For Sunday Proper 5A
Collect
O God, from whom all good proceeds: Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
I often worry that we don’t consider how radical Jesus is being in moments like this. Of course he eats with the tax collectors and sinners! Of course he heals people! That’s the miracle of Jesus! But then we might suggest the radicals in our own time just “shut up and dribble” or we treat Jesus like the one to make things right, not us. It is almost as if the thing that disqualifies people from being listened to today is just fine when Jesus does it. He is the Messiah, son of humanity, persona of God after all.
But the sequence of Jesus’s work here in the first third of Matthew’s gospel is radical event upon radical event. The Sermon on the Mount invites a dramatic restructuring of the world. He then goes on to heal people, including gentiles. He sits with the impure and calls a traitor to be a disciple. He somehow heals a woman without intending to and then raises a child from the dead. This isn’t normal stuff here. And nobody in the gospel narrative is treating it as such. Perhaps we shouldn’t either.
The radicality of Jesus’s work is an essential part of his story and the gospel itself. Because how things were wasn’t good enough. Just as how things are isn’t good enough now. and I suspect that our own sense of the work we’re called to do would greatly benefit from embracing such a vision of purpose, of love, that expands the range of our work. That our commitment is to God’s Way of Love more than it is “winning” anything about anything in this world. Or just getting along with it either.