Talk About a Revolution
A Lectionary Reflection on Matthew 4:12-23 for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany
From that time Jesus began to announce, “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!”
Matthew 4:17 (CEB)
SUBMISSION IS NOT AN OPTION
I was never one of the popular boys in my high school. I was a late developer, so I was one of the smallest students in my grade. I was obviously different from my peers—partly because their peer pressure had no effect on me—and so I became an easy target for ridicule and bullying. And when I came to faith at fourteen, I immediately made Jesus the centre of my life, which did not endear me to my non-religious classmates. Yet, despite all this, there was a strange dynamic to my relationship with the other boys. South Africa was still locked in the systemic racism of the apartheid years, and young white boys were required to do national service in the military. But because of my faith, I was an outspoken supporter of non-violence and the inclusion of all people in the full life of our nation. To be honest, I was also an irritatingly clumsy and determined evangelist. This meant that I was often threatened by the bigger boys in my class, but I also somehow managed to avoid being beaten up. Those years taught me how to stand firm on my convictions, refuse to submit to threats of violence, and talk my way out of trouble. As painful as it was, there is a part of me that is grateful for those extracurricular lessons.
When Jesus appeared on the scene in ancient Israel, there was a menu of responses to the Roman Empire’s occupation from which to choose. The Zealots sought to overthrow Rome through violent revolution and guerrilla warfare. The Herodians preferred to cooperate with the Empire, submitting to their presence and power to gain security and privilege. The Essenes chose to opt out of the whole system by establishing an alternative society in remote communes in the desert. And the Pharisees retreated into legalistic piety, believing that if the people became pure enough, God would send the Messiah and liberate the nation.1 While the Zealots chose violent resistance, the other groups chose submission, each in their own way. For Jesus, violence was not an option, but neither was submission. And so he proclaimed and embodied a different kind of resistance: a non-violent revolution that sought to create a new way of being in opposition to the values, priorities, and oppression of the Roman Empire without using the tactics and force that the Empire relied on. This is because Jesus clearly knew that “those who fight domination with violence become as evil as those whom they oppose.”2
Jesus, as portrayed by the Gospel writers, adopted the language of the Roman Empire and reinterpreted it as the reign of God,3 thus subverting the Empire’s presence and power in the minds of his followers. His essential message, as Matthew puts it, was “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!” (4:17 CEB). This was not a reference to a blissful heaven in the afterlife—it was another way of speaking about what the other Gospel writers called the kingdom, reign, or rule of God. This message of Jesus was radical, subversive, and anything but submissive to the Empire’s oppressive and violent rule. On the contrary, as Tom Wright notes, “Any first-century Jew, hearing someone talking about God’s kingdom, or the kingdom of heaven, would know. This meant revolution.”4
A NEW REVOLUTION
But we need to take a few steps back first, and place Jesus’ appearance and preaching in the context of the Lectionary reading for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany. The first point to note is that the writer of Matthew’s Gospel places the beginning of Jesus’ ministry at the time when John the Baptiser was arrested (4:12). In response to this news, Jesus moved to Galilee, the very place where Herod Antipas, who had arrested and would later execute John, was the ruler. In the words of Judith Jones, this is for Jesus “a journey into the lion’s den,”5 and it shows us that from the outset, Jesus’ words and actions were deliberately intended to oppose the corruption and injustice of the imperial powers of his day. Jesus was not preaching a message of personal forgiveness from personal sins that would bring about the personal salvation of personally going to heaven when we die. Rather, he was preaching a social, political, and revolutionary message of a new world free from the oppression and injustice of empires like Rome.
The people of Israel in Jesus’ time would have recognised that this message originated with the Hebrew prophets and referred to a new world order in which the poor would be included and uplifted, hearts would be purified and turned back to God and God’s ways, evil would be exposed and eradicated, and justice, peace, inclusivity, equality, and love would be the foundations of society.6 To emphasise that Jesus was bringing his vision of God’s reign as a divine light into the darkness of Rome-dominated “Galilee owned by or under the Gentiles,”7 Matthew paraphrases a prophecy from Isaiah 9:1-2. As Jillian Nelson writes:
In Isaiah’s time, the lands of Naphtali and Zebulun were under the dominion of another imperial power: the Assyrians who conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 733-732 BCE. Isaiah’s prophecy was written in anticipation of a future king whose reign, the prophet hoped, would restore these lands and reunite the nations of Israel and Judah. While Isaiah was likely referring to King Hezekiah, the author of Matthew envisions the fulfillment of this prophecy with Jesus.8
For Jesus to have preached that message in that place at that time was clearly a revolutionary act, and it demanded a response from those who heard it: repentance. This does not mean that Jesus was challenging people to feel guilty about what they had done wrong, confess their personal sins to God, and promise to do better. Repentance for Jesus was a much more radical, social, revolutionary act. The Common English Bible is correct in translating it as “Change your hearts and lives!” The call to repentance was a call to live by the values and priorities of God’s reign in the midst of the presence and power of the Roman Empire. It was to join the revolution and become active participants in building God’s new world order here and now.
But this revolution could not be like the one the Zealots wanted. It had to be completely different; a peaceful, loving, and just revolution that used strategies and tactics that were the opposite of Rome’s. In the words of Tom Wright, “Jesus could see that the standard kind of revolution, fighting and killing in order to put an end to…fighting and killing, was a nonsense. Doing it in God’s name was a blasphemous nonsense.”9 And so Jesus waged his revolution by calling disciples to follow him and build a new, revolutionary community, with a little bit of civil disobedience thrown in.
