Preached at St John’s, Devizes
Readings – Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25
“an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David…’”
The Fourth Sunday of Advent can be a difficult moment in the church’s calendar for a preacher. The outside world is already at the height of its Christmas party season, yet in the Church we are commanded to wait for a few days yet, to remain a little longer in that state of longing that defines much of our lives as Christians, that of waiting for a new and better world to emerge. We try our best to be patient, to avoid jumping the gun by celebrating the Christ-child coming into the world before Christmas Day, but St John’s is already full of Christmas trees and we’ve all probably been to a few Christmas parties.
The Christmas concerts and nativity plays we attend tend to jumble up elements from the different accounts of Christ’s origins. As Advent also begins the cycle of Gospel readings for each year, I thought this odd moment in the Church’s year might give us an opportunity to look specifically at Matthew’s account of Christ’s origins and what they might mean for us, because most of our Sunday Gospel readings through until next November will come from Matthew, including this morning’s Gospel.
The accounts of Jesus’ origins are very different between the four Gospels. Mark, the action gospel, doesn’t worry at all about Jesus’ origins – he starts by establishing John the Baptist as the messenger prophesied by Isaiah… and then simply gets on with the action, with the first scene being Jesus’ baptism at the start of his public ministry. John starts with the wonderful prose-poem proclaiming Jesus’ supernatural origins at the beginning of the universe, which we will hear as the Midnight Gospel next week, before also getting straight into the action of Jesus’ public ministry without worrying about his earthly origins. Luke is the source of most of the stories familiar from nativity plays – the shepherds, the angels, the manger, and all that. Its account of Jesus’ birth is also told from the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth, giving an unusual prominence to the voices of women for a work of ancient literature. Matthew give us the Wise Men and King Herod, and the terrible massacre of the babies of Bethlehem, all too believable as we look at the worst despots of our own world.
Yet especially in the light of Luke’s account, we can find today’s reading from Matthew about Jesus’ origins a little disappointing. The story of Mary’s pregnancy is told entirely from the perspective of Joseph. Given our own cultural context, we almost certainly find ourselves taking a sharp breath when we hear that Joseph “planned to dismiss her quietly”.
Also jarring is how obviously important it is to Matthew that Jesus is a descendant of King David, the greatest of Israel’s rulers. Both Jesus and Joseph had already been established as descendants of David in the genealogy that begins Matthew’s Gospel; in today’s reading, the angel who convinces Joseph to take Mary as his wife, addresses him as “son of David”. King David is a key element in the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel, yet we often neglect it in how we understand Jesus Christ today.
King David with his harp on the tower of Christ Church, Shaw. © Gerry Lynch, 24 June 2017
Partly, I think, that is because in our culture, most of us consider someone’s ancestry as being of little importance in telling us about the sort of person they are. Thank the Lord, this is now considered rather politically incorrect. But it also marks us out as being different from most cultures historically, and so we can miss why it was important to Matthew and his readers that Jesus was a descendant of David, and what they would have taken from that about His character and mission on Earth. I think it remains important for us too that Christ was descended from David, and given that David Evans’ Bible study group is looking at King David at the moment, it might be interesting for us to think about why.
I could from this point make an interesting excursion into how Christianity remains rooted in its Jewish origins and all that flows from that, but let me save that for another time, because three things jump out at me as being of particular relevance to us this morning.
Firstly, we learn that God uses very imperfect and unlikely vehicles to fulfil his purposes. David was a complex and contradictory character, a philanderer with a volatile temperament and a degree of ruthlessness, as well as being someone with tremendous artistic gifts and a deep capacity for loving friendships who often refused opportunities for revenge. God often works through people who are obviously flawed, because human beings generally are obviously flawed, including us. David was not a two-dimensional cardboard hero but, like us, a complex character of light and shadow, with good and wicked aspects to his character.
Secondly, as well as working through flawed people, God also often works through people considered unimportant in the eyes of the world. David was not born to be king – he was the younger son of a shepherd who was talent-spotted by Samuel the prophet and later married the king’s daughter. We also see this at work in our epistle reading, which St Paul wrote to “God’s beloved in Rome”. So here we have, in the mightiest empire the world had yet seen, members of a weird splinter sect of a religion known to be troublesome telling people in the grand imperial capital that the Son of God was the son of a carpenter from an unknown small town in a rebellious outer province.
A third thing that identifying King David as an ancestor of Jesus does is to set up the conclusion of Matthew’s story, when people’s conceptions of what a godly king looks like are turned upside-down at Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection. The long prophesied Messiah was expected to be a religious-political leader who would kick out the Roman occupiers by force and lead a godly independent state. Matthew identified Jesus as the Messiah in the first sentence of his Gospel and hammers that home here by restating Jesus is a descendant of the greatest of Israel’s kings, and therefore a right and fitting person to be a king himself. But Matthew’s story doesn’t end with the sort of battlefield victory his followers expected, but with the brutal execution of their hero, his rising from the dead, and then their citizenship of a new sort of kingdom which is not of this world. It is this kingdom that you and I and every Christian alive today remain citizens of even as even the mightiest earthly empires from the Romans onwards have risen and fallen.
That also implies that Christianity is not about establishing a godly political order on Earth; that will have to wait for Christ to come again. In our post-Christian society, we will have to relearn what it is to build God’s kingdom in a context where the Church’s political power has crumbled.
To my mind, the overarching lesson for us here today from Jesus’ being descended from David is to look for God coming into the world in unexpected places, through the efforts of unexpected people. That in turn might mean looking here among us: for who would God to break into the world in a middle-of-the-road parish church, not prone to religious enthusiasm, in a little town without even a train station?
God has a habit of surprising us, and as we wait to celebrate His first coming into the world in a few days’ time, we should be open to how he might break into the world here among us in St John’s. Wait patiently for just a little longer, for God is already entering into the world where He is expected least.
And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen
