You must change your life

Matthew 1-4

It struck me already what a unique book this is.  Since I’m starting with the Gospels, I get to read several versions of the same story.  I get to read the birth of the Savior three times (John skips that part) and his crucifixion four times.  If God had anything to do with how this book was written, he must have cared that 1) there was more than one witness and 2) that in the telling of his son’s life there were certain details that were so important they needed to be recorded more than once. 

Here are the main points I learned this week:

1) History (personal & otherwise) matters.  In a world where we are obsessed with the Self, where teenagers and anyone nearing a mid-life crisis labors to “discover” themselves, we only need to read the first few verses of this book to gain some real, lasting perspective.  The infamous begats teach the reader scope. We are connected intrinsically to a line of other people whose stories also matter.  We are part of something vast.  Those verses (so easy to skip over!) say what Jesus tries to show us later when he stops everything to heal that one person: every life matters.  And maybe the value of our life is found more in our connections to other people than we realize.  Even if those people have been dead a long, long time.

2) Signs are not obvious to everyone.  Herod and the three wisemen slept under the same night sky.  This was a time before electricity, before city lights blocked out the light of the heavens, before haze and pollution clouded the view.  The sky must have been brilliant, each celestial light clear and distinguishable from the rest.  I can’t imagine there being any excuse for not seeing this amazing new star pull into town and sit there in all its glory.  

Three men saw this star far off “from the east,” saw it well enough to navigate their whole journey by it, while a man who lived almost directly below it largely ignored it until three men showed up and had the audacity to ask for another king . Either Herod was blind (which we have no record of) or totally daft (which seems plausible) or so distanced from these prophecies that even when the star was sitting above him he couldn’t make anything of it.  When people cry the old “show me a sign,” is it possible that the sign is already there, big and bright and hanging (literally) right over their heads? 

3) God loves understatement.  In Genesis, after God spent six days laboring over the creation of everything on earth, he stood back to examine his handiwork.  Of all the exclamations he could have made, he chose the seemingly anti-climactic “It is good.”  In Matthew Chapter 3 when his son starts his ministry by first being baptized, he speaks over the scene and introduces his son as his beloved in whom he’s “well pleased.”  And in Matthew Chapter 4 when Jesus enters the wilderness and fasts for forty days and nights, the record says “he was afterward an hungred.” (I realize that it is Matthew speaking there and not God himself, but it seems fairly consistent with the rest and, if he’s overseeing the recording of his gospel, I would think God also helps direct the writing of it.) This last one almost makes me laugh every time.  Not to be disrespectful at all, but it’s got to be the understatement of all Time. Maybe this was Matthew’s way of saying that, despite his being divine, Jesus also got hungry, but I think there’s more to it than that.  There is a kind of profound modesty going on here. 

If you don’t know someone well, if you’re just getting to know them , it helps to have someone who does know them well explain little things to you like, “Oh that’s how he is.  He’s just being modest.”  And then you know to look deeper at what they say.  But since we don’t generally interact with God this way, maybe we miss those things and misread him.

One of the most modest people I’ve ever known was my grandmother.  Every time you complimented her, she would chuckle, pat your hand, and call you a “little ‘weetheart.”  And then she’d ask you about you.  She avoided all drama and went for the simple and genuine. 

Each year near the holidays I would drive up north to her home and we would dip homemade chocolates so that she could hand them out to everyone over Christmas.  We always chatted a good bit while we worked, and I think it was during these conversations that I came to know her best.  One year we landed on the topic of my cousin Dixie, who had been my age and one of my closest cousins growing up.  When she was twenty-three years old, Dixie died giving birth to her third child.  It was a devastating loss, and I still missed her.  I don’t remember what we said about her exactly, but I do remember that my grandma paused a moment to think of her and said with a sigh, “She was a nice girl.” 

A nice girl?  If you didn’t know my grandma, this statement could have seemed almost cold, even distant.  You could have said, this was her granddaughter, not some person who came to her door selling Avon or whom she knew vaguely and who complimented her hair.  You would have missed the genuine affection she held for someone she could see not only as her granddaughter, but as an individual who she appreciated and missed.  Dixie was nice, she was kind in a way that came naturally to her, and to my grandma in particular, she was a girl.  Twenty-three must have seemed extraordinarily young to someone in their mid 80s. 

The thing about modesty is that there’s always more to discover.  Understatement means that, beneath this one phrase, there is a mountain of meaning.  And, when applied to one’s self, it signifies real humility.  God is modest about himself.  So when he talks about how he “so loved the world,” when he lays down his laws and judgments in detail and – to our less refined ears – seems to go on and on about what we should and shouldn’t do and why, we can know that he is doing all he can to be clear, to lay it out so that there is no mistaking what is at stake here. We need to know his laws because we live in those laws.  He is trying to teach us about us.  And, if we’re paying close attention, we also learn a lot about him.

4) You must change your life. I do not use understatement.  I tend to overstate.  Years ago, I had a friend who, when describing me, said, “You know Sunni, she always over-exaggerates.”  (I guess she was guilty of it too.)  In the scope of everything I need to change about myself, that characteristic seems trivial, but I also recognize that I am not all that modest about myself either.  If we are supposed to be like God, I’m sure there are endless things for me to work on.

And that is the main message not only of this section of the Gospels but of the entire New Testament.  We need to change.  John the Baptist comes crying “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and one chapter later Jesus is crying the same thing. 

The call to change is more than uncomfortable.  It is offensive.  We're afraid it means we aren’t good enough already, but if the kingdom of heaven is at hand, I’m guessing it means there’s something better in store.  And everything that Jesus and his followers do from here on out illustrates that.