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Center for Theology, Lenoir-Rhyne University
St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist
September 21, 2003
Pericope Study
Old Testament Lesson: Ezekiel 2:8 - 3:11
"But you, son of man, hear what I say to you; be not rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you." And when I looked, behold, a hand was stretched out to me, and, low, a written scroll was in it; and he spread it before me; and it had writing on the front and on the back, and there were written on it words of lamentation and mourning and woe. And he said to me, "Son of man, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel." So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. And he said to me, "Son of man, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it." Then I ate it and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.
And he said to me, "Son of man, go, get you to the house of Israel, and speak with my words to them. For you are not sent to a people of foreign speech and a hard language, but to the house of Israel--not to many peoples of foreign speech and a hard language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely, if I sent you to such, they would listen to you. But the house of Israel will not listen to you; for they are not willing to listen to me; because all the house of Israel are of a hard forehead and of a stubborn heart. Behold, I have made your face hard against their faces, and your forehead hard against their foreheads. Like adamant harder than flint have I made your forehead; fear them not, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house." Moreover he said to me, "Son of man, all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart, and hear with your ears. And go, get you to the exiles, to your people, and say to them, 'Thus says the Lord God'; whether they hear or refuse to hear." - RSV
1. The scroll was good and sweet, though the words were lamentation and mourning and woe. And the commission was hard, harder than flint … to a people of hard forehead and stubborn heart. It was not the exile that first hardened the foreheads and the hearts of the people of Israel, not Jerusalem's desolation, not Babylon's alien separation, nor even its persistent efforts of cultural "cleansing." The hearts and the foreheads were stubborn already before there was a Nebuchadnezzar … at least as far back as Elijah and continuing on through Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The words of woe were not new. What was new was the lamentation. And the mourning. But the hardness of forehead and heart were chronic and enduring. God's instructions include the caveat: "whether they hear or refuse to hear."
2. Interesting that the pericope text ends with verse eleven. The following sections are telling, also, as to both the prophet's state of mind and the Lord's determination. The Spirit of the Lord lifts him up, amid sounds of earthquake and wings of the living creatures of the vision of chapters 1 and 2. He goes to the exiles at Tel-abib, by the river Chebar, and there sat "overwhelmed among them seven days." At the end of his fasting, God instructs him further: "Son of man, I have made you a watchman over the house of Israel … If I say to the wicked, 'You shall surely die,' and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way … (he) shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand." Verses 16-21 carry several versions of the same warning: if you warn the wicked, then whatever they do - whether repent or not - you will have "saved your life." But if you do not warn them, as I instruct, then their blood "I will require at your hand." The mantle of the prophet is to be under Divine mandate. The burden of the prophet is to be both under warning from God and assault from the people. The people are hard of heart and forehead. God makes it clear that He means business. No wonder the prophet sits overwhelmed for seven days.
3. There is more (vs. 22-27): "Go, shut yourself within your house. And … behold, cords will be placed upon you … so that you cannot go out among the people; and I will make your tongue cleave to the roof of your mouth, so that you shall be (mute) and unable to reprove them; for they are a rebellious house. But when I speak with you, I will open your mouth and you shall say to them, 'Thus says the Lord God'; he that will hear, let him hear; and he that will refuse to hear, let him refuse; for they are a rebellious house."
4. The "rebellious house" motif strikes a familiar cord. It is, both after all and from the first, the central defining characteristic of the human race. The ancient Hebrews and their Christian descendants understood sin as both the condition and the yield of a fundamental unwillingness to let God be God. The sins of the Israelites included, and prominently so, idolatry and economic injustice - chief targets of the radical prophets from the 8th century on. That the sins were the more egregious in the later years is less probable than that simply time "ran out." Jeremiah had already confounded the apologists for the Josiah and post-Josiah reform with his gloom-and-doom message. Those who were bewildered wondered how the deuteronomic Josiah reform was too little or too late. Jeremiads not withstanding, the "people" are portrayed as insisting on the validity of their fidelity, while the Lord plainly reckoned differently.
5. And the task of the prophet has ever been that of saying the hard word to hard foreheads and hard hearts. Ask Jeremiah, whose laments are first of his own lot as prophet, and only later for the fate of the people. "Why did I come forth from the womb, to see toil and sorrow, and to spend my days in shame"? Shame he saw and endured, but his prophetic word and actions live on. Ezekiel has a different chore. The people, even in their degraded captivity, still harbor hardness of heart and forehead … the country folk of my upbringing called it "hardheaded" or "bullheaded" or "mule-headed." Not much difference, there. Stubbornness combined with hardheartedness is not a profile of spiritual vitality, to say nothing of humility or maturity. Humility by now they ought to have learned, by the river Chebar. In the 30th year. But God's call to Ezekiel is to be steadfast to such a people. God even tells him that he will mostly be tongue-tied. And that God will give him both the ability to speak and the words to utter. So the call to be prophet is simple: Do it, instead of avoid it - or you as well as the unrepentant will suffer the consequences. The people are a tough sell, but you are called simply to testify on the Lord's behalf. And he will give you both tongue and words. Not a commission for the faint of heart. Or maybe some there are who are "born to the mantle of prophet," whose courage is not deterred but only whetted by a hardhearted people. Contrarians by nature? Not Jeremiah. And not Ezekiel.
6. Word of comfort and of hope. Not many such words here, either to the prophet or to the people. But such words do come from prophets. Read deutero and dritte Isaiah. The hard word and the word of comfort are not always, or even commonly, said together. But a prophet can be called to both, in different seasons, as instructed by the Lord. The key is, as Reinhold Niebuhr so beautifully put it, "the wisdom to know the difference." It helps if one has a vision or oracle from the Lord. To most of us it is given that we (as pastors) observe the times and ponder the scriptures and proclaim words of both law and gospel, judgment and hope. The bite of the prophetic word is not only in the confrontation but especially in the specifics: what is it that the Lord would have us call to the attention of our people? Ezekiel knows that there are shepherds (c. 34) whose care of their flocks is negligent, or even malicious. We are not called to negligence or malice, but to law and gospel, judgment and hope. Comfort, comfort ye my people….make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
7. But, for Ezekiel, not yet. For Ezekiel is to speak judgment upon the hard of heart and forehead. Upon the shepherds. And the Lord gave him the assignment, as well as both tongue and words.
JLY - 09.16.03
MATTHEW 9:9-13
What a change for Matthew. When we first meet him he probably sat with his back to the wall so that no one could get behind him. He was a tax collector. He experienced the rejection that people have always felt for people who take away some of their hard-earned income and offer them nothing in return that they can see. Tax collectors got their income by keeping whatever they could collect from people over the amount they had to pay to the government and they had a reputation for seeing to it that this would be considerable. They also saw Matthew as a man who had sacrificed loyalty to his people to do this - he was gathering money from his own people for a government that had conquered them. In short, he was a traitor. And this is the man we call a saint today!
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth;
Mark (2:13-17) and Luke (5:27-32) also tell of Jesus calling a tax collector and then eating at his house with a crowd of other people with bad reputations, but identify him as Levi rather than Matthew. Is this a second name of Matthew or another person? If the same person, imagine how the Pharisees would be disturbed to find a man with one name that identified him as a gift of Yahweh and another name which said he could help with the sacrifices to Yahweh, who was gathering taxes for a pagan government which had occupied their holy country.
There are some people in our day and in our experience whom one would rather not see in church. What do we say to people who are not properly dressed for the occasion? Or to those whose occupation is a denial of Christian ethics?
And he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him.
Most of the time we are spared the worry because we can make improperly dressed people feel uncomfortable enough that they will not come back. We can say to the wrong people, "Please come back" but never tell them, "You come back now. I'll be looking for you." There must have been something in the way that Jesus said, "Follow me" that made Matthew think he meant it.
And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples.
If Mark and Luke indicate that it was a meal in the house of Matthew, why does Matthew not mention that fact? This is one of the things that makes some think it was a different occasion and a different man. One can imagine a tax collector inviting other collectors to come to his house, but where did those other sinners come from? It must have been Jesus at work again. Matthew and some other disciples might have had their own questions about some of the people there eating with them. Some of us who regularly confess our sins have the feeling that there are sinners and sinners!!
When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"
The Pharisees knew what they were doing. They did not put their question to Jesus but to the followers, neophytes, all of them. Their purpose was not to get an answer and find out why Jesus was eating with sinners, but it was to raise a doubt in the minds of the disciples. "Why?" is a good question for raising doubt. The disciples may still have been wondering why they had been called. They had experienced the feeling of being wanted by someone who cared but it is not likely they knew why. And they certainly could not explain the presence of the "sinners."
But when he heard this, he said,
A day would come when Jesus would let the disciples answer questions, even a day when he would depend upon them to do the answering for him. Matthew will conclude his gospel with Jesus sending out his disciples to do just that. But that time had not yet arrived. So when Jesus heard the question put to the disciples, He gave the answer.
"Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.
Jesus was not there for people who knew the answers but for people who did not even know the right questions. He was there for the Pharisees too, those people who thought they knew all the right answers and confused everything when they began to ask questions. They were like people who are not ready to ask what that pain is from because they know they could not have cancer.
Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'
People who create God in their image are always asking what God wants from them because they are always looking to see what they can get for themselves. Most religions are built on that premise and the Christian faith is still afflicted with its questions. The question of the law is not about what God needs but about what we can give to God. The answer to both is "Nothing!" When we learn mercy we have learned what God has given for us, his forgiveness. Jesus was not looking for people who knew the questions but for people who were still ready to learn the questions.
For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners."
And what better way to find sinners than to eat with them? It should be easier for us than for Jesus, because that is where our roots are.
W.Mueller
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