Date: 20^th September 2009

Preacher: Nikki Devitt

Churches: Draycott & Rodney Stoke

Readings:

Proverbs 3, 13-18

2 Corinthians 4, 1-6

Matthew 9, 9-13

Sermon for St Matthew

I recently had a conversation with one of the canons of Wells Cathedral.

He told me about some lovely manuscripts of the Gospels which are in the library at Wells, which they use ceremonially during Ordination services.

The gospels are each bound up separately because they are rather unwieldy, being hand written on ancient parchment. And candidates for ordination are allowed to choose which Evangelist’s gospel they would like to use, to take their oath on.

Well, Mark is a popular choice: original and best!

and lots choose John, that great spiritual meditation of the significance of Jesus.

And many others, particularly women, tend to choose Luke’s gospel,

because he tells of Jesus’ concern for those of the margins of society….like

· women, the poor and tax-collectors and sinners

· .. BUT no-one in the Canon’s memory had ever nominated Matthew as their favourite Evangelist!

So, although Matthew’s gospel was the most popular in the early church,

he seems to have fallen out of favour with recent generations.(& I suspect that his designation as Patron Saint of Bankers has done nothing to increase his popularity in recent times…)

Well, tomorrow is St Matthew’s day, and the church celebrates Matthew the evangelist, whether or not he is the same Matthew that Jesus called as a disciple in our gospel reading today…there’s a bit of scholarly debate whether they are one and the same person, but it seems fine to celebrate both the disciple who was prepared to forsake his dubious lifestyle to follow Jesus, and the writer of the first gospel.

So let’s take a closer look at Matthew’s gospel and see what’s stopping 21^st century ordinands from hearing the word of God fully through its pages,

…and perhaps rediscover for ourselves God’s word speaking through Matthew’s particular version of the gospel.

Well at first sight Matthew’s gospel is full of gems to nurture and sustain our faith: he gives us the Beatitudes, and the Lord’s prayer

But there are things about his gospel that rather grate on the mind of the 21^st century reader, first and foremost his apparent anti-Jewishness.

Like all the evangelists, he shows us how the good news was rejected by the Jews, and sent to the gentiles, but Matthew reports it in such ferocious terms, with Jesus telling the Jews that the kingdom of God will be taken away from them, and given to nation that yields proper fruit. He calls the scribes and Pharisees snakes, and viper’s brood, and tells them they will bear the guilt for all the prophets down the ages who have been rejected.

And it is also only in Matthew’s gospel that the Jews cry out to Pilate ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’, before Jesus is handed over to be crucified. And these texts have been used to fuel anti-Semitism over the centuries. I remember in my own childhood having to pray for ‘the perfidious Jews’ in the Good Friday liturgy…and this is very troublesome, particularly the century that has witnessed the Holocaust.

Trying to make sense of this, I think it helps us a bit to remember that Matthew was writing his gospel for his own Christian community.

If we think of his situation, and realise that he and fellow Jewish Christian converts had been expelled from the synagogues after prolonged hostilities, we perhaps realise that rejection by the Jews wasn’t only a matter of past experience, it was an ongoing threat.

And Matthew is pained by Israel’s continuing rejection of Jesus, and of his followers, who are proclaiming Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes.

So this context perhaps explains the harshness of Matthew’s words, but it doesn’t excuse them, and certainly doesn’t justify later generations taking them out of context and using them to persecute the Jews.

As well as the charge of anti Semitism, there is another thread in Matthew’s gospel which makes it rather unpopular now, and that is his seeming obsession with condemnation, hell and torment.

‘Where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ is a recurring refrain in Matthew (he uses it x6, Luke uses it once and it doesn’t occur anywhere else in the gospels).

And it really isn’t that we don’t believe in hell any more. ‘Going to hell ‘ is a sort of shorthand for cutting ourselves off from the life and love of God.

We don’t know exactly how to describe the agony which surely would result from a wilful choice to reject God’s love, but somehow Matthew’s recurring images of physical discomfort: of hell fire and teeth-gnashing, don’t really speak deeply of these things to the modern mind.

So what are we to do with these difficulties in reading Matthew’s gospel? Well the first thing is to be honest and acknowledge they exist. But then we need to remember that extraordinarily, despite the limitations and imperfections of the way people write their stories, and the way that others mishear and misapprehend those stories…that God manages to speak to us through all this.

If we read the gospel in the right spirit, Matthew shows us not only his own prophetic word, but The Incarnate Word. And what Matthew shows us, is a Jesus who turns the values of the world upside down. He celebrates powerlessness:

And so he starts with the contrast between the powerful Herod, & chief priests on one side, and the baby conceived out of wedlock on the other.

..then

Matthew shows us Jesus as the one who is gentle and humble-hearted, and who taught his followers not to resist those who wronged them, and who celebrated being poor- in spirit, sorrowful, gentle, , and persecuted.

And ultimately of course we see Jesus condemned by the ruling powers.

And the soldiers jeering at his authority, by giving him a crown of thorns and a mock sceptre.

Yet still he doesn’t appeal to the Father to deliver him, he goes thro to the bitter end.. His power, is his refusal to use power,

And this surely is a gospel for our time, with our culture’s obsession with individualism and self promotion, material success and the equating of wealth with power.

And our challenge is to proclaim this gospel to the people we live amongst. Most people we know aren’t going to read the gospels, Matthew’s or anyone else’s. So the only way of proclaiming the gospel is to live this way of Way of powerlessness

And so our prayer for the feast of St Matthew might be that as we struggle with his text, that God may triumph in each one of us in our reading, in our praying and in our living.

Amen.