August 30 - “Divine Things, Human Things”
Divine Things, Human Things
Matthew 16:21-28
Romans 12:9-21
30 August 2026
Rev. Mary Nelson – First Congregational Church UCC, Williamstown MA
Matthew’s community is a little different from the other gospel writers’ communities. They’re a minority group (Jews) living probably in Antioch in Syria, a huge city in the Roman Empire, but outside of the traditional Jewish homeland of Judea (what we know as Israel-Palestine), somewhere around 75 to 85 CE – or 5-15 years after the Romans sacked Jerusalem. Matthew’s community were really wrestling with their identity in that context – they were a persecuted minority in this multicultural context, considering what they were hearing about the events shaping Jewish identity in Jerusalem and feeling removed from those experiences, but not wanting to assimilate into the wider Syrian scene, and they’re hearing stories about this Jesus guy, too, and he sounds pretty good, but they’re undecided about him, too.
So Matthew has written up for his community the stories of Jesus, and we’re about halfway through those stories today. Jesus’s life and ministry have made some pretty significant shifts around this point, and the narrative is making a shift, too. Jesus had been talking with his disciples, and they expressed their belief that Jesus is the Messiah, the Jewish figure who is supposed to save the Jewish people from an oppressive ruler or regime… and the text tells us, “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes.” The disciples have confessed their faith in Jesus, and he tells them what it really means to be this figure—it ain’t the glitz and glamour they thought it was going to be.
We know that Jesus’s story involves his horrible death at the hands of the Empire; we also know that his story doesn’t end with that death. We know his resurrection is coming, we know the emergence of the Early Church will follow, and so on and so forth throughout history. Matthew’s community knows some of that, too. They are part of the Early Church, although they have not yet fully decided that they want to be. Still, they know what’s coming.
Over the centuries, the traditions associated with the Messiah in Judaism included an element of apocalypticism. Thanks to terrible theology infusing itself into popular culture, when our modern ears hear the word “apocalypse” we think it is referring to the end of the world, the destruction of Creation, but it’s not: “apocalypse” means “revelation” or “unveiling” – that is, an apocalypse is when some hidden or unknown truth will be revealed. In particular, it was hoped that the Messiah would reveal (or cause the revealing of) this hidden truth, and that revelation would upend the social order somehow—the last would be first and the first would be last. And in the Early Church, there was a hope that the death and resurrection of Jesus would be the event that would kick off this social upheaval, and it would be accomplished within the lifetimes of the people who saw and heard and walked with him.
They weren’t hoping for this upheaval because they were “on the bottom” and they wanted to dominate or punish those in power, the weren’t after retribution. But in the Jewish tradition (and we have inherited this as well), there is an awareness of the brokenness of Creation, and a brokenness especially in humans’ relationship to power. We were commanded by God to be stewards of Creation, and to be in covenant with one another, and these relationships have gotten distorted, out of whack: they yearned for a rebalancing, a restoration of right relationship. And the apocalyptic hope of the Early Church was a desire to see that restoration of right relationship come about in their lifetimes. For some, the hope was that Jesus’s death and resurrection would cause that restoration; for others, the hope was that his death and resurrection would be the first sign of that restoration. Either way, this yearning for restoration to right relationship was present in the ongoing conversation of the followers of Jesus as they came to grips with his death and resurrection… and with the passage of time as the years went on and life in the Roman Empire went from bad to worse. The assurance that “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” was more needed than ever, after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, and as persecutions of both Jews and Christians escalated in the first century Empire. This persecution has got to end sometime. The rebalancing has got to come soon. Restoration of right relationship will happen in our lifetimes, or at least be more attainable. It’s got to get better.
Don’t we all need that assurance sometimes?
Eventually things did get better, though the first hearers of the gospel in Matthew’s community in Syrian Antioch may not have seen much relief from persecution in their lifetimes. Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity (some would call it a cooptation of Christianity) came nearly 250 years after Matthew wrote down the stories of Jesus for his church family. For some 1800 years, almost, Christianity has been the dominant religion (or at least the dominant cultural influence) in the Global North and West. And the imbalance of relationship has not tended much toward restoration with our ancestors in the faith wielding power, we must confess. Christianity has been twisted into a tool of Empire and oppression, colonization and white supremacy, sometimes just as harmful as Caesar’s oppression of the Jews and other minorities had been.
Today, we are far from being a “persecuted minority” (although there are times when it seems that Progressive Christianity could be a target for some), and we still yearn – and work, where we can – for the restoration of right relationship among all Creation. There is more work to do! But I want to believe, and I am sure you do, too: we want to believe that things will get better, and that they will get better in our lifetimes. We seek the restoration of clean water, clean air, clean soil. We seek the restoration of human rights, human dignity, locally and globally. We seek the restoration of peace and justice and equity for all… and we seek these things NOW. We seek them wholeheartedly. We seek them even at our own expense. Not because we’re hoping for the end of Creation, but because we’re hoping for its continuation!
We pray that this restoration of right relationship WILL happen in our lifetimes! And we pray that we can be a part of making it happen. And if it doesn’t, may we still be driven by that hope, and do all we can to reconcile what we can. So that we may be part of that restoration. This is the invitation of Matthew’s teaching, and the invitation of Jesus the Christ himself, that we may be part of restoring what is broken, repairing and healing and creating right relationship. May we do this in Jesus’ name. Amen.