an outside-in church

IMAGE: Ethiopian icon of the adoration of the magi. From the collection of the Centre for Coins Culture & Religious History, St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane. #3218

Feast of the Epiphany
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
5 January 2025

[ video ]

For much of the Twelve Days of Christmas we focus on the beautifully crafted story to be found in the Gospel of Luke.

Over seven successive episodes, Luke invites us into story of two boys—John and Jesus. We hear about the unusual circumstances of their respective conceptions and we glimpse the lives of two observant Jewish households (one based in a small village outside Jerusalem and the other in an even smaller village up north in Galilee). The parents of Jesus undertake a demanding 4-day journey by foot that takes them from Nazareth to Bethlehem just around the time that Jesus is born. Shepherds from the rocky limestone hills around Bethlehem come to see the Christ Child, after angels tell them of this child’s significance for all humanity. After prayers for the week-old baby in the temple, the family return to their home in Nazareth. Finally, some 12 years later, the holy family is back in Jerusalem once more and we find Jesus engaged in conversation with the religious leaders at the temple.

That’s the way Luke tells the story, and he tells it very well.

But there is another Christmas story in the NT, and we find it in the Gospel of Matthew.

Where Luke seeks to connect the birth of Jesus with the famous Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, Matthew wants his readers to link the birth of Jesus with the ancient Jewish legends of Moses and the great exodus from slavery in Egypt.

In Matthew the family do not come from Nazareth. Indeed, they only move there after returning from a brief period as refugees in Egypt. They are locals from Bethlehem and Jesus is born at their house.  There was no searching for somewhere for Mary to give birth to her first child. It was a home birth!

There is no mention of John or his parents in Matthew’s story, but Jospeh has dreams that guide his actions, like Joseph in the OT stories. There are no shepherds in Matthew, and angels in the night sky but—as read just now—there is another and very different set of visitors, and a king who seeks to destroy the Christ Child along with all the other baby boys in the area around Bethlehem. Another echo of the exodus story, but this time the holy family seek refuge in Egypt until the evil king had died.

Matthew is telling the story of Jesus for Jewish Christians, and he wants them to understand Jesus as Moses 2.0; a bigger and more significant version of the great leader from the past.

As I have done for the past few services, I encourage to read the opening chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. You will see that it tells a very different story from Luke, although we have somehow learned how to blend these two different stories so well in our minds that we do not even notice the massive differences between them.

Most of the time we do not pay attention to what the Bible says about the birth of Jesus, because we think we already know that story so well.

As always, my advice is to read the Bible—carefully and with our eyes-wide-open.

We miss the messages that both Luke and Matthew are seeking to convey if we do not listen to each of their stories in their own words and for their own sake.

We need to stop mortgaging Christmas to the nativity play.

So here is the thing, Matthew is writing for Jewish disciples of Jesus.

These were people who valued tradition, and in their religion there were lots of rules. They were a bit like us in some ways.

One of the most important rules related to outsiders. Jews and only Jews were God’s chosen people. Everyone else was an outsider. The covenant blessings were only for the insiders. For the Jews.

Insiders and outsiders. Honour and shame. Us and them.

But Matthew had some tough news for his Jewish Christian readers (hearers, actually).

Matthew could see that the good news that Jesus both lived and proclaimed was for everyone.

By the last scene of his Gospel, Matthew will have Jesus sending the disciples to all nations:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. [Matthew 28:19-20]

Just as Luke created his opening 2 chapters as kind of overture for the whole story he would present in Luke and Acts, so Matthew has created an overture for his account of Jesus.

His overture draws heavily on major Jewish themes: a genealogy tracing Jesus’ descent back to Abraham, Joseph the dreamer, an evil king seeking to murder all the Jewish boys, and the miraculous preservation of the child of destiny who escapes to Egypt (of all places).

All of that would only confirm Matthew’s readers in their view that God favours the insiders, the chosen people.

So Matthew adds one special extra detail: a visit by pagan astrologers from the East.

We are so familiar with this bit of the story in Matthew that we fail to appreciate what he was doing.

The people should not have been in the story.

They were not Jews, Worse still, they were astrologers. Everything about them made them outsiders, and their religion was forbidden by the Old Testament.

But these despised outsiders with their false religion were the only people who recognised Jesus as the Christ Child.

In his nearby party palace, all Herod saw was a threat to his own power.

The stargazers were the ones who got it right, and they embodied the upside-down news that Matthew wanted his readers to understand.

Like them, we can be a church that values our traditions so much that the rules come first and people come last.

We have lots of rules.

But not so many people these days.

I wonder why that might be?

As he tells the story of Jesus, Matthew is going to take his readers on a journey so they eventually understand that God’s love is for everyone.

The outsider belongs inside.

The kingdom of God is an outside-in society.

We exist for the sake of those who are not yet here.

As we celebrate the Epiphany—the manifestation of Christ to the nations—we ask God to erase the boundaries between us and them, insiders and outsiders, pure and impure.

Everything we do is help those who are not yet part of our community discover God’s love for them, and for us.

We too were once outsiders.

Now we all have a place at the table of Jesus.