Advent Resources 2022

The Year A Lectionary, starting in this Advent Season, brings us to Matthew’s Gospel.  First in the canonical order but probably not the first actually to be written, Matthew centers us on the amazing truth of “Immanuel,” the revelation of “God with Us.”  It’s a theme that begins in the first chapter when Joseph is told that the child will be called “Immanuel” and it goes all the way through to the end of Matthew when before ascending to heaven Jesus assures his followers that forever and anon he will be “with them,” and now still also “with us.”

In between that bookending of “God with Us,” Matthew again and again seeks to startle his readers by helping them to see that although Jesus really is the fulfillment of all those Old Testament prophecies that Matthew is forever trotting out, even so the exact shape of this Messiah shakes us up, upends our expectations.  Matthew begins this revelation of surprise with a family tree of Jesus that Matthew not only refuses to pretty up so as to sanitize it of any skeletons in the family closet, he even goes out of his way to highlight the skeletons: prostitutes, those who played the prostitute, foreign women, and even a man murdered to cover up a sorry little adulterous affair.  Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah (Bathsheba by implication) are all included as a way to say that these are both the people from whom Immanuel came and for whom he came, too.

And the hope of it all comes at the end of the family tree when we are told that a man named Joseph is not actually the begetter or father of Jesus but instead Joseph is listed only as “the husband of Mary.”  This “holy irregularity” that breaks the long pattern of “the father of . . . the father of . . . the father of . . .” so typical of a genealogy tells us something else: Jesus has a real ancestry but he was finally more than his ancestors could produce.

Careful readers of Matthew will be shook up by some of that, but Matthew gives the reader no quarter to re-group.  Instead he instantly brings Magi onto the scene—astrologers from Baghdad whose pseudo-science was so whacky as to be overtly condemned by both Scripture and the Jewish traditions active at the time of Jesus’ birth.  Matthew is grinding an axe here: Immanuel means “God with Us” but just so you know right from the get-go: you do not get to define who the “us” is going to be!   No religious tradition, no normal set of expectations by the pious of any age can trump God’s ability to determine who the “us” were who were going to be “with God” (and God with them).

When it comes to Advent, Matthew does not stack up the narratives and the songs the way Luke does nor does he compose the high-flying poetry John provides.  He doesn’t skip the birth of Jesus completely the way Mark does, either, but what Matthew does give us is so bracingly fresh and surprising that those of us who preach from Matthew during Advent should most definitely not provide the congregation with the same-old/same-old of some routine, cozy celebration of Christmas.  Matthew rolls up his narrative sleeves to give us a family tree studded with surprises, odd star-gazers whose religio-scientific quackery somehow led them to a correct conclusion about a new king on the earth, and then to top it off narrates a mini-holocaust carried out by the paranoid King Herod but set off by the birth of this one little child.

This is no Hallmark Christmas card.  This is no tidy narrative told to children gathered in front of a sparkling Christmas tree.  No, this is the story of what really happens when God comes to be with us, when Immanuel bursts onto the surface of Planet Earth.

Who in the world would ever dare predict what such an event would look like, how it would shake out, what effects it would create?

Matthew is telling us that in fact, no one could know what God’s being with us would mean.

So when we preach on it, let’s not even in retrospect act like it’s all cut and dried, neat and tidy.  It wasn’t.  It’s still not.

Thanks be to God for his never-ending mystery and glory!