Lectionary Commentaries for December 18, 2022
Fourth Sunday of Advent

from WorkingPreacher.org


Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 1:18-25

Stanley Saunders

The Messiah has two fathers

The first line of Matthew’s Gospel, which may also be its title, introduces a series of identifications of Jesus: “This is the book of birth (origins/beginning) of Jesus the Christ, the son of David and the son of Abraham.” In 1:18-25, which also speaks of Jesus’ “genesis” (birth/origin/beginning), Matthew develops the identification of Jesus as Son of David and adds an implicit identification of Jesus as the Son of God, through the Holy Spirit. We also learn that the child of Mary and the Holy Spirit is to be named Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins (1:21), and he will also be called Emmanuel—”God with us” (1:23). Matthew thus begins the Gospel by laying all his Christological cards on the table. 

Of these many identifications, two function as a pair that will define the stages of Jesus’ mission. The ministry of Jesus as Son of David will focus on his quest to heal, gather, and restore the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus will reveal his identity as Son of God in manifestations of divine power over sea and storm, for example, but ultimately and definitively in his conquest of death, which had implications not only for Israel and the nations, but for all of creation. There is, however, a snag, which Matthew had to resolve if these two identifications are to run together throughout the Gospel: if Jesus is God’s son, not Joseph’s, how can he also be a son of David? 

Jesus, the Son of David

At the end of the genealogy, in 1:16, Matthew has identified Joseph, who stands in the line of David, not as Jesus’ father, but as the husband of Mary. Matthew presents Jesus as Son of David by adoption, which Joseph will officially signal when, at Jesus’ birth, he publicly announces the child’s name (1:24), as the angel of the Lord has directed (1:21). Joseph is well qualified to serve as Jesus’ human father. When Herod threatens the baby’s life (2:13-18), Joseph flees with the family to Egypt. Joseph also departs from typical social mores when, at the angel’s instruction, he does not divorce Mary for unfaithfulness. Joseph is much like the patriarch after whom he is named (Genesis 37-50): moral, chaste, seeking the preservation and restoration of relationships, and attendant to God’s voice in his ear. As Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph also links Jesus with Israel’s long experience of brotherly alienation, betrayal, and enslavement, while pointing to the resolution of that story in the love and forgiveness that make possible the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel. Both Josephs model “restorative justice” by making space even for those who have harmed or dishonored them, thus making restoration possible or,  in this case, the birth of the one who will save the people from their sins. 

Matthew will portray Jesus, the Son of David, as an atypical monarch, a humble king who restrains and refocuses his authority in order to make space for and restore the lost, blind, lame, and deaf (for example, 9:27, 12:22-23, 15:22, 20:30-31, 21:9-15, 21:5, 26:50-56), whose condition Jesus frequently links metaphorically to the failure of Israel’s leaders. As Son of David, Jesus acts both to judge the powerful who mislead and exploit the people and to heal both individuals and the whole people of God. Finally, like David’s son Solomon, Jesus is a temple builder, but not a temple made by human hands, which will suffer judgment and destruction (24:1-2). Instead, when Jesus gathers, heals, and feeds people, even Gentiles and even in the desert, he is fulfilling the functions of the ideal temple. His resurrection after three days marks the transition from the old temple made by human hands to the new, living temple. This identification is deepened in the assertion that Jesus is also Son of God and “God with us.” 

Jesus, Son of God and God with us

Because Jesus is “from the Holy Spirit” (1:18, 20), he is also the Son of God. Matthew begins to develop the implications of this claim in 1:23, the first of Matthew’s “fulfillment quotations.” This quotation from Isaiah 7:14 is not meant as a simple proof text in support of claims that Jesus is the Messiah. Like many of Matthew’s fulfillment quotations, this citation conveys elements of both judgment and salvation. Isaiah 7 speaks of the birth of a child, who will be named “Emmanuel. His birth is a “sign” of God’s promise to deliver and bless King Ahaz and the Judean people with abundance, but also of devastating judgment if the sign is refused. When the son born of the “virgin,” or young woman, is rejected, he becomes a sign of judgment rather than deliverance. Matthew thus uses the citation of Isaiah 7:14 to indicate that Jesus’ person and mission compel people to make choices, resulting in both redemption and judgment. 

The identification of Jesus as “God with Us” also has roots in 2 Chronicles 36:22-24, a passage from the very end of the Hebrew canon that will  feature prominently in the Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s story of Jesus. The Persian king Cyrus, who has just conquered the Babylonians, tells the exiles to go back home to Judah and rebuild the temple for their God, because all the kingdoms of earth have been given to him, “so may the Lord his God be with him!” (2 Chronicles 36:23, see also Matthew 28:18-20). “God with us” in Matthew 1:23 and 28:20 thus frames the whole Gospel, which serves as a comprehensive narrative that defines what it means for Jesus to be God with us. The culmination of Jesus’ mission in his death and resurrection means that God’s work of redemption has reached its climactic moment, when Israel is gathered and restored, the mission to the nations has begun, and the whole creation—heaven and earth—will be restored and renewed as God’s dwelling place. What role might disciples—all of us—play in the continuing realization of this story? How is this story still our story in a world ever more filled with greed, exploitation, violence, and death?


First Reading

Commentary on Isaiah 7:10-16

Anathea Portier-Young

Here is the promise: God is with us, so that we might live.1

God is with us, so that we might believe. God is with us, because it is hard to believe, and God knows it.

“And the Lord kept talking to Ahaz” (Isaiah 7:10). This first detail tells us we have entered a story well underway. It is a story of national crisis and a king’s gut-wrenching fear.

This scion of the house of David, king in Judah, has a responsibility to seek the welfare of his people. He must make political judgments that will lead to national security, health and life. External threats to national security seem to require military or diplomatic resolution.

But there is tension. The king also has a responsibility to learn and keep God’s law (Deuteronomy 17:18-19). Moses promised that the king who resists pride and never turns from the law will have a long reign (Deuteronomy 17:20). God promised to the house of David an eternal dynasty, so long as his descendants hold fast to the covenant and to God’s teaching (Psalm 132:12). Military and diplomatic resolutions do not always accord with covenant teaching. Alliances with foreign nations might lead to worship of their gods. Seeking help from nations more powerful than Judah might signal lack of faith in Judah’s God. It might look an awful lot like hedging bets.

Ahaz faces a threat. Two neighbors to the north, Israel, with its capital in Samaria, and Syria, with its capital in Damascus, are forming a coalition. Their kings, Pekah and Rezin, are vassals to the mighty Assyria. They have surrendered tribute, dignity, and human life. They are ready now to throw off the yoke. They press Ahaz to join them and lend Judah’s armies to their rebellion. He refuses. They respond with aggression. In 734 BCE the troops of Israel and Syria invade Judah (cf. 2 Kings 16:5). Their plan is to gain control of Judah’s capital city, Jerusalem, and replace Ahaz with a new king, the son of Tabeel, who will back their bid for independence (Isaiah 7:6).

Pekah and Rezin propose to make Judah sick with dread and break this nation open to serve their purposes (Isaiah 7:6). It is a manipulation. The prophet Isaiah calls it what it is, and shows Ahaz the future. These two kings, says Isaiah, are smoldering stumps (7:4). These kings who make you sick with dread are nothing to you; in two years their lands will be empty (7:16). God has already decreed against their plan (7:7). The Lord reveals to Ahaz that Israel has embarked on a path to its own destruction (7:8). What path will the king of Judah choose? If you want to see your kingdom stand, if you crave a descendant on the throne of Judah, one thing only is needed. Believe (7:9).

This is the story we have entered. “And the Lord kept talking to Ahaz” (Isa 7:10). The summons to faith is hard to answer, and God knows that if God stops talking, Judah doesn’t have a chance. The power of God would be too incredible to believe if there weren’t signs of it everywhere.

Ask me for a sign, says God (Isaiah 7:11). Ask me anything. What can you imagine? What can you not imagine? I will show it to you. Dig deep into the earth, sink your mind as low as the pits of hell, and I will give you a sign there. I can work such salvation that the dead come to life again and the underworld itself gives birth (Isaiah 26:19).

Turn your face, turn your mind, turn your hope upward, and I will show you a sign there in the sky. I put sun and moon and stars in the sky for signs (Genesis 1:14); I put my bow in the clouds as a sign of my covenant with creation (Genesis 9:12).

I gave Moses signs, and the people believed (Exodus 3:12; 4:3-31). I worked signs in Egypt (Exodus 7:3, 8:18, 10:1-2; Deuteronomy 4:34-35; 6:22; 7:19) to make it known that I have the power to save. I can save and I choose to save. Believe it. I know that you need a sign. I am ready to help you believe (cf. Isaiah 65:1). Ask me for a sign (cf. 1 Kings 3:5; 2 Chronicles 1:7; Psalm 2:8).

Ahaz refuses. Ahaz refuses because God’s signs are too good. If he sees a sign from God, how will he be able to discount it? No, says Ahaz, “I will not ask. I will not test the Lord” (Isaiah 7:12).

On the surface this refusal sounds righteous. Moses had commanded Israel, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested God Massah” (Deut 6:16). The test at Massah grew from Israel’s incapacity to trust in God’s plan, sustenance, and miraculous provision. Israel failed to believe in God’s saving presence among them (Exodus 17:7).

Now, if Ahaz does not need God’s help to believe, we might applaud his show of deference. Isaiah does not applaud. He accuses the house of David of wearing out humans and God alike (Isaiah 7:13). So much has been entrusted to them, and they are using it up. When God offers to replenish the well (cf. Psalm 68:10), they refuse. Isaiah slams Ahaz for his pretense of faith, and calls him out of his unbelief (cf. Isaiah 1:14).

According to 2 Kings, Ahaz sent a petition to Assyria’s king, Tiglath Pileser, declaring himself the king’s slave and asking the king to “save him” from the threat posed by Israel and Syria (2 Kings 16:7). He bought his salvation with gold and silver from God’s temple and the royal treasuries (16:8). When Tiglath Pileser neutralized the threat against Judah, Ahaz went to meet his new lord in Damascus and there saw Tiglath Pileser making a sacrifice on the altar (16:9-10). Ahaz had a copy of this altar made for Jerusalem’s temple, and put it in the place of the bronze altar of the Lord (16:10-16). “On account of the king of Assyria” he stripped precious metals from the furnishings of the Lord’s temple (16:17-18a). These actions do not testify to a surplus of faith.

This is the story behind Ahaz’s refusal. Ahaz already has a plan and does not want to believe. It is easier to sell himself to Assyria than wait for salvation from God. But God still gives even when we will not ask. “Therefore the Lord will give a sign to you.” It is still a sign of salvation. It is still a sign of God’s power to save. It is a security for every promise even when faith fails.

Look, says Isaiah. “Here: the young woman is pregnant, and she is giving birth to a son. And she will call his name ‘God is with us'” (7:14). The Septuagint translator of this verse projects the birth into the future, as does the evangelist Matthew (Mattew 1:23). The Hebrew text calls attention to a present reality (cf. Genesis 16:11; 38:24; Jeremiah 31:8). The impossible miracle of God’s saving power is evident in the birth Isaiah shows the king taking place at this very moment. Stop looking away from the miracle. This woman is wracked with pain. She is laboring in faith to bring forth life. In a moment you will hear an infant cry. The woman will feel a flood of fierce love that binds her to this child as his guardian and protector forever. Listen closely when she speaks his name and you will hear her name the ground of all life and hope: God is with us.

There is much more to the story of Immanuel. In your Advent preaching I invite you to explore how the proclamation of the birth of Christ reveals the persistence of our God who knows how we struggle with faith and will give any sign, any grace, to help us believe and live.


Notes

  1. Commentary first published on this site on Dec. 19, 2010.

Psalm

Commentary on Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19

Jason Byassee

Advent and Christmas never fail to stir up a vast range of emotions.1

There is holiday cheer and family warmth and commercially-catalyzed retail therapy aplenty. There is also FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) in full blast, and nearly constitutionally-mandated trips home that can end in ruin. Church might be one of the only places where we can name these contradictions. And Psalm 80 is perfectly placed to help us name them.

God is praised in this psalm, no doubt. He is the shepherd-king over Israel, as in the beloved Psalm 23. He is splendid on the cherubim, and savior of the tribes of Israel, and so of the cosmos (Psalm 80:2,10). He is the only one who can save just through the shining of his face (verses 3, 7, and 19, in the psalm’s refrain). 

Yet God is also absent. Israel is desolate. Scholars think this psalm originated in the devastation of the northern kingdoms in 722 BCE and then touched again by later editors’ fear of Judah’s pending devastation in the early 6th century. These twin bookends of Israel’s misery are the points of origin for a psalm seeking salvation. 

The psalmist prays remembering God’s one-time mighty acts of deliverance and wondering where those acts are now, when the people could really use them. Aren’t you the God who defeated Egypt and drove out the nations? Can’t you lend us a little help? Psalm 80:14 asks God to “repent,” shuv in Hebrew, to remember again the surprising saving work he has done before and repeat it anew. “Then we will never turn back from you,” the psalmist promises ( verse 18).

It is hard to imagine Christmas-crazed consumers hearing God-talk this searing anywhere else this time of year: “How long will you be angry with your people’s prayers?” (Psalm 80:4). That is, God rejects those prayers before they even reach heaven. “You have fed them with the bread of tears.” “Our enemies laugh among themselves” (verses 5-6). No more mighty hand and outstretched arm, just a busy signal when we pray and opponents who mock our stories of God’s Exodus and world-making power. Anyone who has ever found prayer barren has a friend in Psalm 80.

It has become common for mainline Protestant churches to offer a Blue Christmas service around the winter solstice—the darkest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. The idea is for those who have suffered particular trauma that year or anytime to gather and lament and maybe dare to begin to look for hope. As a pastor I found folks reticent to come to this. It would be akin to admitting misery, which feels like the violation of a commandment of some sort. Plus it just sounds depressing. 

This psalm shows the Bible is way ahead of us. It dares to name its worst fear. Not only are we defeated, perhaps about to be erased from history, but even God has abandoned us. It is remarkable that God’s people include such raw and honest expressions of misery in the Bible itself. God is teaching us to pray with skepticism about whether God hears prayer! 

And yet who is still here after such colossal military and civic disasters as the destruction of the northern tribes, the defeat and exile of Judah? Who is still praying these prayers? The people Israel, and by Christ’s surprising act of including us, the Christian church. God hears, and records those tears, and teaches us to pray that he would “stir up” his might anew, that his face would shine, and we might be saved (Psalm 80:1). 

The psalm’s closing offers several excellent arguments for why God should remember his might and stir it up once more. One, God likes praise (Psalm 80:18). This is akin to Moses reminding God on Mt. Sinai that he is vain, and cares what people think—does he want the Egyptians to say he led the Israelites into the wilderness just to kill them? “No, you’re right, I care about my reputation.” 

The psalms often offer a sort of bargain with God: you deliver us, and we will praise you. Israel likes being alive and God likes praise. Can’t we get together and make this happen? Dust can’t praise. Only living, redeemed people can. So we need the living, redeeming God to work anew. 

This psalm also includes the man at God’s right hand (Psalm 80:17), the one made strong for God’s sake. The psalms rarely identify these figures. James Mays suggests the right-hand-man is Israel itself, God’s own chosen and beloved in the world.2 The Jewish Study Bible suggests the man is the king, God’s regent in Israel.3 The psalm is non-specific for a reason, we trust. But for Christians the one at God’s right hand is, of course, Christ, the one whose birth we commemorate in just a few days’ time. Israel longs for a messiah to lead the people and usher in a new age of unmatched peace. Christians long for a messiah to finish his work of gathering unlikely people into an upside-down kingdom where the first are last and the last, first. The earth is full of longing. One day God will satisfy the longing he stirs up and make all things new.

The refrain in this psalm is particularly striking: that God’s face would shine, that we may be saved. 

There is no non-metaphorical language for God, of course. Moses cannot see God face to face, neither can anyone else. God does not “actually” have a face any more than a beard or a bum to sit on a throne. And yet these anthropomorphisms form the church’s imagination about a God in our flesh. 

Not only that, but Paul imagines all Christians standing in the place of Moses, in God’s presence, with faces shining (2 Corinthians 3). God will always work anew. That is what he shows again each Christmas. We long and wait for his coming, and as we do, our faces shine—and so do everyone else’s, if we look aright.


Notes:

  1. Commentary first published on this site on Dec. 22, 2019.
  2. James Mays, Psalms (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994), 264.
  3. The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1359.

Second Reading

Commentary on Romans 1:1-7

Jennifer Vija Pietz

Paul’s greeting in his letter to the Romans (1:1–7) immediately focusses the audience’s attention on what is of ultimate significance: the gospel of God (verse 1), which is the good news that Jesus Christ is both God’s promised Messiah and resurrected Lord (verses 3–4; see also Psalm 2:7; 2 Samuel 7:12–16). The rest of the letter will unpack this snapshot of the gospel (see also Romans 1:16–17). 

Framing Paul’s condensed portrait of the gospel in the opening section of Romans are his self-identification as the letter’s sender (verse 1) and his greetings to the recipients of the letter: “all God’s beloved in Rome” (verse 7). These basic features are characteristic of Hellenistic letters of Paul’s time, including Paul’s other letters. But the way Paul expands (or omits) standard epistolary elements indicates his emphasis and aims in a particular letter. In the case of Romans, Paul emphasizes the nature of his own call and ministry (verses 1, 5), but does so in such a way that shows that these arise from the very gospel that he proclaims (verses 2–4).

Right away, Paul identifies himself as a servant or slave of Jesus Christ who has been called to be an apostle, set apart for the sake of spreading the gospel (verse 1). Although Paul does not directly mention God as the one who called and appointed him, this is implied. Indeed, Paul makes God the subject at the beginning of verse 2 as the one who promised the gospel in the Scriptures before the arrival of Christ. And it is God who fulfilled this promise through God’s Son, whose life, death, and resurrection are presented in shorthand in verses 3–4. It is this life-giving gift of God’s Son to a world often turned against God that constitutes the grace that transformed Paul and his co-workers into apostles—ones sent by God to bring this gift to others.

In short, Paul declares that his life and his ministry are not his own. Rather, they are a living testimony to God’s transformative power that turned him from an opponent of the gospel to one of its most fervent proclaimers (see also Galatians 1:13–24). 

Showing the interconnectedness of his own call and the gospel serves what is arguably Paul’s main aim in writing Romans: to enlist the financial and spiritual support of the Roman Christians in his proposed evangelistic mission to Spain (for example, Romans 1:11–13; 15:23–24, 28, 32). Unlike the communities to which several of Paul’s other letters are addressed, Paul did not found the Christian communities1 in Rome. In fact, he has not yet visited Rome, although he plans to do so and does have relationships with Roman Christians, including some who support his ministry (for example, Romans 15:22–24; Romans 16:3–15). It is thus crucial for Paul to introduce himself more generally to the Roman Christians as one who is called and commissioned by God to preach the same gospel that has also claimed their lives (verses 5–6). He is inviting them to trust him and God’s work through him. The opening of the letter, therefore, is not simply a greeting but also Paul’s attempt to connect with the recipients by means of what fundamentally unites them: the gospel.

It is this gospel that compels Paul, a Jew, to bring God’s good news to the gentiles (verse 5) within the Roman Christian communities. There are apparently also Jewish believers in Rome (for example, Prisca and Aquila, Romans 16:3; see also Acts 18:2–3; Romans 2:17; 4:1) to whom Paul appeals by citing Israel’s Scriptures as a witness to the gospel (Romans 1:2) and acknowledging Jesus as the promised Davidic messiah (verse 3; see also Samuel 7:12–16). This foreshadows another theme of the letter: the gospel that brings about God’s righteousness is freely and equally offered to both Jews and Gentiles, who all have sinned (for example, Romans 3:21–31). By evoking faith in the God made known in Christ, the gospel unites diverse groups of people in community.

Paul likely draws on earlier Christian tradition in Romans 1:3–4. This might partly account for what some consider to be adoptionism in Paul’s statement that Jesus Christ was declared or appointed Son of God by resurrection (verse 4). But since the human Jesus is already referred to as God’s Son in verse 3, another way to read verse 4 is as a declaration that the resurrection of the crucified messiah is the way in which God exalted him as Lord of the cosmos. This Lord ushers God’s eschatological new creation into the world.

The gospel, therefore, that Paul presents in Romans is not an abstract theological reflection on God. Instead, it is the very power of God to free people from the powers of sin and death that characterize the old age and form in them the new creation that lives to serve God and each other in love. 

This passage is full of possibilities for preaching:

  • It can stimulate reflection on the common ground that the preacher shares with congregants and on the importance of acknowledging this in the sermon.
  • Paul’s presentation of the gospel as an unmerited, divine gift that binds people together amidst their differences can speak a counter-cultural word to the social, political, and ideological divides in the United States, including in the church.
  • It is a powerful reminder that God’s gifts and callings are for the sake of something larger than our own lives. The gospel ultimately calls all people to be living proclamations of God’s love in justice in the world. As we await the arrival of Christ during advent, we recognize that the ability to live this way is a gift from God.

Notes

  1. It is possible that there were multiple house churches or local gatherings of Christians in Rome.