Easter & the missional life and hope

Easter is about Christian missional hope. There is no time when the theme of Christian hope is at fore than the season we have just remembered and celebrated. God’s story, which runs from Genesis to Revelation, is about a God relentlessly on a mission of hope for renewal. He is at work in his world restoring his broken creation, renewing everything until the current heaven and earth have passed away and there is a new heaven and earth (Rev. 21:1-2). The greatest sign that God will bring about that restoration and that hope is Easter – when Jesus went down to the lowest of the lowest but was also raised from that low to inhabit the right hand of his father in heaven, as the first fruit of that renewal.

At GospelLife, the church I pastor, we have been doing a series on the Gospel of Matthew in the last 3 months culminating in the Easter event last weekend. It has been quite journey of deep reflections on who Jesus is and what he calls us to become – a people on a mission with and for him. The agenda of the gospel writers is to show us who Jesus is, in all his majesty and sophistication, so that those who hear his voice can know and love him and follow him where he leads in whatever contexts they find themselves in.

The Gospel begins with a statement about the genesis of Jesus. The first statement in the gospel is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Then Matthew runs through a list of names that includes creepy characters like Jacob and Judah, David, Tamar, Rahab and Ruth. God’s purposes overules their creepiness en route to his Messiah, Jesus, the last of that genealogical epoch, but the firstborn of a new generation in the new messianic age he inaugurates. This is the family tree of the most important human being that has ever lived. His origin and destiny are determined by God, the Father and the story that has come before. Even Joseph, his foster parent, cannot choose a name for him. He will be named Yashua, Joseph is instructed by the angel (1:21-22). The name is based on the Hebrew verb yasha which means to save, deliver, liberate, or rescue. When Yahweh yashas in the biblical story it’s almost always a physical activity. It is usually an earthy and tangible rescue. It is not a spiritualized or abstracted rescue. It is not ethereal. Yahweh yashas Israel from her enemies literally. He saves from sickness, plagues, famine and death. And when Jesus the Messiah is born, he is named Yashua (Jesus, from the Classical Latin Latin Iesus, interpreted: for he will save his people from their sins.

Taken in context the word “sins” must be understood broadly. It must mean something broader than moral depravity to include all the effects of sin in a very messed-up world and society. Yashua saves, not only from sins, as in transgressions of the Law, but from everything that is anti-life, including but not limited to sickness and demonic possession and oppression, despair, and ultimately death. Jesus saves entirely, physically and spiritually. he comes to deliver the whole person. A commentator has put it very aptly, that the entire ministry of Jesus was thus a commentary on his name (Marvin Wilson).

That is not all there is about his name. he is also Emmanuel (1:23) drawing straight from the story that has come before in Isaiah (7:14) Look! The virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they will call him Emmanuel. The name means God with us. Jesus is not just the Messiah, the King of God’s kingdom anticipated by the long Story of Israel that has come before, but he is the very embodiment of God. He is God, present with his people. He is God walking and talking in ancient Palestine. As the story that Matthew tells unfolds we will find Jesus being exactly that: And he went around through all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and every sickness among the people. And a report about him went out throughout Syria, and they brought to him all those who were sick with various diseases and afflicted by torments, demon-possessed and epileptics and paralytics, and he healed them. And large crowds followed him from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from the other side of the Jordan (4:23-25). His life is truly a commentary of his names – Yashua and Emmanuel. Ultimately, after his death and resurrection, his disciples not only revere him (28:17), but Jesus approaches them and tells them that he is now the appointed King of God’s world (28:18), commissions them to go out and announce his rule and reign to every people. And the promise at the end of that commission is: behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the age (28:20). He is Emmanuel, the one in whom God is with us as Matthew showed from the begining of his story (1:23). Here he declares that he himself will ‘with you always’. The only appropriate reaction to this is indeed worship, worship of the one true God who is now, astonishingly, revealed in and as Jesus himself.

Quoting the famous priest and theologian of the last century, Herbert McCabe, Stanley Heurwas in his commentary on this Gospel helpfully affirms that Matthew’s genealogy … is a stark indication that God’s plan is not always accomplished through pious people, but through ‘passionate and thoroughly disreputable people’ … the moral is almost too obvious to belabor: Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of middle-class respectability, but rather he ‘belonged to a family of murders, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars—he belonged to us and came to help us, no wonder he came to a bad end, and gave us some hope.’