Matthew 1: 1-17 - The Upside-Down Jesus. What if God was all of us?

Reading:  Matthew 1: 1-17

Thoughts arising from sitting in the silence of Quaker worship in Newcastle on New Year's Day, 2017.


This passage from the Bible was written with purposes in mind.  Every passage was.  There isn't a single word of the book that we can claim is just plain, simple history.  There are meanings and agendas behind every verse, every story.  In the gospel of John we read an agenda when the gospel writer says, "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

Every verse of every gospel is the same.  Backed by agendas and beliefs.  They're not history books.   On a shelf opposite me I have books about the history of Newcastle.  On the table next to me is a book about the history of Manchester.  These books have an agenda too:  To teach about the way things were and how people lived in the past.  Perhaps the authors may have tried to make social or political points too.  Perhaps they have added their own judgements to the events of history.  Perhaps not.  In any case, their books are there to teach and to inform; to help the reader understand a little of our human story.

The gospels are not history books though they claim to tell a history, a story of one man and the people surrounding him.  The gospels are polemic.  They are evangelistic.  They weren't written so you could understand the conditions in a Victorian poor house or even the conditions for a Roman slave.  They were written to convert you to a belief, to a life and to keep you converted.

Every word was written by zealous believers, men thinking that their way was the right way, men thinking that other people should follow that way too.  Every word was written in order to convince others that this man Jesus was worthy of surrendering your life to, living for, and that he brought hope to the world in a unique way.

Not only that, our understanding of those words traditionally came from more men who thought the same way and who set in stone and doctrine their "correct" interpretations of the gospels, their "correct" understanding of Jesus, and a firmer and firmer belief that outside of Jesus there was no hope at all.

When we look at the genealogy of Jesus as recorded in Matthew - and as recorded differently in Luke - we don't see the hand of the historian.  We see the hand of the religious apostle trying to convince us that their thinking about Jesus is correct.  We see him writing too in his own social, political, religious and scientific context.

In short, the genealogy you might have read was written to show you that Jesus is special.  That he is unique.  It was written to prove that Jesus was THE Messiah promised long before and that he is worthy to be worshiped.  It was written to prove that Jesus is special.  And specially unique.  Volumes have been written just about the two genealogy passages.  People have come up with lots of ideas about the ways Jesus is shown to be special and unique and about why the two passages are so different.  I don't want to talk about any of those ideas.  All you need to know is this:

The family history of Jesus in Matthew is the beginning of a gospel written by a man with a particular religious viewpoint, a particular view of Jesus and a particular zeal for expressing that view as the truth.

The family history of Jesus and the entire gospel was written to show you that Jesus is special, unique and that he wasn't just a human.  It was written to show that Jesus is worth following and worshiping and dying with precisely because he is so different from us.  Heck, he's God incarnate, one of a kind.  He's messiah, one of a kind.

That's the Jesus I followed for 25 years.  But it's the Jesus I can no longer follow.

What I'm going to talk of today is a different Jesus.  I'm going to give you the upside-down Jesus.  And then I'm going to suggest that the Jesus I'm speaking of is closer to the Jesus of history and that the Jesus of orthodox Christianity is the upside-down one.

I'm going to proclaim that Jesus and the stories about him are worth paying attention to for one simple reason:

Jesus was ordinary.

Yes.  That's right.  I did say that.  Jesus was ordinary.  He spoke deep truths as an ordinary man.  He attracted followers as an ordinary man.  He was just like you.  Just like me.

The Jesus of Christianity is far removed from us.  He's God.  He's perfect.  He doesn't make sense.  In three gospels we read narratives of Jesus being tempted.  But he's God.  And really, when push comes to shove, there's no way that Jesus could have given in to the temptation.  The Christian Jesus makes the stories meaningless.  But when he's an ordinary man and temptation comes ... that's the moment the story has something worthwhile to teach us.

The whole Jesus is fully incarnate God and one-third of the Trinity while being fully man has never really made sense.  Christianity, once it codified the dogmas, has worked on the assumption that it's true and theologians and preachers have battled with the contradictions arising - preferring to call contradictions "mysteries."  Theologians have looked at the concept of God emptying himself to become man (it's in chapter two of the letter to the Philippians) and have piled theory onto theory of how that works out and how God and Man are held together in one person.  Each theory ultimately fails.  Why?  Is it because it hasn't fully expressed a truth?  Or is it because it's not a truth at all?  I used to preach the former.  I now believe the latter.

I no longer look upon Jesus as uniquely special.  That's meaningless for my life.  I can no longer follow that Jesus. 

I believe he was ordinary.  And his followers couldn't cope with an ordinary Jesus.  So they bigged him up!  They kept inventing ways in which he wasn't ordinary, was special, until they had made him into God - completely missing the point and misinterpreting the things he said about ordinary people.

When Jesus prayed and meditated he did so as an ordinary man.  When he loved he loved as an ordinary man.  When he spoke he spoke to ordinary people as an ordinary man.  When he cried he cried the tears of a man and when he laughed he laughed as a man.  Curiously he never laughs in the Bible.  The gospel writers had become that out of touch with his humanity.  You have to look to the gnostic and so-called apocryphal texts to find Jesus being that much of a human.  When Jesus ate and drank he was an ordinary man and when the story takes us into his suffering he is suffering as an ordinary man.

And that's a Jesus worth following.  That's a Jesus worth listening to.

He's ordinary.  He's just one of us.

That doesn't mean that he's not extraordinary though.  He was.  An ordinary man, fully realising truths and living an extraordinary life.

I believe his life has been mythologised, that many of the events we read of didn't actually happen.  I believe stories have been lifted from pagan religions, words have been borrowed, inventions have been devised, and facts greatly exaggerated through years of religious enthusiasm by a bunch of great people who couldn't quite cope with their ordinary shepherd.  But I'm not sure that matters.  I'm going to be looking at whether the stories can teach us - with an ordinary Jesus and without preaching the existence of a God.  Perhaps, just as those early Christians created a Jesus they could follow I am in exactly the same business of creating a Jesus who says words I can listen to.

The creeds say that Jesus was fully divine and fully human.  I agree with that.  However, I would go on to say that we are all fully divine and fully human.  We have forgotten our divinity.  And we fail to live as the humans we are.

This upside-down Jesus can teach us.  To remember our divinity.  And to learn to be human.

The Jesus who is said to have preached the Sermon on the Mount preached it as an ordinary person to ordinary people.  And then he lived the sermon and taught us how we might learn to live it too.  The Jesus who told us that the kingdom of heaven is within us told us that as an ordinary person speaking to ordinary people.  And then he lived it.  He showed us the kingdom of heaven in himself and so showed us the kingdom of heaven in us.

He's ordinary.  And so are we.

He's extraordinary.  And so might we be.  Precisely because he is one of us.  The same.

I tried to follow "The Imitation of Christ" for twenty years.  But really, when all is said and done, what was the point of that?  The person I tried to imitate was so much different to me that it was impossible.  I might as well have tried to imitate a storm cloud by wringing out a wet sponge, flashing a torch and shouting "Boom!"  Imitating a uniquely divine, uniquely powerful, one of a kind Jesus is a fool's errand.

But imitating the ordinary Jesus?  I might be able to set foot on that path.  By the time I reach the close of the fourth gospel I might be walking it.  Or I might decide there are other paths equally worthy of walking and walk those.  At this point I need to find out.  Is the godless gospel worth my time?  Is the ordinary Jesus worth sitting with as a friend?  I invite you to find out with me.

Matthew 1:1-17 - Four Ideas From Forty Generations

Reading:  Matthew chapter 1, verses 1 to 17.

Image originally from http://sacredsandwich.com/ but I can't find the page.

I've been thinking about these verses for the past week, wondering what to say.  I've always found that they make for a very difficult beginning to the New Testament.  I'd open the book and the first thing I'd be presented with was a dull family tree and I didn't know quite what to do with this list of names.  I had plenty of choices and I've found myself wondering about four in particular, none of which have felt right.  They're not wrong.  They're just not right for me now or right for what I'd like this blog to become.

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It would have been easy enough to write about how the genealogy recorded in Matthew points to the inclusiveness of the message of Jesus.  A radical inclusiveness in which nobody is excluded.  I'd have written about the women included in the list of names - Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah, and of course Mary.  Five women among forty men.  I'd write of gender inclusivity.  I'd have written about how those five women included foreigners, about how they included those known for sin too.  Inclusiveness.  But that's been done many times before.

Interestingly I've never heard anyone talk about how many of the men in that list committed grievous sins in the Old Testament men of whom it isn't recorded that they did anything good at all, just that they "did evil in the eyes of the Lord."

And while I've heard sermons about those women and been told that God accepts outcasts and people from all walks of life I never heard in those sermons about the man who was from an almost despised underclass - a shepherd.  A man who was accepted and who became king of Israel.

I find that all the radically inclusive sermons I've heard - even those I've heard in inclusive churches - are not inclusive enough.

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For a day I was toying with writing about "begat".  The King James Bible is known for all the begatting!  On Christmas day I was listening to carols and one of them points to Jesus as being special because he's "begotten not made" echoing the words of the Nicene Creed of AD325.  I could have written about how we are all begotten and how traditionally Christianity claimed that Jesus was begotten of God - so was himself God.  I toyed with that idea.  And hastily moved on.

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I considered talking about verse 17.  A good verse for the first day of 2017.  The translation linked to above reads, "So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations."

All those fourteens.  Impressive the way that works.  It's also interesting that Hebrew numerology ascribes numbers to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the letters of David add up to fourteen.

What I would have written about is that the verse is wrong.  Plainly, patently, obviously, glaringly wrong!  Count the generations for yourself if you wish.  There's one missing.  Why is that?  Personally I think it's just a scribal error that got into the received text or that the gospel writer was mistaken in the first place.  But what if there's a reason for the missing generation?

What if there is mystery in something so simple?  I was all set to write about the joy of mystery and the wonder of not knowing the answers.

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Then I wondered if I wouldn't be able to turn off my scholar's head.  I thought of writing about the differences between the genealogy of Jesus as recorded by Matthew and Luke and about the different reasons people have come up with for the discrepancy and how they have tried to explain it all away.  I thought of writing about what Matthew was wanting to prove and what Luke was trying to prove and the things they were wanting to say about Jesus.

I am in a privileged position these days.  In years gone by I believed the Bible to be the inerrant word of God.  Whatever it said had to be true and I went to a great deal of trouble to try to defend it.  It's an illogical quest but sometimes a conservative and monolithic faith triumphs over reason.  Ultimately the inerrancy of the Bible is indefensible.  I realise that now.

Today my conclusion about the two genealogies is simple:  They are fabrications.  They are stories to prove a religious point.  They are tales to convert the unconverted,  Jews and gentiles alike.  They are lists of names drawn together to fulfill loose prophecies and provide a Jesus who might be worthy of adoration.

For most of my Christian life I wouldn't have been able to begin to accept such a conclusion.  I found the image above, without attribution, on a page telling me that though the genealogies are very different, "sound" scholars have provided reasonable explanations.  I know those explanations.  I don't believe they hold up to critical analysis but I know them.  And I believed that at least one of them had to be true because everything in the Bible was true.

I find that, now I am not a "Christian", my belief is far more in line with the bulk of modern biblical scholarship.  I note that the Wiki page on the genealogy of Jesus mentions in its first paragraph two scholars I now respect deeply, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan - men whose work I once found reprehensible and grossly anti-Christianity.  It seems that I am in broad agreement with them on this passage.  The fundamentalist claims that men like Borg are not Christians.  He would have claimed otherwise.  Maybe his deep faith rested on something far more deeply rooted than a book.  It's only now, as a post-Christian, that I find myself able to consider reading his writings.

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I could have written about any one of those topics when considering this passage.  I'm not going to.  As I sat in a Quaker meeting house this morning an idea arose and I knew that I had to write from that idea.  It's an idea that will explain from the outset what I currently believe about Jesus.  It's an idea that may give me a clue as to a reason why Jesus may still be worth following - even with my beliefs.

It's a simple idea:  The passage entirely misses the point about Jesus!

Now there's a sermon I've never heard.  In the next post I will write it.  Or possibly in the post after that because that wasn't the only idea arising from the silence of Quaker worship today.  I've just got to skip forward an entire gospel to express the other idea and to ask you questions.

Next time I'll get into the real work of this blog.  The real pleasure too.  I apologise that today was more a laying aside of the some of the things standing in the way of how I want to approach the gospels.