of Luther’s virtues or vices should not occupy the chief place in our study but rather must wait until we have settled the question of the truth or falsehood of his doctrine. A man who is wild and challenges kings and authorities, who threatens divine wrath might be a nutcase or he might be Elijah. As John’s first epistle tells us the matter must be settled by what he confesses, by whether it is the Everlasting Gospel of Jesus Christ which has gone out into all of the earth, the one true ground on which to call a thing ‘catholic’ or universal or whether it is some invention of men.

It is taken as a given by the Prophets and Apostles that any religion which proceeds from humanity is false. In Matthew 15 our Saviour takes this as an admitted principal which can settle the dispute between himself and the Jewish leaders, who boasted of the descent from Abraham and of their unbroken rabbinical tradition in the same way that the followers of Rome do now.

But the question of how this man, Luther, lived is not at all to be overlooked, for we have no interest in merely propositional truth, or that which merely resides in the mind and ‘puffs up’ but we rather look to see whether a man’s doctrine makes him a ‘true’ man or a ‘false’ man. However, we must be prepared to discover that the righteousness of God will not look righteous to us. We recognize that our intellect, our will, and in fact every part of us is tainted by sin such that our judgment should always be suspect. For those who deny or wish to debate this, I simply point out that it is only those parts of us infected by sin which ought to expect redemption. To insist on any purity in any part of man is to deny that part of man the touch of the Great Physician. For my part, I seek to have the whole man made new and so I don’t hesitate to ‘confine all under sin’ that He might have mercy on all.

As my introduction has already gone overlong I wish to move on to what I take to be O’Hare’s thesis:

And so now I wish to state my thesis. O’Hare is correct. Luther was a man of wild passions, a man well suited to uproot and tear down(as the Lord called Jeremiah to do). Luther was not called to gently correct wayward sheep but to bring the proud low, to subdue a rebellious people to obedience to the Gospel. Hence, when we see the fact of the Reformation, when we see men being made passionate about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, being made patient to endure cruel martyrdoms, as history beyond dispute records, we cannot at all attribute this to the wild and intemperate Luther but must seek for a higher source.

O’Hare alternates between painting a Luther who desired only wickedness and yet when he quotes him complaining about the wickedness of the German people he doesn’t see that this contradicts the picture that he is trying to paint.

What sort of man is it who complains that men are irreligious, who complains that their morals are not improving? It is almost as if O’Hare doesn’t know that this is the common complaint of the Hebrew Prophets, that the more prophets the Lord sends and the more they preach the worse the people get, going backwards not forwards as Jeremiah has it.

He complains that Luther is hard on his countrymen and insufficiently patriotic, again as if he doesn’t know that Luther is merely following the Prophets. And truly, O’Hare’s complaints seem more a matter of the pearl-clutching of the seminarian against the coarse man of the people than they do of the genuine complaints of a Minister of the Gospel.

At the end of chapter one what facts about Luther have we learned? He was a man impatient with vice and willing to use a sharp tongue to reprove it. He did not care to court the favor of men with flattering words but intended to strike them with a sense of their sinfulness in order to drive them to Christ, or at least to what he perceived to be Christ. I am told by Lifelong Reader that it abounds in unbiased third party assessments of Luther and Monseigneur O’Hare brags much about his use of protestant assessments of Luther. So far those sources amount to, Reinhold Seeburg- a 19th liberal professor of theology, famous for reducing religion to its social dimensions and downplaying the significance of revelation; Augustine Birrell- a ‘New Radical’ liberal progressive politician in early 20th century Britain and sometime baptist minister; and a gentlemen referenced only as Licentiate Braun who published a screed in Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, on March 30 , 1913 , p . 195 which I have not been able to locate. The part quoted by O’Hare however is not merely anti-Luther but entirely anti-Protestant and Pro-Romanist, yet he is cited to us as an eminent protestant theologian.2 What I chiefly note is that, like O’Hare, Braun takes no note of the truth or falsehood of Luther’s theology or indeed of theology at all but is concerned with the Social Justice aspects of Luther and finds that he prefers these and the economic policies of Rome. These are the sum of the ‘facts about Luther’ found in chapter one. The remainder is devoted to a sort of pulpit eloquence, a rhetorical thunder in which all outside of communion with Rome are bashed as a demon-driven maniacal rabble and then the kindness and charity of Rome is shown by mercifully deciding that we are rather insufferable fools, as in the sample below,

Onward then to chapter 2, where I hope to find some actual facts and possibly even some actual kindness and charity.

We often talk about surprising and unexpected Grace, about the love of God reaching those that we think that it can’t or shouldn’t, but our story today from the end of Matthew 22 begins in a very different but no less surprising way. It begins with surprising sin, inconceivable stupidity, and stubborn rejection of God when it seems most unlikely.

Now, full disclosure, I have never been to a royal banquet. I have never sat in a palace with foie gras on my Walmart t-shirt. I’ve never asked the butler for Grey Poupon. It’s not that I couldn’t or wouldn’t. I just haven’t had the opportunity. If I was invited I think that I would go. I’d go for the food. I could stare and gawk at my betters in my best country bumpkin style.

So, the people in our story declined to celebrate the royal wedding. I read it and wonder, ‘Who turns down free food?’ Was their beef with parties in general or this king in particular? Were they too good for the wine, maybe preferring grape juice, or afraid of their own unworthiness, afraid of making a fool of themselves like I am so often1? Either way it all comes out the same. Whatever else we see or say about this parable, I think that the real meat is in the shocking refusal of the invitation. We imagine ourselves as people who want to be happy and imagine the world, nature, and Nature’s God standing in our way. This parable denies both the credit that we give ourselves and the slander that we cast on God and Creation. Our flattering image of ourselves as lovers of joy and goodness and peace who just can’t achieve our goals must be rejected. Christ paints us as lovers of death and misery. When given the opportunity for something better, we stubbornly cling to our ways and our works.

Lotto winners usually declare bankruptcy within 5 years. They live it up and then find themselves back where they started. Winning the lottery doesn’t really change anything. It’s not so much a new life as a vacation, which is probably why we find it so desirable. We live our lives thinking that there is some amount of money great enough that it would change our lives forever, but this parable tells us that if that sort of gift was really offered to us that we would turn it down. We want transformation but we want the person that we are now to direct and control and if necessary veto the transformation. When the gift that will truly change everything arrives we refuse because it is an earthquake in our lives destroying everything that has come before. But let’s not get ahead of our story. The King is about to go farther than a simple invitation, much farther. And the invited guests are going to go farther than a respectful and apologetic rejection letter, much farther.

When the time is approaching and it begins to seem as if the invited guests aren’t coming another more urgent and emphatic invitation is sent out. The host makes clear that He is providing everything. This isn’t a potluck. Mama doesn’t need to make chicken and dressing. Granny doesn’t need to bring a casserole. The party is definitely not BYOB. Ironically, this is probably the news that finalizes their decision to reject the invitation.

I should point out here that this isn’t a mixed response. There is no indication that any of the invited guests were willing to come. The guests, every man, woman, boy, and girl prefer their work to His party. He says so as baldly as words permit.

That sure escalated fast.2 These people are invited to a party and feel the need to quite literally shoot the messengers. I struggled to see why a message that should be so welcome should provoke such a response. I think that it must be because although this is a very gracious invitation, it is a royal command. The Message is not, ‘You may come to the wedding.’ or ‘You are welcome at the wedding.’ but the imperative ‘Come to the wedding.’ We are offended at the invitation, offended that the host has prepared everything and demands that we bring nothing. Our offerings, our religion and our works are not optional and unnecessary, but rather they are forbidden. All of our contributions are excluded as things tainted and abhominable. This is why we are offended at the gift and the giver.

Christ said that He did not come to bring peace but a sword. He came to divide brother against brother, husband against wife, father against son, that a man’s enemies would be those of his own house. This parable shows that the sharp sword that divides is not separate or different from the Gracious Invitation. The invitation is either cheerfully accepted or it fills us with fury. If we refuse the invitation to go about our own business then we are no less rebellious than if we openly defy the King and murder His servants. The King has determined on grace, has determined to pardon and heal His sworn enemies, but it is not at all a take it or leave it grace which leaves us unchanged.

So, we are offended that the invitation commands us as subjects but we are also offended that it strips us of agency, makes us a passive recipient of unearned goodness. I don’t see myself as a charity case. I see myself as a contributor, as a taxpayer, as an upstanding citizen who shoulders the load. Grace is for the beat up, broke down, and burnt out. Grace is for the losers, the last, the least, and the lost, the welfare queens and the trailer park trash. Certainly not for fine upstanding people like I imagine myself to be.

I want us all to see that those who reject the Gift are appropriately judged. It sounds harsh but to reject the Gift of Jesus Christ is to reject the fundamental truths of human nature, it is total rebellion that extends to every part of a man’s spirit, soul, and body however it looks from our perspective. Why do I say that? Why can’t Christ and His Gospel allow the sleeping dog of our Pride to lie? Accepting the Gift requires lying prone, lying on your back at rock bottom and looking up. To accept the Gift is to confess yourself helpless, unwilling and unable to do what is needed to improve your life, a creature who will never be ‘like God knowing good from evil’ but ‘naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked will I return’. It requires seeing yourself as a lover of death, as homicidal and suicidal. When we speak of being ‘dead in our sins’ we don’t mean dead like Old Yeller or dead like a doornail. We mean dead like Dracula, an infectious, pestilential death.3 Older forms of the Baptismal Service call for the recipient of the baptism to renounce the devil and all of his works. This is very appropriate to baptism and perhaps we are suffering for its loss.

Our only response is to cry out to God. Admit that we need rescue, that we are in a condition of lost desperation and need a Saviour, as much today as we ever have. We ain’t got this. Our plans and our schemes are coming to nothing. We are not improving or becoming more holy or righteous or good, individually or collectively. My worst sins are not behind me but before me, and the need for overwhelming, drastic, reality rewriting grace, for the Creative Word to speak new life into existence in me and for me is more urgent in my home and my life than it has ever been before. And whether you realise it or not, the same is almost certainly true of you. Now is the time to cry out to the Lord.

When our first parents heard the lie, ‘You can be like God,’ surely what this meant to them is that you can be independent. You can be done with neediness and helplessness. You need not receive from the hand of a condescending Lord what you can take by the strength of your own arm. To reject the Gift then, is to declare that you are capable. You are strong, smart, and independent. You have the will and the power to transform yourself into something beyond humanity, beyond your created estate. It is to declare that you are elite, better than the sons of men which inevitably means better than the Son of Man. Hence, the only positions available to us are Recipients of the Gift or Judges of the Gift. Accepting the Gift is renouncing these aspirations and way of life.

But, as Paul makes clear, being an Accepter of the Gift is no less a way of life than its opposite. I don’t mean to deny that it is a one time thing with everlasting validity and power, but we must live in the acceptance of the Gift.

For ancient Israel this way of life meant renouncing their faith in chariots and horses, in military might and the strength of their own arms, which wouldn’t be a bad start for us. It meant renouncing powerful and productive alliances.4 It meant seeing themselves as fatherless, without status or standing, without property or claim on the One on whom we depend. We can never hold a promissory note against the Ancient of Days, never put Him on a repayment schedule. ‘Who has been His counselor? Who has given to Him to then be repaid?’ as Isaiah 40 says. He is good to us when and how He chooses. I’m not sure what it means for us, but this is the way that we need to be thinking and I would like to hear from you all how we, as recipients, ought to live.

Notice that this call is not refused. After the severity of Justice rains down on those who despise God, the full scope of Grace can be expressed. The servants ‘gather together all whom they found’. Like all children we are drawn to a Father who is capable of sternness. We are small and seek a mighty protector, One who is willing and able to do what we can neither will nor do. We are unwilling and probably unable to accept the Lord’s tender affection until He has shown Himself mighty in judgment.

Notice too, that there is no consideration of the works or habits of the guests. Those first invited were called unworthy, but their only unworthiness was their refusal to accept the Gift that was offered. The servants gather ‘all whom they found both bad and good’. You are made for the party. The purpose of your existence is to glorify the Lord and enjoy Him forever and the only way to be unworthy is the stubborn refusal to do so. Christ’s gift of Himself is the one essential thing. As Luther says, this is the article by which the church stands or falls. We have a deeper more real fraternity with another Accepter of the Gift than we do with our natural siblings even when we have nothing else in common.

It always comes back to clothing, to our own contrived righteousness. It shows up in the oddest places and ways in scripture. Friend, how did you come in here wearing your own clothes? For we can’t suppose that this devilish guest was naked. But where did the other guests get their garments? Recall that the servants, ‘gathered together all whom they found’, these people who were pressganged into the wedding, who were driven in like sheep had no opportunity to dress in their finest, had no time to prepare at all. And even if they had we know that this undifferentiated mass called ‘bad and good’ could not be expected to all have the proper attire for the royal juke. Nor could they have put it on after they arrived, for He says, ‘How did you even get in the door?’ The invitation itself is the wedding garment. The presentation of the Gospel, and the call to respond transforms us, whether it is accepted or rejected we don’t leave the way that we came. Christ presents Himself before us in forma pauperis, of no reputation, as He did before Pilate. But if we wash our hands of the matter then we have judged ourselves. The call is, ‘Come to the wedding’. The Father says, ‘Come enjoy the fatted calf with me for my son, your brother, who was dead is alive.’ ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good.’ ‘See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.’ But bring nothing of your own, no righteousness, no casserole, no fine apparel the works were done from the foundation of the world. Accept them making no alteration or addition.

3

In modern language it might be more illuminating to speak not of being ‘dead in your sins’ but undead. We are something like ‘Mumm-Ra the Ever Living’, high on our own supply of the Ancient Spirits of Evil, Pride, Wrath, Envy, and Lust. It is only when we see our own reflection in the Holy Law, the Lion of Judah’s sharp sword, that we see that our apparent life is truly death and crawl back into our sarcophagi.

’

And so, my small and rather artless answer to that attack today, is to cast the 14th and final chapter of the prophet Hosea into verse2. The prophet was not at all exempt from the problems of ordinary life. God called a man who tried and failed to avoid the shipwreck of infidelity and divorce to deliver a message of wrath and suffering and also of forgiveness and renewal that must have seemed like something from the distant past to most of Israel but was light, hope, and true progress to broken, failed people. Having survived all of the darkness and storms of his wild family and career the prophet finds at the end a tranquility which inspires this beautiful hymn. It is perfect praise with the smell of the blood and the fire through which he and Israel are still living but in the prophetic vision have already passed through still clinging to it. As far as the text it is almost solely an arrangement of the NKJ text with three changes. Throughout, the NKJ changes between a plural Israel and a singular in a way that is beyond my understanding. I have rendered all of the Israel references in the plural. Second, the unclear ‘Take words with you’(NKJ but virtually universal) of verse 2, I have rendered as ‘Grab hold of the Word’3. And the third, relates to verse 4 ‘For My anger has turned away from him.’(NKJ) The generally excellent NKJ should have bracketed the ‘from him’ to make it clear that they are an interpolation, intended to refer to Israel. I have merely taken it a step further and made it explicit where God’s anger goes when it turns away from us by rendering it, ‘For My anger has turned from you to Him.’

Any quality in the hymn should be attributed entirely to the strong source material and any defects not to my laziness or indifference but to sheer inability. My one excuse for publishing something so shoddy is that I am quite overwhelmed with the beauty of the original and would like to draw attention to it.

Return After Wandering

Israel, return to the Lord your God,
For you have stumbled because of your iniquity;
Grab hold of the Word.  Return to the Lord. Say to Him,
Take away all iniquity, Receive us graciously,
Our works shall not save us but in you the fatherless find mercy.

Assyria shall not save us,                                                                                                           We will not ride on horses,                                                                                                     But neither will we say anymore to the work of our hands, 'You are our gods.'
Take away all iniquity, Receive us graciously,
Our works shall not save us but in you the fatherless find mercy.

"I will heal their backsliding and love them freely, 
I will be like the dew to Israel;                                                                                               They shall grow like the lily, their beauty shall be like olive trees,
For My anger has turned from you to Him.
Our works shall not save us but in you the fatherless find mercy.

"Ephraim shall say, 'What have I to do anymore with idols?'
I have seen and I have heard Him.  
I am like a green cypress tree; Your fruit is found in Me."
For My anger has turned from you to Him.
Our works shall not save us but in you the fatherless find mercy.

The War on the Family is a good description of something that is really happening, but it is also a term of art, a bit of good marketing even though it is true. Kinda like we say Pro-life to describe the position of being Anti-infanticide, the War on the Family is really at its core a War on Fatherhood. It is the nature of our enemies to attack things that they hate, not directly, but by venerating something adjacent to the hated thing. They didn’t start by directly attacking fatherhood but by elevating women, particularly single mothers who work, not because they love women or motherhood but cynically to compress, constrict fatherhood, to marginalize fatherhood, to suck the air out of the filial space. And then they moved to elevating stepfatherhood and livein-boyfriendhood and random-people in the ‘hood hood and now its a beautiful day in the neighborhood with two gay men adopting little boys to pimp them out. This is known as Progress. They took a thing that is special and unique and that they hated and mixed in a lot of other things, because holiness and purity are anathema to humanity. And so what is needed now to be a father is a gentleness like Mr. Rogers and a fierceness like La Valette.

But the real root question is, why are there so many problems between fathers and their children? Why is the citadel on which the survival of humanity depends vulnerable to attack? Life begins for us with a separation from our mother at birth. The whole story of growing up is a double story. It is the story of growing further from your mother. The cord stretches and stretches and is eventually cut. And we feel the tragedy of this. There are so many sad landmarks, the first time mama goes to the store without baby, the first night apart, the beginning of school etc. In all of this the father is in the background, trying to seem sympathetic and supportive because his story is very different. The father begins as an outsider. He is an interloper in the delivery room. Because we believe that he belongs there he symbolically cuts a cord that has already been cut, older generations sent him to boil water and find towels to AFAIK no practical purpose, but he has no natural function. The kind of care that a baby needs is not natural to a man either. He naturally does a job performing one step and then when it is done moving to the next and not looking back with all of his focus on one thing at a time. Childcare is a matter of a constant low-level attention to multiple issues which are never in any sense finished, even on a very short timescale. Fatherhood then is a thing that has to be built. If it is to exist it must be planned out, with allocation of time, energy, and resources. It takes time, it is very vulnerable in its early stages. It is, in some senses, unnatural and artificial. It may be the thing that most certainly separates us from the beasts and unites us with the Deity.

The father, especially in our society, senses how easy it is to get rid of him. He senses that he is at risk of being merely a sperm donor and if he is wise, he fights back. He fights back by providing. He fights back by building bonds with the children, by opening doors for them. The great weapon of fathers is education, and its removal from the home is his greatest defeat in this war. The mother is always conflicted by growth knowing that the child’s growth is a growth away from her.1 But for the father the child growing is his great hope, that the child will increasingly be a part of the father’s world, will need to know the things that he can teach, will need things that only he can provide. All of progressivism fails because it begins by rejecting fatherhood and patriarchy as a stumbling block when it is in truth the only engine of true progress in this world. This is going to seem like a very odd introduction to our text today, which is from the third chapter of John’s Gospel.(I will point out that this was almost all written before I ever conceived of using this piece for Father’s Day.)

For the thirty years since the birth of Jesus(not His begetting) all of Judea had been in a fever of ‘Messianic Expectation’. Whether the obvious dimension of freedom from Rome or the more nebulous promises of freedom from sin and death there were frequent outbursts of Messianic fervor, whether false Messiahs or less obviously wrong attempts by the Jews to bring God’s promises to pass by their own hands occurred in Judea and especially Galilee almost every year. Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus took place before John the Baptist was thrown into prison, before the religious leaders were set on their course against Him. It was probably within a few months of Jesus beginning His public ministry when only a few signs had been performed. Whether on his own, or as an agent of the leaders of the Jews2, Nicodemus desired to find out the truth about Jesus but felt the need to do so secretly. I think, that Nicodemus and whoever else, if anybody, he represented, believed in stagemanaging the nation from behind the scenes. They didn’t want to ‘give air to narratives’ that were unapproved. They were careful to only promote those beliefs which promoted their own control and vision for Israel. At best they were partisans. At worst they were conspirators, seeking to shape Jesus’s ministry to their own advantage. The things that we all do seem so tawdry and shameful when we hold them up next to Him don’t they?

But anyway, Nicodemus came by night to say what he wasn’t willing to say in public or in the light of day and to hear what he wasn’t willing to be seen listening to. He said that the things that Jesus had done proved that God was with Him. Which is true but I don’t think that Nicodemus believed it. He was saying it trying to butter Jesus up.3 Nicodemus told Jesus that he could see that Jesus came from God and Jesus surprising answer was effectively, ‘No. You don’t know that.’

I have a problem with this text. Actually, I have a lot but let’s start with this. ‘Born again’ is not quite accurate. Now a lot of people have taken issue with the ‘again’ pointing out that the Greek word anothen that John uses properly means ‘from above’ and is in fact used in that sense by John the Baptist towards the end of the chapter.4 But I believe the ‘again’ part of born again is correct.5 My issue is with the ‘born’. This word is ‘gennao’ and while it is often used to describe birth, and Nicodemus takes it in that sense in v.4 birth misses something that I think Jesus intended to be caught. And I think that missing this is part of what left Nicodemus so turned around. Gennao appears a lot of times in scripture in just a few places. It is used over and over in the early chapters of Matthew and Luke for instance.

There it is not usually translated born but begot. And you might be wondering what the difference is or if I am arguing about mere words. There are two reasons that I make the point, and I will give you the first one now. Born refers to the mother primarily and the father only by courtesy. Begotten, as Matthew 1 makes imminently clear refers very much to the father. If we view the New Birth as a solution to a problem6, then the problem is that we were begotten of the wrong father. We are in David’s words, ‘conceived in iniquity and brought forth in sin’, very appropriate for our situation since he probably had his own adultery in mind. We are illegitimate and misbegotten.

But let’s try and see specifically what these words meant to Nicodemus in context. Nicodemus had made an assertion that he didn’t expect to have challenged or have to defend. He asserted that God was with Jesus. Most religious teachers if you tell them that God is with them will smile at the compliment and think what a smart guy you are to notice. Jesus bristled and told Nicodemus that because of the nature of his begetting that he couldn’t perceive the kingdom of God. In other words, he wasn’t qualified to make that statement.

So, Jesus accused Nicodemus of not having the spiritual discernment to say whether or not God was with Jesus and He told him that his beginning was completely wrong to be making determinations like that. I had some hard words for him earlier, and I may have some more before this is through, but I have to say that I don’t think any of us would have done any better confronted with such a statement than Nicodemus did. We have the entire New Testament for a teacher and we’ve been thinking for all of our lives about what Jesus means by being ‘born again’ and while we might or might not choose better words I am not convinced that we understand what Jesus was talking about much better than Nicodemus did on that night.

But Nicodemus wasn’t as dumb as he might seem.7 He certainly knew that the coming of the Messiah had something to do with hearts of stone being replaced with hearts of flesh, as Ezekiel said, had something to do with the New Covenant promised by Jeremiah and he couldn’t have failed to realise that the baptism that John and more recently Jesus had been preaching had something of that character, represented a renovation of Judaism so complete as to be a whole new creation. So, when Jesus points out his inability to perceive the work of God Nicodemus responds by getting defensive. It’s as if he said, ‘You say that only someone whose birth is different from mine can see what God is doing, you say that if I can’t even understand the wind that I have no chance of understanding its Creator and I guess that you are right. But nobody else does either. You aren’t describing a failure of Nicodemus but rather a failure of all humanity. Your requirements exclude everybody.’ Bingo!

Jesus agrees that neither Nicodemus nor any of us have within us the conditions for understanding. Jesus words to Nicodemus, and all of us, are that we don’t understand and can’t understand because our mama is a ho.

The picture that works best for me is the family of the prophet Hosea.

Hosea has a unique way of telling the story both of His people and of humanity in general through His own family. It is unique and powerful but you sort of have to dig through the whole thing to figure out what happened, but the story seems to be that his wife cucked him early on and he didn’t think that two of the kids were his. Sometime when they were small she left and took them with her.

Our culture, all of our connections to the human race are, in this context, maternal. They ought to connect us with Our Father but instead connect us with her boyfriends that she brings in and out of our lives. Similarly, our attempts to connect with the Father, to RETVRN, are doomed to failure. Our Father remembers us from before the divorce but we were too small to remember Him. His memory is mixed up with the random dudes that mom has been bringing home ever since. But there is hope. But the hope for the little girl ‘No Mercy’ and her tiny brother ‘Not my Son’ is plain. Before all of the ho’ing there was a different baby boy born. His name was Jezreel. He was Hosea’s Only Begotten Son.

Hosea’s story isn’t the easiest to make out, the interweaving of family details and national and messianic prophecy is unique to him in I think the entire corpus of literature and a bit confusing and I honestly can’t find any verses that tell Jezreel’s story plainly. Lo-Ammi and Lo-Ruhamah are subbed in and out for the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah in a way that I don’t understand precisely. But it seems clear that this older brother was key to reuniting the two estranged siblings with their father. But before this becomes even more confusing, let’s head back to the main point.

Jesus only pointed out Nicodemus’ failure and inability, our utter helplessness, to understand or even perceive spiritual realities so that we will turn to Him and get what we need. He only kills and damns so that He can raise and justify. It is our fundamental nature to fail and fall short. It is His nature to be full of grace and truth placed before us as a feast. What is required of us is simply impossible as Nicodemus realised. We are born of flesh. We cannot at all ascend to Heaven cannot take a single step in that direction. What is required is a way to the Father, of whom we only have blurry and confused memories from before the dark part of our lives began, and this is the thrust of the famous monogenes, the ‘only begotten’. There is an older brother who knows where to find the old man, who can reconnect us with Him. Mom, that is the whole world around both within and around us, tells us that Dad is a crazy old man, that He hates us because we aren’t His, that He is frothing with righteous, depending on who you ask self-righteous, rage. And so, when we put all of John 3 together, it becomes clear that Jesus doesn’t make a point of calling Himself ‘only begotten’ to deal with some obscure theological point or to satisfy our curiosity about the nature and relations of the Trinity, but to make it clear that He is our only source of knowledge about the real nature of God. He is the only one who is begotten from above, the only one who has ascended to Heaven such that He can be a guide. Just as His begetting and His birth are two seperate events, so we can be rebegotten. The initial separation of father and child that seems a weakness and allows for the world’s attacks, is actually the keystone of the whole plan. It is not unnatural at all for father’s and children to become connected later in life. It is not a cause for despair. When we were younger we were not ready to receive the gifts that our Father had for us. But He has put in the work and the time is coming close and we are growing.

Closing note: I am aware of the artistic and literary lack of this particular piece but it seemed the right time to get these thoughts to you. There are parts of this message that are clumsy and artless and I would appreciate any comments to make the pieces fit together right or any thoughts on which parts work or need work. I would also like to express my indebtedness to the thoughts of Alexander Maclaren on this passage, found here: https://ccel.org/ccel/maclaren/john1/john1.ii.xix.html

Happy Father’s Day!