Jesus the Prophet – “Portraits of Christ series”
Matt. 12:1-14 – Steve Simala Grant – Jan. 19/20, 2002
Intro:
This is the CNN report from December 18, 2000:
MEXICO CITY, Mexico -- Fire lit the sky Monday night as lava, rock and ash spewed from Mexico’s Popocatepetl (pronounced poh-poh-kah-TEH-peh-til) volcano, which erupted shortly after 7:30 p.m. (0130 GMT).
Many of the 40,000 residents within six miles (9.6 kilometers) of the volcano’s base remained in their homes, despite being urged by officials to evacuate.
For more than two days, officials have urged some 40,000 people living within 6 miles (10 kilometers) of the volcano to leave the area. But most have ignored the pleas, preferring to stay behind to guard their belongings and livestock.
On Monday, some residents began to rethink their decision.
"They already told us to leave, but we didn’t believe them -- until last night. Now we are scared," said Javier Hernandez, 71, huddled about one fire with five other men. Six female relatives slept under blankets in the back of a nearby pickup.
"We didn’t sleep at all last night," he said. "It was thundering loudly."
Scientists have warned that a dome of lava at the base of the 17,886-foot (5,366-meter) volcano is causing pressure to build inside the mountain. That could trigger a strong eruption, throwing rocks and other debris for miles.
"It’s like a pressure cooker," Creel said. "It could lead to a situation the likes of which we’ve never seen."
Families swaddled in blankets gathered around roadside fires as the sun came up, nervously glancing at the steaming crater above them.
People in the area have grown accustomed to the vapor, ash and lava that the volcano has been spewing intermittently for the past six years. Still, this week has been one of its most active in years, and tremors have shaken nearby towns.”
We generally think of prophecy as future-telling. We think of Isaiah looking ahead hundreds of years and describing how Jesus would be born and would suffer as a servant. But that is generally an incorrect way of viewing prophecy: generally, the prophet was concerned with an immediate situation and threat to God’s people. They usually function like the scientists in the news story – they have more information, a view from on high, and can thus warn the people about what is to come. Unfortunately, the people’s reaction is generally like that of the 40 000 people who ignored the plea.
Context:
When identifying the major roles Jesus filled, it is common to list them as prophet, priest, and king. For completeness, we should also include the role of “wise man,” or “teacher of wisdom.” These were roles that people of Jesus’ day were familiar with and understood, and they saw Jesus as filling those roles. Today I want to look at Jesus the Prophet, to see what portrait of Jesus we see and what this means for us, and in the coming weeks we will explore the other common designations. We are going to look at one particular story in Jesus’ life where we see him in this role.
But first, it is probably necessary for us to step back and discover what a prophet is. The simplest definition is “one who is a spokesperson for God.” About 1/3 of our Old Testament contains the writings of these prophets, and record for us the words of God to His people through those prophets. One of the common phrases we read in those books is “This is what the Lord says:” – where the individual prophet proclaims the words of God to the people.
And already, with the definition of a prophet as “spokesperson for God,” we can see that Jesus was the greatest of the prophets. He not only spoke the words, He embodied them – He lived them – in fact, He was them. John calls Jesus “The Word,” emphasizing this point.
Often the message of the prophet was not a welcome message. Like the residents at the base of the volcano, the message required change, giving up some things that were precious, trusting. Most people refused to listen. As a result, we read about a lot of confrontation in the prophetic books of the OT – a lot of rejection of the people bringing the message, even to the point of killing the prophet. The prophets of the OT were generally opposed – rejected – often even persecuted.
We see that parallel also in Jesus. We know that Jesus encountered unbelief, leading even to the ultimate rejection and persecution in His death on the cross. Jesus didn’t simply walk away when people rejected His message – He confronted that rejection directly (much like the OT prophets). I don’t know if your picture of Jesus usually includes this confrontational portrait – I think most of us tend to imagine a kinder, gentler Jesus. We like the Sunday school portraits of Jesus smiling, helping people, healing people, comforting people. And those are true and good pictures. But they aren’t the whole picture – there are many examples of Jesus being confrontational and speaking God’s truth even when it was unwelcome: the first ones that spring to mind are those examples of Jesus confronting the religious leaders of His day (one example of which we will look at in depth in just a moment); but Jesus did the same thing with those who believed in Him, including His disciples.
The point I’m trying to make is simply that if our picture of Jesus only consists of Him welcoming children, healing the sick, comforting the broken – if it is only a comfortable, pleasant, nice picture – it is incomplete. That is the dimension that looking at Jesus as prophet brings. It is that prophetic, confrontational Jesus that I want to look at today.
Text (Matt. 12:1-14):
The story is a simple one: Jesus and His disciples were walking in a field of grain when His disciples plucked a handful of grain to eat and satisfy their hunger. A group of religious leaders witness this action and get quite upset, because in their mind picking a head of grain is equal to harvesting which is definitely work which is definitely forbidden on the Sabbath. So they confront Jesus about His disciples’ behavior. Jesus responds to their accusation, and then takes the confrontation to a higher level by deliberately healing a man with a shriveled hand on the Sabbath, basically in defiance of the religious leaders convictions about what was and was not appropriate behavior. The end result is that the Pharisees went out and started planning a way to kill Jesus.
Though the story doesn’t call Jesus a prophet (and there are numerous places in the NT where Jesus is called that directly), it for me paints a clear picture of Jesus fulfilling the prophetic role. We see Him confronting the lifeless religious systems of His day, see Him speaking the truth of God even though the result is great personal danger to Himself. And we see Him at the end validating His prophetic office by a miraculous sign – healing the shriveled hand.
I want to draw just two simple points from the story.
1. The most important thing is Jesus:
Let me draw your attention to two statements Jesus makes about Himself: vs. 6 “one greater than the temple is here,” and vs. 8, “the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” These are pretty clear statements of the uniqueness of Jesus, and of His claim to be God. In the first, He says that He is more important than the temple, which was the center of the Jewish faith. It was the earthly representation of God – in fact the Jews believed that God Himself dwelt in the physical earthly temple. Jesus’ claim to be greater than this place would have been received as a definite threat to the established religious order.
It seems that in concentrating on the temple, the Jews had lost touch with the God they supposedly worshiped there. Jesus turns this on its end – He says “It is about a person, not a place – it is about me not the temple.” In the second statement He asserts His Lordship, proclaiming that He is over all of the commandments and systems.
This is a good reminder for each of us. We must always remain focused on Jesus – on who He is. That is one of the big reasons I chose this sermon series. It is easy to get sidetracked, to focus on the temple instead of the Lord. To obey because we believe it is the right thing to do instead of because of Jesus. It is easy to determine that we serve because the church needs it instead of because God has given us the ability and we are serving Him. It is easy to lose sight of Jesus and get caught up in the structures and systems around us. And I want to be clear – it is not those structures or systems that are inherently wrong – many of these are instituted by God Himself – but rather the problem is when we lose sight of Jesus and just end up doing things without meaning.
We try really hard to stay focused on Jesus as church leadership. A few weeks ago we had an elder’s meeting where we spent considerable time in prayer, seeking God’s will for our church. We were struggling to know which way to head, we were looking for direction, feeling like there was some part to the puzzle that we hadn’t seen. As we prayed, each of us gradually relaxed, as God let us know that He had the “Big Picture” under control, that it was difficult for us to see because we are right in the middle of it, but we could relax in knowing that we were in the right place and doing the right thing. Our need was simply to stay focused on Him and continue to obey.
This is something we need to learn as individuals as well as a church. We can learn to live with Jesus as our focus – seeing our days as gifts from Him and opportunities to live for Him – seeing our struggles as opportunities for Jesus to come close and share His power – seeing our joys as reasons to thank Him and worship Him. We can learn that “one greater than the temple is here,” and we can stay focused on Him.
2. It is the Heart that Matters:
The story depicts confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees; the simplified reason for the conflict is that the Pharisees were concerned with the outward things – not picking a head of grain on the Sabbath, not healing a man on the Sabbath – and Jesus is concerned with the heart. The religious system had become concerned with measuring up to a bunch of external criteria – a very long list of things to do and things not to do. The laws surrounding the keeping of the Sabbath had become extremely onerous, with explicit rules about how far you were allowed to walk, what you were allowed to do around the house, even what help you were allowed to offer someone in need. In that final example, the rule was that you could provide aid to preserve a person’s life, but anything less than imminent death had to wait until the Sabbath was over. The man with the shriveled hand was not in immediate danger, so Jesus’ healing him was a violation of the Sabbath laws.
What this all tells me is that the religious leaders had lost touch with the purpose. They had become preoccupied with outward adherence to the requirements of the law without regard for the heart. Obedience to the forms of religion had become the most important thing, and the heart of the people didn’t matter. That is what we see Jesus confronting.
There is still a danger of this today. There is a danger that we come to a point of just going through the motions – showing up at church week after week, singing the songs, sleeping through the sermon – without putting any heart into it. We can get lazy, take our focus off of God and onto the details of our lives, and forget what it is we are really doing and why we are doing it. We sing instead of worshipping. We day-dream instead of praying. We listen to be entertained rather than to understand and experience God. There is a danger of our relationship with God becoming nothing more than routine.
On February 11, 1962, Parade Magazine published the following brief account, entitled: “Still Munching Candy”
At the village church in Kalonovka, Russia, attendance at Sunday school picked up after the priest started handing out candy to the peasant children. One of the most faithful was a pug-nosed, pugnacious lad who recited his Scriptures with proper piety, pocketed his reward, then fled into the fields to munch on it.
The priest took a liking to the boy, persuaded him to attend church school. This was preferable to doing household chores from which his devout parents excused him. By offering other inducements, the priest managed to teach the boy the four Gospels. In fact, he won a special prize for learning all four by heart and reciting them nonstop in church. Now, 60 years later, he still likes to recite Scriptures, but in a context that would horrify the old priest. For the prize pupil, who memorized so much of the Bible, is Nikita Khrushchev, the former Communist czar.
Nikita Khrushchev who nimbly mouthed God’s Word when a child, later declared God to be nonexistent -- because his cosmonauts had not seen Him. Khrushchev memorized the Scriptures for the candy, the rewards, the bribes, rather than for the meaning it had for his life. He knew the words, but knew nothing of their meaning or of the life that comes through knowing God.
Jesus confronts that attitude in this story. Like the prophets of the OT, He gets in the face of the religious leaders, and says in verse 12 that doing good is lawful on the Sabbath. Caring for a fellow man, actually caring and ministering to their needs, is more important that living up to some external requirements of the law. In this part of the text Jesus even goes so far as to point out some hypocrisy on the part of the Pharisees, who would break the laws of the Sabbath to save a sheep while ignoring the needs of people around them.
The challenge is still here for us today. Are you just going through the motions? Did you come to church today just because that is what you do on Sat/Sun? Did you show up just so that others would look at you and think you are obeying, when really you have spent the rest of the week doing things that you know are wrong?
Let me turn that around and phrase it positively. Did you come to worship God today? Did you come because you love Him, and couldn’t imagine letting an opportunity to bring God an offering of worship slip by without taking advantage of it? Or did you come because you are hurting, and you knew that by bringing yourself to Jesus you would find strength, encouragement, and power to change the hurt into healing? Did you come to dive into God’s Word, to see what message He might have for you today? Did you come out of love, for God and for His people that are gathered here? Did you come to serve Him, sharing the gifts He has given you to share with the rest of His people?
I wish I could say that I always come with that kind of attitude – that I never just go through the motions when it comes to worship. But the truth is that sometimes I catch myself wandering off on a bit of a mental holiday – singing words without paying attention to the meaning, thinking about lunch during corporate prayer – you know what I’m talking about. And that is why I don’t like to think about a prophetic, confrontational Jesus: I know He’s talking to me. I know that I am then not one of His disciples, innocently nibbling on a snack while Jesus takes the flack – then I am one of the Pharisees, focused on the external forms instead of grasping the meaning. And I take that seriously, and so when I catch myself merely going through the motions I hate it, and I resolve to do something about it, to find the meaning, or at the very least to stop going through empty, meaningless motions.
Jesus got into a prophetic confrontation because He is concerned with our hearts. Verse 7 states this succinctly (READ). Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea here, where God had expressly told His people that mercy – an action which flows out of a heart of love – is what God desires far more than an empty sacrifice.
That is what God desires. He wants our hearts. Mercy. Love. Forgiveness. Acceptance. It amounts to grace instead of works – the goodness of God to us rather than us “earning” or “being worthy” of God. And our actions flow out of our gratitude for God’s grace.
Conclusion:
For some of us, our experience of church/religion/Christianity has been very much like the Pharisees – a list of rules and expectations pushed upon us, which sometimes we accepted just to please those around us. But that isn’t what God is looking for. That’s not His desire. God wants our love. He wants our obedience as a response to His grace, as a result of what He has done for us – not an empty, meaningless slavery to ritual but rather a relationship where we interact with Him on a personal level. We respond and worship and obey because of our experience with Him. How do you get there? It begins with simple invitation. Then sometimes it’s hard work, but always the work needs to come out of our love for God and desire for more of Him. I invite you to give Him your heart and your love and your service.
