A few years ago I was talking with someone who knows a lot more about Christian ministry than I. Such folk are not hard to find, but this mentor is especially sagacious, and I relish his insights. We were lamenting the tendency of one celebrated and wildly successful (if numbers, popularity and resources count as success) Christian group to focus almost exclusively on the fashionable and the well heeled. My friend noted that Jesus practiced the exact opposite. For proof he cited that incident in the region of Gadara on the far side of the lake. You will remember that the case involved madmen, demons and pigs. Decorous it was not.
I thought back to that conversation as I spent a little time in Matthew 8 and 9 yesterday.
The Sermon on the Mount stretches across the whole of Matthew 5-7, preceded by the Temptation in Chapter 4 and the Baptism in Chapter 3. Working our way back to Chapter 2 we are already at the Birth Narrative. So effectively the beginning of Jesus’ ministry proper, at least after that stunning inaugural sermon, commences at Matthew 8.
How then does He begin?
What emphases does He foreshadow?
Is there an intentional (could Jesus ever be unintentional?) pattern here meant as a model for us?
Those initial signals constitute a kind of gauntlet thrown down. He begins by cleansing a leper. Then He heals a Centurion’s servant from a distance after offering to enter the man’s home. While that Centurion had gained some favor with the Jews he was still a Gentile and an occupier. Jesus extols the Gentile’s faith noting that it was especially praiseworthy compared to the faith of Israel. This from the Jewish Messiah! Impolitic that. Not at all what was expected. At the beginning of Chapter 9 Jesus calls the author of the First Gospel, Matthew himself, to become a member of the Twelve. He thus renders permanent His association with the despised for the balance of His biological Life. His was not a perfunctory ministry to the outcast. He actually invited a tax-collector to live with Him and become His permanent envoy.
Can we see a pattern yet?
He appears to actually favor the Low and the Loathed.
Do you think these memoirs were contrived?
Impossible!!!
If these accounts were spun from fancy they would have been crafted in a far different way.
The agenda of Jesus of Nazareth did not originate in the First Century.
The language of Jesus of Nazareth was not originally spoken on this planet.
And that was just the way He started out.
Outreach to fallen women, Samaritans and the Zaccheus-like wretches of the earth follow in their turn.
Chesterton said we ought to sing “Glory to God in the Lowest” when we hail the coming of this Christ.
He seemed always to specialize in the unfashionable and the counterintuitive.
In Chapter 8 we learn that Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Mark informs us that about the same time the paralytic was lowered from a roof rudely peeled off someone’s home. That house was likely Peter’s. Would it be amiss to imagine that Simon Peter may have been among that vast number of the married and the male who secretly prefer a healthy roof to a healthy mother-in-law? The very presence of Jesus seemed always to precipitate the unexpected. And often the uninvited. That’s one reason we’re sure the Gospel accounts were not made up. Men don’t make up that which they cannot imagine. The life and teaching of Jesus would have settled no First Century controversy in a hoped for direction. He vindicated no cherished position. He enfranchised no school of thought.
The message He brought, the model He showed pleased neither the Scribes nor the Pharisees. Not the Herodian or the Sadduccee, neither the Essene nor the Zealot would have been attracted to His teaching. Their prior convictions and commitments ruled out such a possibility. Only an Anna here or a Simeon there would have been pleased, and those two rare and worthy ones were in heaven well before He approached young manhood.
No, the thing cannot have been contrived.
“Cui bono?” the ancients sometimes asked. For whose good? Who would have profited from the doctrine and actions of this Jesus?
Nobody.
No one but the hopeless sinner.
None but the Sovereign God.
