Ash Wednesday
2/6/2008
Series A
Joel 2:12-19
II Corinthians 5:20-6:10 (Ministry of reconciliation)
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
("Is Sometimes Less More?")
Our meditation is on the Gospel reading assigned for today, Ash Wednesday.
("Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.)
Is sometimes less more? I had to look twice because something was missing from our Gospel reading of Matthew chapter 6. It's just a few verses, 7-15, on prayer: the Lord's Prayer was missing. tsk. During Lent, one feels robbed. I feel robbed. Is there a reason to get rid of good things? The Lord's Prayer is good, right?
It is good. In fact it's stunning. …even in the original Koine Greek. Listen.
Lovely, isn't it? Then why would the Lectionary conspirators break in to my world and snatch away the Lord's Prayer out of chapter 6. Maybe it was because, like the Alleluias, you may not miss it until it's gone. Since this omission was scheduled on Ash Wednesday, I thought maybe they thought LESS IS MORE: that we should once again feel the ash heaped up… to feel the emptiness of not hearing Jesus teach how a Christian breathes. (That's what prayer is.) Or maybe IF left in the text, the prayer steals the scene. So, I look at the rest of Matthew. And y'know what? A light turns on.
The preceding chapters of Matthew are lush with miracles. But its in chapter 5 that it all begins. Jesus teaches the first discourse on the mount, the first of five. St. Matthew orderly presents us 5 narratives and 5 discourses, woven together between the introduction and the finale. Stuff happens and Jesus teaches.
Since Jesus is not random chaos, He naturally explains what just happened. Jesus can and does explain the unexplainable. Yet only faith receives this teaching, not the mind. So again, 5 total times this pattern shapes this book. And since Matthew's gospel fulfilled Jewish hope, it's plain that Matthew continued the structure of the Pentateuch, the 5 books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Here, the 5 books of the Pentateuch & the 5 discourses of the Gospel. Each one connected. Each one teaching together about each other. See it's not dismembered. The sum of these parts point to Body.
(The 5 discourses can be divided in this way, (1) the Sermon on the Mount, Matt 5:1-7:28a; (2) apostolic authority and martyrdom, Matt 9:35-11:1; (3) the parables, Matt 12:46-13:53; (4) ethical problems without apparent answers, Matt [17:22] 18:1-19:1; and (5) the end times, Matt 23:1-26:1.)
So then, the final narrative of Jesus' Death and Resurrection is the key to open the locked treasure of the 5 discourses. None of it can make sense ever, without the cross. His cross is the conclusion that begins everything. Water and Wine & Bread, Promise and Body & Blood. The cross is the power of faith. Without it, religion is futile. God must die for man, because man can't live for God. It took God's death, so that dead men may walk. Jesus' cross is the conclusion that begins everything.
So much for Christianity being for simpletons. It's not simplistic, but it's simple. It's not easy, but it's taken care of. It gets down to business, messy if it has to. We don't hide nor run from the world into our moral country club. We engage the world with the ministry of reconciliation, bringing this world of ashes to the cross where forgiveness waters ash into Adam, into life that breaths.
Each discourse is a self-contained unit, but the meaning of each is related to and dependent on the others. No single discourse can be understood by itself without the possibility of misinterpretation.
Remember after Jesus was transfigured, He instructed Peter, James, and John shh, "Don't tell anyone what you have seen… until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." Jesus doesn't let them run off bragging, immediately show off the glory of this man-God. Because none of it, the transfiguration, the Sermon on the Mount, nor the Lord's prayer, none of it make any sense without the cross in plain view. The cross makes love tangible and touchable. That's digestible. I can't eat a tomb emptied. It's easy to misinterpret when we reduce Christianity, throwing the baby out with the bath water. Hang onto the body, the corpus of the cross!
Oh, there are those who dismiss the words of Jesus as recorded by Matthew. Supposedly Christianity was conjured up centuries after Jesus walked. To them, Matthew's book was unreliably doctored after-the-fact. Where's their proof? Matthew's Gospel cites Jewish and Christian tension, recorded extra-biblically at the turn of the first century. Oh, these Bible experts pick your pocket after they break your home open. An unreliable Gospel is no Gospel.
Equally probable though, and much more pious, is that it was written early, with the events fresh on mind, because their cited animosity didn't just start at the end of the 1st century… Jesus didn't exactly NOT ruffle their feathers. Darkness rejected the Light. (John 1:5, 10-11) There was tension from the get-go. Jesus was and is antagonistic against the fake piety of lawful men. Dismiss Jesus' word? Hah! Jesus dismisses them. Seven woes to them! Jesus called them blind guides, who strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. (Matt 23:24)
These form critics, judges over loose-leaf scripture, they try to help you: that you CAN'T trust each and every word, written as is. Well, what kind of god couldn't inspire the actual words as they are? Not much of a god at all. This God can. This God does. Each word is reliable. As God it gave it to Jesus, Jesus gave it faithfully to the Apostles, the evangelists, preachers, teachers, and parents… in order to give these life-saving words to another.
Hang on to those words. The tide rises and falls. Days are full and then are barren. Our lives come and they go. We sit on the Earth now… but so soon earth is on us… unless He who created the earth, and walked on the earth, and swallowed up the earth by letting it take Him down, unless the Word Himself says differently, we return to the ashes forever.
Thanks be to God, for Jesus' words: for Him teaching us on the mount, to give, to pray, and concerning gifts. For in all these things, He points us outside our petty selves, our futile times, our unsubstantiated religiosity.
So, is less really more? Initially I really didn't feel comfortable with this text missing the Lord's Prayer. Since infancy we've prayed it. About three years ago, I fondly remember my Greek class, where we prayed the Lord's Prayer every day in the original Greek. Haha. How pious. But if it takes pruning fruit so that I may see the tree; if it takes pruning fruit so that I may see the tree, let it be done. Oh please Lord, strip us so we may hear you, see you, and know you.
He is the mountain. It is His breathful prayer we need, the purchased gifts by His wrists. For this life and the next. Amen.
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