Canter Bridge

The gospel of Matthew begins its presentation of ‘Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham’ with a genealogy. This fits perfectly the identity given to Jesus at the front end as heir of a rich, three-fold legacy of memory of expectation. If he is ‘Messiah’ and if he is heir to David’s throne and if he is the vehicle or realization of the promises made to Abraham, then he before all else will be the restorer of Israel. So does the carefully selective genealogical material that follows cohere perfectly with Matthew’s grand design.

Matthew then crowns his genealogy with a rather famous quotation from the book of Isaiah which is now understood to have pointed to Messiah’s birth by way of a virgin. At least two features of this approach suggest that a key party—the nations—is missing. YHWH’s promise to Abraham embodies blessing to many nations, in the first instance. Any prospective reading of Isaiah nourishes the expectation that the nations will stream to Israel’s God at some future date and that they may even compete for first arrival honors as they flock to Zion to learn from him. (more…)

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A proper perspective will frequently elicit the inherent simplicity from a mass of details rather than impose an external simple-ness. Such is Jesus’ view of the Hebrew legal complex, a hermeneutic for which Jesus himself would scarcely have claimed novelty. (more…)

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Jesus’ earthy parables often offended the sense of justice that had accrued over centuries to conventional wisdom and salt-of-the-earth logic. His contemporaries, like ours, managed fairly established assumptions about what a good man was like and how a bad man was likely to behave. Even for those unschooled in the legal minutiae of Israel’s long dance with Torah would have agreed with a high level of consensus about the kinds of behavior that were worthy of respect, the kinds that cried out for retribution, and the unspoken moral code that lay behind all of this. (more…)

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As to seasick disciples on a turbulent Sea of Galilee, Jesus sometimes appears out of context, seeming very much to be a ghost. He comes at an angle from which we expect only threat and danger, messengers of an alien chaos that could only devour us.

Amazingly, to his disciples’ cry of ‘It is a ghost!’ (for who else comes walking on water through a storm but weird, destroying things?), Jesus’ reply echoes the long, biblical pattern by which unsought appearances of the divine are announced by just these words: ‘Don’t be afraid!’

But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

Quite reasonably, we fear that chaos which we cannot control. Yet very much to our amazement, Jesus often approaches us most promisingly from out of that very disorder. He is not to be controlled. Yet we ought to welcome rather than fear him when he comes to us this way. Or if we cannot do that, then at least we may hear his words of friendly intimacy: ‘Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.’

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In Jesus’ teaching, blessing is a deep paradox. It does not come to those who seem most likely to have achieved it. Its credentials are counter-intuitive. Blessing descends in sharp contradiction to the appearances of candidacy. (more…)

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The gospel according to Matthew, one of the four canonical literary glimpses of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that are afforded us, peers attentively into Israel’s past. Indeed, this portrait of Jesus and his way in this world finds its guiding framework in the Old Testament. Matthew will frequently refer to a word or action of Jesus with a ‘this is that’ formula that anchors the thing to some fixed point in the witness of the Hebrew Bible. (more…)

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