With Matthew and the Master: And Off to Work

January 31, 1993

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Scripture: Matthew 4:12-23

Less than 15 minutes after beginning work on this sermon, I knew I had bitten off more than I could chew. Too much material here, an absolute surfeit of preaching themes. The Bible is full of passages like that, of course, and Matthew, I think, has more than his share of them.

For 2 weeks now, we’ve been marching, or maybe stumbling along under the banner “With Matthew and the Master”, following, with reasonable fidelity, the lectionary readings for January. Chapters 3 and 4 of Matthew are his version of the opening events of Jesus’ adult career.

There was the baptism, the formal beginning, Jesus’ commitment to His call, and God’s public declaration of His identity and mission. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

On the heels of that, immediately, comes that 40 days in the Wilderness testing, as Jesus works through the implications of the call, wrestling vigorously with temptations to dilute the fullness of His commission.

And now it’s OFF TO WORK. In Methodist parlance, consultation has occurred, the appointment has been fixed, the assignment had been accepted, and moving day has arrived. He’s on His way. Matthew tells us picturesquely that sustained by ministering angels, after the harrowing experience of temptation, He goes back to Galilee, back home, and the days of public ministries begin.

Now, here’s where it gets crowded.... Too much material to choose from. OUT OF THIS ONE PASSAGE, this one reading of 11 verses, look at the possibilities--- We could explore the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist--- John has just gotten himself arrested when Jesus starts.... We could explore the relationship between Jesus and His Old Testament heritage--- that’s in there...very important for Matthew.

We could explore His going first to Galilee of the Gentiles---from the beginning His ministry was to NON-Jews, as well as to the household of Israel, a universal theme, an Epiphany theme...over and over Matthew pushes that. We could explore the charisma with which Jesus attracted those first 4 disciples, those fishermen he recruited to join His cause. Immediately, they left their nets and followed Him, Matthew says. What was it about Him that exuded that powerful appeal and gained that instantaneous response?

This passage even gives us a synopsis of His early success, describing the effect His preaching and healing had as He moved around Galilee and the news about Him spread. We could explore that.

SO MUCH MATERIAL. AND THAT’S NOT ALL. That’s only a sampling. A preacher could put his bucket down just in this one, limited spot, and draw up enough fresh water, enough fresh nutrients to keep him going for months.

I used to wonder how I’d ever be able to come up with enough material to keep preaching week after week, Sunday after Sunday...and now I almost weep over what has to be left out. Talk about an inexhaustible resource....

George Buttrich used to say to his young theological students, “The Bible is wonderful Book. Every preacher ought to have a copy of it.”

AND HE’S RIGHT. If you believe in the priesthood of all believers, you can even expand

on it. It’s loaded with good stuff. But this morning I pick, not quite arbitrarily, but out of a host of potential rich themes that some day I hope to get to, ONE FACET OF JESUS’ EARLY MINISTRY, one KEY component, one that captured the imagination of Matthew, and that he wanted more than anything for his readers to know about.

It’s the preaching of Jesus, as he records it here, the burden of the Master’s message. He only gives us a summary, in fact, only a one sentence summary, but here in capsule form is the proclamation of God’s holy Messenger, the Word of God from the Son of God, that heralds the dawn of human redemption. Matthew says it this way, “From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has drawn near.’” Wouldn’t you like to have been there?

With these 9 brief words, the divine rescue is inaugurated.

The other night at Disciple Bible Study, we got into a discussion about the historical reliability of the Gospel Record with respect to the actual words of Jesus. Some Bibles print them in red, you know, the words of Jesus, which at least tells us something about the publisher but hardly guarantees authenticity.

Do we have a true record, or a pretty close one? When we read the accounts the Gospel writers have left us, how do we know we’re not reading simply their faulty remembrance, or, even worse, the product of their fertile imagination? Are we able when we read the Gospels to get beyond the Gospel writers to the Central figure Himself? The question is, DO WE HAVE A RELIABLE PORTRAIT OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS?

Well, I think we have to be honest enough to say that Jesus comes to us in the Gospels

through a filter, and it is the filter of the faith of the early Church. The Gospels are FAITH documents. That helps us understand them. They were written, not by professional historians, programmed by training for non-biased, objective reporting. They never claim that.

They were written by believers, in every case, committed disciples of the Lord, people who were certain down in their very bones that God had done something BIG, unprecedented, unique in this Carpenter man.

Emil Brunner has said that not one sentence of the New Testament was written, not one word, not one syllable apart from the conviction, ardently held, that the One about whom these things were being said had conquered death and was alive forevermore, as Kings of kings and Lord of lords. His glory is not being proven in the Gospel accounts, it’s being testified to.

The Gospels are faith documents. But, YES, I would say emphatically YES, they contain

accurate historical information. A point of view doesn’t keep you from seeing and remembering. To say the Gospel writers selected the material they included doesn’t make what they included erroneous. They were doing exactly what preachers do every Sunday, only doing it better.

They wrote from a point of view because they were preachers, evangelists, people with an experience and a mission. Something had happened to them, and they had to tell about it. Jesus had made an indelible impact on their lives. What He did, and some of His literal words were so memorable, so vivid, so striking, so searing they could never forget them. It comes through. It still does.

Can you forget that a story about the boy coming home from the pig pen? Or the line about a camel passing through the eye of a needle? Or the statement that we should forgive 70 times 7?

Those images are so sharp you can’t erase them. The filter gets pretty thin about that time. And here’s one that just “feels” untampered with. There is about it the unmistakable whiff of authenticity... What’s more, every one of the Synoptic Gospel writers, each from his own perspective, operating independently, and reflecting the consensus of the early Church (pretty good corroboration), testifies that Jesus kicked off His ministry proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. This is how He began, say they all in unison.

His word from God to the people.... Matthew has it, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” What does it mean? What did it mean to those first hearers, his contemporaries in Galilee? How did they hear it? And more significantly, more to the point, what does this cryptic message, this ancient proclamation mean to us?

Matthew calls it the “good news” of the kingdom. What’s it all about?

Doesn’t sound all that much like good news, does it? Any sentence that starts off REPENT doesn’t sound like good news at all. And when John the Baptist said it, the way he said it, you can pretty well figure it didn’t carry implications of blessed deliverance.

But on Jesus’ lips a new connotation emerges. Good news, Matthew says Jesus says... about the blessedness, the overflowing fulfillment, the rapturous ecstasy, the deep-down abiding JOY of allowing God’s perfect will to have its unimpeded way in your life.

If somebody who could deliver came offering that, would your ears perk up? Let’s examine it a little more closely, especially the words KINGDOM and REPENT.

Kingdom is a great New Testament word. It’s even an Old Testament word, though it’s used sparingly there, and never with the full implications that it carries in the Gospels.

The Greek word is “basileus”. You don’t have to remember that, but you might want to remember that the root meaning of it has to do with rule or sovereignty. Jesus’ hearers would have known that.

When the Gospel writers speak of the Kingdom of God, or as Matthew prefers to say, the Kingdom of heaven, they’re not speaking about a place at all, THEY’RE SPEAKING ABOUT A RELATIONSHIP.... THE RULE, the control, the oversight, the reign of God over a life, or over a situation.

By the way, that’s how you can tell when you’re reading Matthew instead of Mark or Luke. If somebody wants to quiz you and they read a passage and ask you where it comes from, and it contains something about the Kingdom of God, you know at once it’s not Matthew. He always says Kingdom of HEAVEN instead.

He was a good Jew, remember, Jewish Christian, a good, devout Old Testament Jewish Christian, who out of that heritage resisted saying the holy name of God out loud. It was too sacred. Instead, he used a euphemism.... the Kingdom of...HIM, you know, the One in heaven...up there.

But the phrases are identical---Kingdom of God, Kingdom of heaven...Both have to do not with a place, not with a location, not with geography at all. You can’t find them on a map.

They have to do with God’s rightful Sovereignty, God’s legitimate authority, in the life of a believer. When that happens, blessedness and joy ensure. The Kingdom is present wherever the rule of God is acknowledged and practiced. The Kingdom, then, is not something we discover, or go to...it’s certainly not something we build.

There was a time in the Church when it was very popular to talk about rolling up our sleeves and going out to build the Kingdom of God. I remember youth speakers in my youth---a hundred years ago, or whenever it was---preaching sermons on that theme. Some of them were stirring. The implication was that it was OUR kingdom, and that if we could just somehow expend enough energy, and enroll enough volunteers, that we could by our efforts establish the reign of God in our time. We could produce the Kingdom of heaven.

The Bible doesn’t fall for that naivete. Jesus knew better than that, and so did Matthew. The kingdom is not ours at all. The kingdom is God’s ALWAYS!

But here’s the good news. God’s sovereign blessed rule is a GIFT. It’s a relationship God bestows. We must appropriate it, of course, we must claim it...we’re coming to that...but we don’t start the process, and we can’t make it happen. God’s claim to rule and our acceptance of it together constitute the Kingdom, but the initiative is always God’s. It’s something bestowed, something freely bestowed...just because God’s that way, I guess. As Jesus says at another point in Matthew, “It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Imagine! Until you grasp that simple, happy truth, your religious life will continue to be a chore.

Now, that’s not all. This kingdom business is big stuff. In the New Testament sense, the kingdom is not only a gift, it’s the sum of all gifts. It’s...the superlative, the ultimate, the consummation, the gathering up into one blessed experience of the sum total of blessing. I don’t have the words to express it. But that’s all right, because not even Jesus did completely. That’s why He resorted to poetry, and to parables to say what mere prose words don’t have the power to say. He told stories about the Kingdom, not to define, but to illuminate, to express various aspects of the greatness and the glory of Kingdom life.

Matthew records many of them. What is the Kingdom like? What is the joy of having God come first in your life? Well, kind of like finding a pearl so enormous and so precious that any sacrifice you had to make would be worth it in order to get it... like finding a treasure in a field so valuable that you’d sell everything you had in order to buy that field. That’s what being in the kingdom is worth.

Its inclusiveness is like a huge net thrown into the sea which pulls in fish of every kind. NOT ANYBODY NEED BE LEFT OUT. Think of it. The generosity pervasive in the kingdom, the generosity of the King is like a vineyard owner who pays a full day’s wage to every laborer, no matter how long he works. He doesn’t do it because he’s just; HE DOES IT BECAUSE HE’S SPONTANEOUSLY LAVISH. Think of THAT.

The kingdom is like a sumptuous banquet the King throws and invites everybody in the

neighborhood.... Heck, everybody in the county to come in and pig out. We’re talking extravagance!

Now all these stories, all these parables are similes, of course. They’re not definitions of the reign of God...they’re not explanations. They’re windows of illumination that opened up to Jesus’ hearers and to us, a glimpse of the radiance, the warmth, the value, the excellence, the infinite preciousness of turning over the control of your life into the hands of its rightful King. This is what you were made for. You can’t find the Kingdom; you can’t storm it; you can’t build it...BUT YOU CAN ENTER IT, when you surrender to the King’s rule, and when you do, all these other things will be added unto you. It’s the best thing that can ever happen to you.

Now there’s one more thing about the Kingdom. O.K., there are 2. Actually, there are 3, but the third is really a summary. I promise, Cub Scout’s honor, we’ll move quickly.

Early on, the members of the Church made a discovery...a BIG discovery. They realized very quickly that the Kingdom, the fulfilling, satisfying, blessed rule of God was intimately tied up with the One who came as its herald. They realized very quickly that the message of the Messenger and the Messenger Himself were indissolubly linked. In fact, they were ONE. Jesus they realized, was the embodiment of the Kingdom...God’s perfect rule in a life.

Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven HAS COME NEAR. Of course, they said. NOW we see it.

The Kingdom has broken in upon us. We see the manifestation of it in the One who proclaims it....in His preaching and teaching—He speaks words of abiding truth, in His healing, in His unquenchable compassion.....

We see the effects of it in the turnaround taking place in people’s lives, in husbands who have stopped running around and drinking and now are devoted family men again... in wives, who have stopped nagging and browbeating and now are sharing their blessings with the less fortunate...

We see it in the renewed step of people who were formerly exhausted, and in the twinkle in the eye of those who were formerly without hope. The Church said, We know how it happened. It happened because Jesus of Nazareth came among us. In Him the Kingdom, the perfect rule of God broke into the common life.

The full realization of God’s reign is still out there, still to be experienced in its entirety, but it has begun. No wonder Matthew wrote with heat and passion. This is NEWS.

The Kingdom has come and is coming... It is present and it is future... It is invisible and it is visible...like the leaven in the loaf. It is from heaven, and it operates on earth. In Jesus of Nazareth the Kingdom is inaugurated. The inaugural banquet is spread.....

REPENT! Oh, yes.... That word! We finally come to it.

On the lips of John the Baptist it was a threat. On the lips of Jesus it’s an invitation. That’s the good news. John the Baptist called people to repent in order to get ready for the Kingdom. Jesus called people to repent in response to the Kingdom. That’s the difference. Turn your life GODWARD. Open it, and let the Son shine in.

For you see, when you know the King... when you know you’re loved... when you know the One who made the world, made it for you, and loved it enough to give His Son for you, and paid the price for you to know the blessedness of His companionship, the joy of His liberating rule...what can you do, if you have any sense at all, but turn to Him...repent, in loving surrender.

I read a story recently.

Every year a 5th grade teacher conducts what she calls a “Scholastic Olympics”. Each child is asked to pick one sentence, name the author, and the source of the sentence, and then explain why that is their pick for the greatest sentence ever written.

You can probably guess what some of the sentences are that have been picked through

the years...4 score and 7 years ago.... All men are created equal... To be or not to be... When in the course of human events.... It was the worst of times, it was the best of times....

One year, there were 14 entries for the same Biblical verse, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”, probably because the teacher announced that verse as her pick when she gave the assignment.

Last year, though, the sentence which won the school’s Scholastic Olympics wasn’t written by a famous author at all. In fact, it was written by an 11 year old girl’s new stepfather. It didn’t come out of a book or a magazine; it didn’t come out of a published document at all. Instead, it was penned on a postcard that was sent to this young girl named Charlotte from Hawaii, were her new stepfather and her mother had gone on their honeymoon.

At first the teacher was uneasy about the nomination. But the student was required to give a reason for choosing her sentence as the best, and the reason she gave removed all anxieties. She explained that until she received that postcard, she had never really known exactly how her stepfather felt about her. That kind of uncertainly can be tough on anybody, especially on a child of those tender years.

Here’s the entry that won the prize for the greatest sentence ever written. It was penned on the back of a postcard from Waikiki Beach. It read, “Charlotte, I love you.”

Jesus came preaching the good news of the Kingdom. People heard Him and came pouring in to hear more. Matthew heard it and wrote it down for others to hear. Soon it was on the lips of people all over the world, and the power of it continues to radiate transformation.

“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near....”

It’s the reliable, genuine, authentic voice of the Father, through His Son our Lord Jesus Christ, mailed straight to you--- Charlotte, George, Bill, Mary...Tom.... Whatever your name.... I love you.

Hear God’s message of enduring affection...and be thankful.