4th Sunday Advent A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2016

What was Matthew up to in shaping his story of the origin of Jesus? Unlike Luke, Matthew was a Jew; and for Jews the Jewish Law, the Torah, was highly important. In today’s translation Matthew described Joseph as a “man of honour”. More helpful, perhaps, would have been something like “law-observant”, a man who respected the Torah. And Matthew made it clear that the law-observant Joseph, by naming Jesus and thereby claiming him as his son, clearly initiated Jesus into the Jewish people. Jesus was essentially a Jew. We must not forget that; and he remained a faithful Jew all his life.

Interestingly, Joseph named the child “Jesus”. Matthew gave us the theological reason why. Yet was it, perhaps, just a happy coincidence that the name “Jesus” meant something quite important in the Aramaic language? Whatever, the name meant “one who saves from sin”. A lot of names have meanings, especially in some other cultures more than ours. [Mum and Dad named me ‘John’. In Aramaic John means, “God is gracious”, for which I am very grateful – though they had no idea of its meaning when they gave the name to me. It was simply the name of dad’s father.]

This morning I would like to reflect briefly on Jesus as the one who “saves from sin”. The word sin, in the language of the Gospels, meant “missing the mark”, or “missing the point”. Later on, Jesus made it clear that the reason why he operated the way he did was so that we might have “life to the full”. He also made it clear that we live life to the full as we “love God” with everything and “our neighbour as ourselves”. When we don’t, when we miss the point, when we sin, we cripple life for ourselves and for each other.

The point of laws, of the Torah, of moral laws, is to clarify what such living involves in practice. Unfortunately, for some reason or other, it seems easy simply to focus on practices. Love certainly involves practices but it involves considerably more than practices. It is firstly an inner attitude towards self and others, a function of the kind of person I am. To focus on outer practices and ignore the inner attitude is to miss the point. Without love, practices do not give life. They might ensure a certain order, which can be helpful and even sometimes necessary – like road laws or tax laws. But they are more a condition for than the actual content of “life to the full”.

Human persons generally seem to have a tendency to absolutise laws and to forget the attitudes they are meant to express. In doing so, we create small “g” gods everywhere. We fill our lives with a variety of obsessions and compulsions that can even look good, look virtuous, but are destructive of the freedom necessary for love. They miss the point of the commandment, “You shall not have other gods before me” – small “g” gods. Jesus, for example, insisted that, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. That was why he healed on the Sabbath – because his healing revealed the goodness of God, in the hope that it would lead to faith and to personal growth.

Right at the beginning of his Gospel, in his story of the origins of Jesus, Matthew temporarily shone the light on the issue of law-observance [that would be worked at in greater detail in Jesus’ later public ministry]. Jesus fell foul of the professional virtuous, the Pharisees, the “culture warriors” of his day, always defensive of the law. They could not, or would not, understand his approach. As a true Jew, faithful to the Torah, he tried to focus people on the point, the essential purpose of the Torah: “life to the full” within the “Covenant people”. It eventually cost him his life.

“You shall name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”