A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Proper 25A and 27A
The text: Matthew 23-24
After several weeks of gospel readings proceeding directlty from the previous reading, we now experience a jump forward to chapter 25.
If you celebrated All Saints’ Day last week, then the gospel you didn’t use was Matthew 23:1-12. I covered that reading last week.
Doom and Gloom
To hazard a too general description: Chapter 23 is about how detestable the leaders are and chapter 24 is a little apocalypse. So this whole section is a bit of a downer.
Remembering that the previous sequence of confrontation in the Temple revolves around Jesus unsettling the leaders’ authority. And it revolves around their striking back. Ultimately with the purpose of silencing him permanently.
The challenge of hearing this story, piece-by-piece, however, is in maintaining that same witness. So after several weeks of confrontations, we may not be prepared for the turn that happens at the beginning of Matthew 23. When Jesus appeals directly to the crowd and calls their leaders hypocrites.
And maybe, if we’ve followed along, we are prepared. But I doubt we’re prepared for a whole chapter of it.
“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”
It comes as a relentless stream of critique and warning. And while it sounds like it is addressed to the leaders themselves, it is said to the crowd—that they are among. This is a public “calling out” in the current vernacular.
Prophecy
There is another take on it, though. It is straight from the mold of Hebrew prophecy. This isn’t one academic critiquing the teachings of others. It is a prophet sharing the anger of God with people who sin.
For many in the early 21st century, the only association they have with this comes from charismatic circles and the only subject of that scorn are those who support LGBTQ+ or pro-choice persons. A righteous anger so targeted that it no doubt causes hives for anyone who has ever deconstructed.
Of course, this is the opposite of the prophetic voice.
Prophets condemn the powerful who abuse—not the abused; the ones the tradition easily condemns.
The prophetic voice is liberative, opening and saving the people from catastrophe. It is about turning toward equality, joy, and blessed community.
When Jesus takes on the prophetic voice, he is calling upon the ancestors to turn the hearts of the powerful toward the saving love of God.
Apocalyptic Fear
The prophetic voice turns toward apocalyptic prediction. An idea that many Christians struggle with internally and intellectually. Something I’ll probably engage with later.
For now, let us focus on that transition from Jesus’s condemnation of the powerful to God’s condemnation of the structures that maintain that power.
In a sense, the challenge of the apocalyptic vision is that it so resembles war. Such that the powerful cannot be eliminated without civilian casualties.
The apocalyptic experience is necessarily frightening and devastating, precisely because the powerful inhabit systems that maintain their power. Those systems, too, must be decimated.
At its core, the idea of transforming an unjust system is inherently violent, even to the ideological conviction itself.
Thus, even a love revolution becomes a violent apocalypse because the powerful see any removal from power (even peaceful) as a violent attack on their personhood. And they will choose to respond with violence.
And must never treat that response as a responsibility resting on the backs of the oppressed.
The apocalyptic character of Jesus’s prediction—that revolution will lead to mass terror and death—is not a preview of God’s wrath, but of human fear.
Apocalyptic Watchfulness
This leads, naturally, to the teaching of apocalyptic watchfulness. Not for those who will take the people toward a violent end (the leaders), but for the crowds who would be the casualties.
The teachings that round out chapter 24 and those through chapter 25 are filled with this darkness and watchfulness. They exude a character of preparedness.
But it is important to see how they do so at a slant. The straight readings would seem to celebrate ruthlessness or barbarism; power or thievery.
Instead, Jesus is inviting us to compare them to the Kin-dom. These are not the Kin-dom. The Kin-dom isn’t like this. We are to compare this to what we already know.
The presumption is that we know what the Kin-dom is like. Because this isn’t second-week-of-the-semester stuff.
This is finals week.
We’re in the endgame now.