Tenacious Hope: SALT's Commentary for Third Sunday after Pentecost

Third Week after Pentecost (Year A): Genesis 18:1-15 and Matthew 9:35-10:8

Big Picture:

1) From now until November, the Gospel readings will move chronologically through Matthew, week after week, with only a couple of exceptions.

2) Among the four Gospels, Matthew distinctively emphasizes Jesus’ Jewish identity — and accordingly, in this week’s reading, Jesus instructs his disciples to minister not to Gentiles, but rather only “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:6). At the same time, however, over the course of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ teachings evolve through a dramatic transformation on this point, and he eventually instructs his disciples that God’s salvation is for everyone (“all nations,” Matthew 28:19). This week’s reading is a key episode in this larger story of opening up.

3) The Gospel of Matthew is organized around five discourses or teaching sessions — probably a poetic reference to the five books of the Torah traditionally attributed to Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), thereby casting Jesus as a Moses-like figure. The first of these discourses is the “Sermon on the Mount,” and this week’s reading comes from the second, sometimes called the “Missionary Discourse.”

4) This week’s story from Genesis is a turning point in the story of Abraham and Sarah. God has promised to make them ancestors “of a multitude of nations,” even though Sarah is childless and ninety years old (Gen 17:4,19). Abraham initially finds this unimaginable, even laughable — and in this week’s story, so does Sarah (Gen 17:17).

Scripture:

1) Jesus has been on the move throughout the countryside, healing and preaching and teaching great crowds whom he finds “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” — a predicament that moves him with “compassion” (Matthew 9:36). And so we might well expect Jesus, the wise and powerful Son of God, the caring and capable “shepherd,” to step into this vacuum for the sake of the sheep (Matthew 18:12-14). And yet that’s exactly what Jesus doesn’t do.

2) Instead, he commissions the disciples to step into his shepherding sandals. The Messiah has come, as it turns out, not to solve humanity’s problems for us, but to encourage and empower us to solve them, in effect recruiting us into becoming full participants in God’s work of love and redemption. Matthew’s language is striking: Jesus commissions his followers to go and do the very work he’s been doing (compare Matthew 9:35 with 10:1 and 10:7-8). Just as John the Baptizer’s proclamation that “the kingdom of heaven has come near” is picked up and carried on by Jesus, now Jesus’ work is picked up and carried on by the disciples (Matthew 3:2, 4:17, 10:7).

3) Not that they’re a particularly impressive bunch! Check out the list: first comes Peter, who will deny Jesus explicitly when Jesus is arrested; and last comes Judas, the betrayer himself. In between are some uneducated, unremarkable fisherman, a profession near the bottom of the social hierarchy in first-century Palestine; then there’s Matthew the tax collector (as we explored last week), a profession often despised as corrupt collaborators with the Roman occupiers; and Simon the Cananean (or “the zealot”), who used to battle against those very occupiers. The group’s number evokes the twelve tribes of Israel, suggesting that Jesus’ mission will renew Israel’s fortunes — though on the face of it, with this motley crew, that’s pretty hard to believe!

4) As he sends them out, Jesus explicitly limits the scope of their mission to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:6). But this phrase sets up the dramatic second part of the larger story in Matthew, when a Gentile woman confronts Jesus and changes his mind. At first, Jesus refuses to help the woman’s daughter, saying again, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” — but after the woman insists and gets the better of the argument, Jesus praises her faith and fulfills her request (Matthew 15:21-28). We’ll dive into that story in August; for now, the important point is that this week’s reading is laying the groundwork for that later transformation. And in the end, of course, Jesus sends his followers out to “all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

5) After showing the three strangers (God in disguise!) some extravagant hospitality, Abraham and Sarah stand by — and from inside the tent, Sarah overhears the visitors tell Abraham that she “shall have a son” (Gen 18:10). Sarah laughs to herself in disbelief — she’s ninety, after all! But not only does she eventually have a son (“Isaac,” from the root “to laugh”), she ultimately declares, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me” (Gen 21:6). In other words, by God’s graceful, astonishing gift, her private laughter of disbelief is transformed into shared laughter of astonishment and joy.

Takeaways:

1) These two stories point toward one of God’s signature moves: gracefully making possible what initially seems impossible, and doing so through unexpected, even downright unlikely suspects. A nonagenarian as a new mother? A small, motley crew of uneducated, unreliable disciples carrying on Jesus’ mission? I doubt it…

2) And that’s the point. Why does God so often operate this way? To get our attention, for starters. But the deeper purpose is to train our eyes and hearts and minds, strengthening our ability to hope against hope, and therefore our ability to act in times of adversity. Think of it this way: If God’s grace often works through unlikely means and unexpected people, then in situations of difficulty, even when the likeliest remedies are exhausted and the expected champions falter, we can still be hopeful. Tenaciously hopeful. And accordingly, precisely when we feel “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” — precisely then, God calls us to take up the shepherd’s mantle, to play our part, to step up into God’s ongoing mission of healing and renewal, no matter how unlikely it may seem, and no matter how much we ourselves may be “unlikely suspects.”

3) Indeed, as Matthew tells it, the story of salvation is a story of wider and wider circles of inclusion: first Jesus’ followers, then “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and ultimately everybody else, too (“all nations,” Matthew 28:19). It’s a story of love transcending the sectarian divisions we construct along ethnic, religious, racial, and ideological lines, among others. And the fact that this Sunday (June 18) falls the day before Juneteenth (June 19), the celebration of the emancipation from enslavement in the United States in 1865, presents a powerful opportunity to explore the transformative, liberating power of God’s love.

4) In the face of today’s many challenges, in our communities and in our hearts, forward movement can seem elusive, illusory, laughable. But the good news of the Gospel is that anywhere love or justice seem laughable, the Spirit is already at work, calling the church to join her. At its best, the church is constituted by participation in that mission. It may take some time, struggle, and plenty of tenacious hope — but in the end, God will transform our private laughter of disbelief into shared laughter of astonishment and joy. Do the challenges before us seem daunting? Impossible? Hopeless? As the mysterious visitor puts it to Sarah: “Is anything too wonderful for God?” (Genesis 18:14).