Jesus the Messiah

 Jesus the Messiah

Matthew 1:18-25[1]

The assumption that everyone you meet has a similar notion of God is not one you can make these days. We live in a world in which people increasingly view the notion of “God” as irrelevant. They’ve grown up, lived their whole lives, and may be at the point of facing the end of life, all without any reference whatsoever to God. And we are living in a time when children are being raised by parents who have lived without any faith in God (in some cases grandparents). When you’re looking at the third generation of people who live their lives without any reference to God, it’s hard to find common ground as a basis for sharing the good news of Jesus’ birth.

Even the church, we can’t assume that everyone shares the same view of God. We believe in a God who loves us all unconditionally, undeniably, and irrevocably—from eternity past, throughout time, to all eternity. Most Christians would agree with that statement. But for many, God’s love is reserved only for those who do all the right things, say all the right words, and look acceptably “Christian.” Those who fail to “live up” to a particular standard are simply excluded from God’s love. And they believe that happens by design and for all eternity. I don’t know about you, but I find the idea that God only loves people who look and think and talk and act a certain way pretty scary!

Still others have been raised in a setting in which God comes off as anything but a loving father. The foundation for their whole framework of faith is not God’s love, but rather human sin. When you grow up in a church that constantly hammers into you that God disapproves not only of what you do but who you are, it can be hard to even want to have anything much to do with God. If your “faith” beats you down on a regular basis, it should come as no surprise that those who have a choice about whether or not to participate walk away from it. I wouldn’t want to subject myself to that kind of treatment either. It’s toxic!

One thing we have to understand about the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel is that it is about reframing our view of God. What you may not know is that Jesus completely redefined the way in which people understood God. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a very different view of God in some books of the Bible. The sacrificial system was based in part on the belief that they had to kill an animal in order to keep from being killed by God, who was angry with them for their sins. The very idea of getting “close” to God was the opposite of what people believed: if you got too close to God you could wind up dead!

That understanding about who God is was literally set in stone at the Temple. The very walls of the Temple were there to keep the “wrong” people from getting too close to God. And only certain people, following certain rigidly prescribed procedures, could even dare to think about entering God’s presence. That was a privilege reserved for a select few, while most people could only watch from a distance, if they were even permitted to do that. In a very real sense, Jesus came to tear down the walls that had been built up around God by the Jewish religion and its leaders. He came to open the doors to God’s presence to everyone.

That was his role according to Matthew’s Gospel. And Matthew explains all of this by calling Jesus “Messiah,” “Savior,” and “Immanuel.” These ideas weren’t new in that day, but Jesus filled them with new meaning that most people didn’t expect. When the people of his day looked for a “Messiah,” they expected someone who would ascend to the throne of David. That was what Isaiah looked forward to: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore” (Isa 9:6-7, ESV).

Given our traditions of worship at Christmas, we naturally assume that Isaiah was predicting the coming of Jesus. But Isaiah was speaking to people living 700 years before Jesus was born. It seems clear that Isaiah was talking about the birth of a king who would lead the nation of Judah to freedom by establishing peace and justice. But even the best kings were only human. The promises God made to his people through the prophet were never fully realized. And that gave rise to the hope for one who would truly and finally bring peace to the Jewish people.

Given the fact that Jesus didn’t exactly follow the “script” people were expecting, we might wonder why Matthew would make such an effort to identify Jesus as the “Messiah.” Part of the answer is that Jesus also redefined what it meant to be the Messiah.[2] And, as we saw last week, this was about what Jesus did, not about trying to figure out the theological problem of Jesus as God and man. Jesus fulfilled the role of the Messiah by carrying out the promises of salvation, promises like “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Mt 11:4-5). Matthew called those actions the “deeds of the Messiah” (Mt 11:2). Jesus was the Messiah because of what he was doing: he was acting to “save his people,” just like the Angel told Joseph in his dream.

But just as important was the fact that Jesus the Messiah was also “Immanuel,” or “God is with us.” Jesus also fulfilled this role by what he did. As he engaged in his ministry, he broke through all the boundaries that the Jewish religious leaders had thrown up to keep “undesirable” people away from God’s blessings. Jesus’ preference for spending time with the “common people” became such a scandal that he came to be known as a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19). That was not a good thing! What really turned the tables on them was the fact that Jesus shared meals with “unclean” people.

All of this was simply Jesus carrying out his role as “Immanuel,” “God-who-is-with-us.” It redefined not only their expectations about a Messiah, but also their prejudices about who was “acceptable” and who was “outcast.” By sharing God’s love with those who were despised and rejected, Jesus demonstrated that not only God’s love, but also God’s presence and God’s blessings could not be limited by the narrow constraints of those who were smugly “holier-than-thou.” As Jesus would tell them all, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt 5:45). This was Jesus fulfilling the role of “Immanuel,” the one who definitively and once and for all made it clear that God is “God-who-is-with-us,” and that includes all of us![3] 

When I think about the many ways people either misconstrue who God is or ignore God altogether, I’m comforted by the news of Jesus’ birth as “Messiah” and “Immanuel.” It reminds me of something that the Study Catechism that we use in Confirmation class tells us: that “God does not will to be God without us.”[4] Because of God’s very nature, God seeks us all out through Jesus.[5] And that means that no matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done, God is with us, loving us to all eternity. Whether we joyfully celebrate the embrace of a loving God, or we cringe  and shrink back from a God we fear will punish us, or we go about our lives without giving God a second thought, God is with us. Jesus made that clear just by being born. But he also made it clear by the way he lived, by carrying out the “deeds of the Messiah” in his ministry, by dying on the cross and rising again to new life, and by promising that “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20).

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 12/18/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/KD-rPMjNnJI

[2] Cf. M. Eugene Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew,” New Interpreters Bible VIII:270: “To say that Jesus is the Christ is not only to say something about Jesus, but to transform the meaning of Christ as well” (emphasis original).

[3] Cf. Boring, “Matthew,” New Interpreters Bible VIII: 138: “for Matthew, the story of Jesus is a way of talking about God.  In Jesus and his story, God is with us.”

[4] The Study Catechism, 1988 (question 88 in the full version, question 66 in the confirmation version). This originated with Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2:735: “God does not will to be without us, but, no matter who and what we may be, to be with us, that He Himself is always ‘God with us,’ Emmanuel.” 

[5] Cf. Desmond Tutu, Made for Goodness, 198: “For Christians, finding our way home to God is not a ‘self-help’ project. Jesus Christ is our hope for complete wholeness, for healing that is salvation. And that hope has already been accomplished. So we are constantly called to experience the truth about us: that we are beloved of God.”