We’ve returned to the Gospel of Matthew; and so again, our lesson from Isaiah sounds as if it were teeing up the Gospel lesson. To Christian ears, it may even sound as if Isaiah was anticipating Jesus. But, as I said two Sundays ago, Isaiah wasn’t anticipating Jesus any more than Isaiah was anticipating George Frederic Handel. Isaiah wasn’t anticipating Emmanuel Church either, but here we are again! It’s is exactly the other way around. Probably in Antioch of Syria at least two generations after Jesus’ death, Matthew was living and growing in the teachings and stories of Jesus. Matthew’s audience was living with the political, economic, legal, religious, and cultural consequences of Roman imperialism, just as we are living with the consequences of American imperialism. [1] Retelling those teachings and stories about Jesus in a written Gospel toward the end of the first century of the Common Era, Matthew was thinking, “These stories sound so much like the stories that Isaiah told eight-hundred years ago!” Matthew wanted to make sure that his community heard and understood the connections. I want to make sure that my community hears and understands the connections, too. 

Isaiah was most likely writing about Gideon, who, when the angel of the Lord visited him to say, “The Lord is with you,” replied, “But, Sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this [calamity] happened to us?” Then God’s Very Self turned to Gideon and said, “Go in your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; I hereby commission you.” And Gideon replied, “But, Sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” (In other words, “I am the weakest of the weak! I have no strength! What on earth can I do to stop the imperial oppression of the Midianites?”) The Lord said to him, “I will be with you.” [2] And so the story goes in the Book of Judges that Gideon freed his people from the oppressive rule of the Midianites.

When the prophet Isaiah was recalling in his beautiful poetry the surprising defeat of Midianite oppression, he was offering assurance that Assyrian oppression would be overcome as well. I learned this week that the territories of Zebulun and Naphtali were not just lost tribes of Israel, they were the least and last in importance among the twelve. In other words, the lost, least, and last would be restored and redeemed.

Right after the verses before us, Isaiah declared that a child had already been born who would carry the authority of God on his shoulders, a child who would be called Wonderful Counselor, because he would be wise and discerning; Mighty God, because he would be filled with powers; Everlasting Father, because he would be generative and protective; Prince of Peace, because everything would fall in order for the wellbeing of the people.  Isaiah wrote that when this child came of age, he would use his authority to establish peace through justice and righteousness. Peace, according to Isaiah, is possible in the coming generation, so don’t lose hope.

By the time that Matthew was writing his Gospel account of Jesus, some eight-hundred years later, the oppression of the Assyrians, and later of the Babylonians, had long been overcome and the land restored. By Matthew’s time, however, the people of God were living under the oppressive authority of the Roman Empire. He wanted his community of the lost, least, and last to know that Jesus was a child born into the family of the Holy One; so Matthew listed Jesus’ ancestors all the way back to Abraham. At the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew’s beginning, he quotes the beginning of Isaiah two times. The first is in his birth narrative about Jesus, when Matthew wrote that Jesus would be called Emmanuel. This was a direct challenge to Caesar’s claim to be the divine presence. Matthew’s second Isaiah quote comes in his description of the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry. Biblical scholar Warren Carter makes a convincing case for why Matthew was reminding them of Isaiah: Matthew wanted to make sure that everyone was looking backward and forward to understand how Jesus was going to carry out his mission to make manifest the presence of the Holy One under a harsh imperial reality. [3]

Matthew wanted to make sure everyone understood that God opposed imperial power, that imperial power was a direct consequence of people turning away from God (Who is Love), and that the dreadful consequence would not last forever, because Love would take the initiative.[4] For Matthew, Love was trying again, because Jesus had offered freedom for his people from the oppressive rule of the Romans. Of course the Romans were still in authority, but Jesus’ followers had been liberated from the fear of death. Once (or whenever) you stop fearing death, you can start living and loving so much more fully; then imperialism has no power over you.

Isaiah’s defiant poetry became Matthew’s, as his defiant poetry becomes ours. What follows almost immediately in Matthew is Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which starts with the Beatitudes, which we’ll hear read next Sunday. Jesus began by laying out an alternative to imperial oppression, which emphasized strengthening relationships, emphasized communal economic practices, and advocated for non-violent resistance to imperial violence and personal misery. [5]

I think about what poet Adrienne Rich had to say about the role of the poet in an essay she entitled, “Defy the Space That Separates.” She wrote: [6]

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

According to Matthew, when Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been arrested and handed over to Herod Antipas, he picked up where John had left off and, indeed, quoted him directly. Jesus headed to the Galilee, which was a part of Herod Antipas’ domain, so he wasn’t getting safe: he was getting brave.  He began by recruiting two pairs of brothers from the fishing village of Capernaum. Maybe he already knew them from his earlier visit with John the Baptist; or, maybe Matthew knew a different tradition about how they met. The idea that they left “immediately” often stirs up anxious conversation in Bible-study groups. If you also feel it, it might help you to know that the word translated immediately could refer to a very short amount of time, as in instantly or right away; or, it could mean the very next event which is relevant to the total context. It might be like looking back on a sequence of events and saying, “The next thing you know, they put down their fishing nets, left their boats, and started traveling with Jesus.” It might have been a matter of minutes or a matter of days or months. Jesus and those first followers might have been total strangers to each other, or they might have known each other for a while; we don’t know. We do know that they didn’t leave fishing completely, because of the Gospel stories that happen on or near the sea throughout Jesus’ ministry and after his death. What they heard and saw from Jesus was evidently some kind of wake-up call, and it was compelling enough to stop everything and go with Jesus.

We have had our own kinds of wake-up calls: the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, illnesses, or accidents. We have inherited three key messages for when wake-up calls come:

1. Death does not overcome love; Love never ends.
2. You are not more precious or less precious in the eyes of God than anyone else.
3. Our journey as Christians goes by way of the cross.

Paul says that this message is foolishness to those who are not Jesus followers, but that it represents to those who are being saved by the life and love of Jesus Christ, the power of God to redeem whatever is most hurtful, most shameful, most devastating. [7] When we get to today’s cantata, I invite you to substitute the word Love for the words God and Lord. I guarantee it will make more sense to your twenty-first-century ears. It’s not my innovation; it’s a first-century Gospel message: God is Love. If you believe nothing else, I urge you to believe in the will of Love and the power of Love, because it’s Love that will never abandon.

1. Warren Carter, “Evoking Isaiah: Matthean soteriology and an intertextual reading of Isaiah 7-9 and Matthew 1:23 and 4:15-16,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 119 no. 3, Fall 2000, p. 511.
2. Judges 6:1-16.
3. Carter, op. cit., p. 518.
4. Ibid., pp. 511-2.
5. Ibid., p. 519.
6.  Adrienne Rich, “Defy the Space That Separates”, The Nation, October 7, 1996.
7. 1 Corinthians 1: 18.