Tag Archives: Matthew

Matthew: “Jesus is the Light!” Jesus: “You are the light!” (5th Sunday after the Epiphany, 2/8/2026)

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Readings

Last week we heard the prophet Micah: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” This week’s reading from Isaiah is working the same question. We might hear it as fleshing out Micah’s answer:

If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

Doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly with God: both about responding to specific needs and reknitting the torn fabric of our culture, recovering our common humanity.

And, like last week’s psalm (Psalm 15), Psalm 112 offers a portrait of those who do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God. But it does something more, and, heading towards today’s Gospel, it’s worth noticing. So please turn to pp.754-755 of the BCP. Both psalms are acrostic, each line ordered—after the initial “Hallelujah”—by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, running from A to Z, as it were.

Back in Genesis we hear “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (1:26); we might hear these two psalms as a meditation on how that plays out.

The divine-human relation is certainly not symmetrical. Both psalms begin with “Hallelujah!” (Not first “Praise Yah” and then “Praise Us.”) The first psalm ends with “the fear of the Lord;” the second begins by declaring “happy” (there’s that word again that we met in last week’s Beatitudes) “they who fear the Lord.”

What is striking is the celebration of image/likeness, in the identical vocabulary (in Hebrew) in vv.3-4:

111:3b and his righteousness endures forever.
112:3b and their righteousness will last forever.

111:4b the Lord is gracious and full of compassion.
112:4b the righteous are merciful and full of compassion.

The celebration continues, taking the differences of scale into account. The Lord is generous (vv.5a, 6b, 9a), as are the righteous (vv.5a, 9a).

Besides the Creator/creature difference, perhaps the most obvious difference is that the Lord is unopposed; the idols of the nations are not worth mentioning. The righteous, on the other hand, live in the midst of the wicked. And here’s where the psalm notices a corollary to the fear of the Lord. The righteous fear the Lord. So they do not fear evil rumors (v.7), they do not “shrink” (v.8, same Hebrew word). A proper fear/reverence of God puts others who demand our fear into perspective.

Today’s Gospel: the middle section of Matthew 5. Last week we heard the first section, the Beatitudes, another fleshing out of Micah’s “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” The third section, that series of “you have heard…but I say to you,” gets preempted this year by Lent.

So what’s in this middle section?

First, the hearers as salt and light. Salt is an open-ended metaphor, inviting us to meditate on it, and see where that meditation leads. Light, on the other hand, is an image Matthew works with repeatedly. Probably the most important connection would be in Matthew 4, citing Isaiah: “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned” (4:16). That would be Jesus. Then in today’s reading: “You are the light of the world.”

It’s the same move made in that Isaiah text that begins “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me” (61:1) that Jesus reads in the synagogue in Nazareth. By v.3 the text is talking about those whom the speaker has touched:

They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the LORD, to display his glory.
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations. (Isa 61:3b-4)

That, as you probably recognize, is the same project our first reading from Isaiah 58 was describing. Parenthetically, it’s easy to focus on Jesus as the light of the world, the generous God of Ps 111, and postpone “you are the light of the world” and Ps 112. In the first we’re the beneficiaries; in the second we’re also the agents. But it’s a package deal.

The Beatitudes: an implicit description of both Jesus as light and Jesus’ followers as light.

The second part of today’s Gospel is the lead-in to the “you have heard…but I say to you” section. Whatever Jesus is doing there, it’s fulfilling, not abolishing the law and the prophets. Since Lent is preempting hearing vv.21-48 this year, a couple general comments:

First, throughout the section we might more usefully translate “you have heard…and I say to you.” Jesus is fulfilling, not abolishing.

Second, Jesus’ words are addressed to us more as a parish than as individuals who happen to be in a parish. So the question they’re repeatedly asking: How do we live together in ways that support hearing and responding to these words?

Third, Jesus ends the section with “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s not about our being sinless. Recall the Beatitude “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Jesus recognizes that we’ll always need mercy. And later in the Gospel: “Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times’” (18:21-22). What’s the point, then? It’s a replay of Ps 111-112’s insight: imitate this generous God. And we might recall Vince Lombardi: “Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

We need, Jesus tells us, to up our game; this third section (vv. 21-48) provides examples.

Two more things and I’ll close. Paul’s contrast between God’s wisdom and the wisdom of this age maps in interesting ways on Jesus’ words. The wisdom of this age regards the Beatitudes as folly. Ditto Ps 112. This world’s wisdom: happiness consists in imitating the carnivores, the more powerful and brutal the better. That can generate a lot of fear, so Ps 112’s implicit call to nurture our fear/reverence of God as a sort of vaccination remains relevant.

Second, there’s important tension between this week’s “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” and last week’s “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (5:11). It’s not that the disciples’ different actions are eliciting different responses; it’s that they have little control over the response they’ll receive—as Jesus had little control. His actions were celebrated by the crowds pretty much until Holy Week. John Howard Yoder nails it: “The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship between cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.”[1]

How to pull this together? I think Matthew would be happy for us to return to Ps 112:

Hallelujah!
Happy are they who fear the Lord
and have great delight in his commandments!

[1] Cited in Hauerwas, Matthew, p.72.

Fear and Light (3rd Sunday after the Epiphany, 1/25/2026)

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Readings

Today’s readings: such a mixed bag! The Gospel continues Epiphany themes—more on that later. The reading from Isaiah: presumably selected because Matthew quotes from it. Psalm 27: perhaps because it’s ‘light’ (“The Lord is my light”) echoes the light in Isaiah and Matthew. 1st Corinthians: well, this is when the lectionary wants us reading 1st Corinthians. Nevertheless, because all the texts are talking about the same God and the same humans, there are some interesting connections.

Today’s psalm: besides the light image, an exploration of what to do with fear. The psalmist celebrates God’s deliverance in the past, but there are still enemies out there. Verse 10: “Hearken to my voice, O Lord, when I call; / have mercy on me and answer me.” Then there’s the psalm’s last verse, omitted by the lectionary: “O tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; / be strong, and he shall comfort your heart; / wait patiently for the Lord.” The Lord’s timing only sometimes matches our preferred timing, so patience is necessary. What to do with fear? Acknowledge it, but don’t give it the steering wheel. God has been faithful in the past; God will prove faithful in the future; we can bring even our fear before God. Recall the saying attributed to Winston Churchill: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Speaking of fear, our Gospel begins with “When Jesus heard that John had been arrested.” Matthew doesn’t mention it, but John the Evangelist tells us that there was a period in which John the Baptist and Jesus were baptizing in the same region (Jn 3:22-24). You never know how narrow or broad these sweeps are going to be, so Jesus, prudently, leaves Herod’s jurisdiction. Galilee is not safe, but safer.

Matthew then pairs Jesus’ move from Nazareth to Capernaum with a citation from Isaiah. Why? Well, probably for at least three reasons.

First, one of Matthew’s recurrent themes (one of our Epiphany themes) is that this Jewish Messiah is good news for the Gentiles. That’s important to the mixed Jewish/Gentile congregations for whom he’s writing. So the phrase “Galilee of the nations” in Isaiah is important.

Second, Matthew, like John, likes that light image. John the Evangelist has Jesus saying “I am the light of the world” (8:12); the quote from Isaiah is Matthew’s equivalent. It’s also a setup for what we’ll hear in the next chapter, toward the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world” (Mat 5:14). Back in the first chapter the angel said to Joseph “he will save his people from their sins” (1:21); that’s about empowerment.

(Let’s stay with that for a moment. Matthew doesn’t waste time between “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light” (4:16) and “You are the light of the world” (5:14). It’s the same move made in Isa 61:1ff which lies behind the first three beatitudes in Matt 5:3-5, from “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me” (61:1) to “to provide for those who mourn in Zion…  They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations” (61:3-4; italics mine). Easy to focus on the benefits of salvation, but without an equal focus on being empowered and sent (John 20:21), we miss the point.)

Third, in the minds of some, Jesus’ association with Galilee counted against him being the Messiah. From John’s Gospel: “Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he?” (7:41). And here, I think, Matthew is relying not only on the text he quotes, but on the continuation of the text. The reason for the light and joy Isaiah describes: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (9:6). Galilee is precisely where we should expect the Messiah’s presence to be felt. Matthew sees the situation Isaiah faced prefiguring the situation in Jesus’ time, and builds on it!

Moving on, I think it’s helpful to have Handel’s “For unto us a child is born” ringing in our ears as we read the calling of the disciples, because it gives a sense of the authority of the one doing the calling. One commentator (Boring) sees the story as discipleship stripped down to its essentials. Why are we disciples? Jesus called us.

Circling back to today’s psalm and the beginning of the Gospel text (“Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested”) notice what Matthew leaves implicit. With the combination of Roman occupation and compliant local elites, no occupation is safe, but fishing is usually safer than most. Jesus calls them to leave that, and today’s gradual hymn reminded us of the consequences (“Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless in Patmos died. Peter, who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified” [The Hymnal 1982¸ 661].) “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

After the other readings, the 1st Corinthians reading is almost comic relief. Jesus, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” has called us, and here we are, driven by our fears to seek status through one-upmanship. “’I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’” Almost comic relief, because whatever Corinth needs, it isn’t more darkness, and Jesus really needs those folk to be light.

So perhaps our lessons suggest an additional piece of advice to “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” That would be: “Going through hell doesn’t cancel the need to repent.” Matthew summarized Jesus’ message in today’s reading: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” It’s easy to postpone repentance until we’ve—say—gotten rid of the Roman occupation. But that simply guarantees that if we get power, we’ll use it as destructively as the Romans did.

“The Lord is my light.” Let us, with patience, allow that light to continue to do its work within and among us, the work that we know needs doing, the work about which we’re clueless. And we can do so with confidence, for the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace has promised to be with us always.

The Day is Near (!) (?) First Sunday of Advent, 11/30/2025

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Readings

Somewhat earlier in Matthew we hear Jesus saying this:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (13:44-46).

The vision of God’s kingdom in our first reading is like that treasure, that pearl. The nations beating swords into plowshares, devoting all that expertise, all those resources, into human flourishing. That, says Isaiah, is God’s future for the nations. The last verse describes it as Israel’s charge in the present: “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!” And perhaps Israel walking in that light will make it easier to get the nations walking in that light.

This theme of the nations doing that, you need to do this organizes Paul’s exhortations in our second reading. He is writing, recall, to the Christians living in the capital of the empire. The reveling and debauchery he alludes to may be issues among the Christians; they’re standard for Rome’s elites. That, says Paul, is the night; the day’s “near,” so “let us live honorably as in the day.” It’s still night; we live as in the day.

What’s at stake in these two readings? Well, catch Isaiah’s vision or Paul’s vision of God’s coming kingdom and the political differences that can be so important to us pale in comparison. Some of you may have seen Ken Burns’ 12-hour documentary The American Revolution that aired a couple weeks ago. One of its striking themes was the degree to which the revolution was a civil war, with rampant inhumanity on both sides. That represented a massive failure in Christian formation. Disagreements are inevitable; violence may be inevitable. Keeping God’s coming kingdom in mind should mean not keeping a supply of tar and feathers readily available.

When is God’s kingdom coming? Our texts offer two answers. Jesus in our Gospel reading gives one: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Only the Father knows. (Parenthetically, that “nor the Son” was disconcerting enough that while Matthew took this verse over from Mark, Luke simply omits it!) So judging simply from the titles, there are a good number of books not worth opening, web links not worth the click.

But twenty-one centuries after these words do we simply say “Amen!”? Paul’s “the night is far gone, the day is near:” “Amen?” Well, yes. Peter, already addressing the issue, writes “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2Pe 3:8). Whether that resolves the issue is a judgment call. I think not, so my wondering goes in a variety of directions. Clearly God has hit the pause button. There’s God’s answer to Job (chapters 38-41): not simply that God’s ways are several orders of magnitude above our understanding, but that we’re not God’s only concern. God spends the last two chapters celebrating Behemoth (“which I made just as I made you”) and Leviathan (“When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; / at the crashing they are beside themselves.”). We humans are often making a mess of it; the rest of creation, from the hummingbirds to the great whales, are giving exquisite full-throated glory to God.

Then there’s the time involved in creating the splendor and beauty preserved in our national parks. Yosemite Valley: the time to form those massive blocks of granite, the time for the glaciers to do their thing. So we get the majesty of Half Dome. The Grand Canyon: God introduces what will become the Colorado River: let’s see what that looks like in five or six million years. God is happy to work with long stretches of time.

Then there’s the time involved in exploring the potential of this creature made “a little lower than God” (Ps 8:5). It takes centuries to develop the musical tradition in which a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Copeland can appear. It takes centuries to develop the scientific traditions that make possible the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Literally breath-taking what we can do together in our best moments.

There is, as Scripture and the daily headlines remind us, more than enough cruelty and suffering to have us crying “Come, Lord Jesus.” Job and these other reflections don’t lessen that impulse, but do make me grateful that I’m not the one making the decision on timing.

So, “But about that day and hour no one knows” is one answer to the question of timing. But then there’s Jesus’ promise at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (28:20), which somewhat relativizes the question of when Jesus returns. That, coupled with the exhortations in Isaiah and Paul to live God’s future now, raises the question of how much of that future might contaminate the present.

So, for example, Isaiah’s vision: only for the future? Second and third century Christians argue that it’s being realized now, evidence that Jesus is the promised Messiah. Here’s Justin, writing around 160:

“For, we Christians, who have gained a knowledge of the true worship of God from the Law and from the word which went forth from Jerusalem by way of the Apostles of Jesus, have run for protection to the God of Jacob and the God of Israel. And we who delighted in war, in the slaughter of one another, and in every other kind of iniquity have in every part of the world converted our weapons of war into implements of peace—our swords into ploughshares, our spears into farmers’ tools—and we cultivate piety, justice, brotherly charity, faith, and hope, which we derive from the Father through the Crucified Savior” (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 110.2-3).

How much of God’s future might contaminate our present? We don’t know. The invitation of Advent—of the entire Church Year, for that matter—let’s find out.