Here ye be!
Matthew 2:1-12; Ephesians 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7,10-14; Isaiah 60:1-6
There’s several dark chapters in Christian history: the witch trials in Salem, the wars around the Reformation, the Inquisition, the Crusades — the list goes on. Early in the church’s history, there was a rather serious issue with racism. The Christians who were Jews first kept trying to make the Christians who were not Jews first into Jews.
Let me give you more than a few examples. In the letter to the Romans, Paul spends a good portion of the middle of the letter explaining to Jewish Christian readers that it’s ok that the Gentile Christians are around. In Galatians, perhaps Paul’s most scathing commentary on this kind of behavior, he writes of some opposition he met because he was preaching to the Gentiles, and not expecting them to act like Jews. Reference Galatians 2:11-16. The church in Galatia had a bad habit of segregating their congregations based on Jew or Gentile. Paul is constantly reminding the recipients of his letters that it doesn’t matter if one is Jew or Gentile, but that one is now a Christian — which strongly implies to me that there was a problem he had to solve.
Now, you’re likely already wondering what this has to do with Epiphany, so let’s look at the Gospel for Matthew for a bit. On a broad scale, the Matthew’s purpose is to show Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, the one promised through Old Testament prophecy and the heir to David’s throne. And yet, while in Luke the first witness to Jesus’ birth were some Jewish shepherds, in Matthew it was some Gentile Magi from the east.
In a way, you’d almost expect the two gospels to have it the other way around. It would fit more with their purposes for Matthew to have the Jewish shepherds and Luke to have the Gentile Magi, since Luke was writing so that Gentiles would come to know Jesus as well as Jews. Even early on though, Matthew’s writing about these Gentile witnesses of Jesus’ birth shows that God is more than just for one group of people, but for all.
Paul talks about something similar in Ephesians, that though God once chose to reveal himself only through Israel, it’s now revealed to everyone through the Holy Spirit. Isaiah even says the same thing, that “Nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” All in all, God the Holy Spirit, through Scripture, did everything he could to help fix the early Church’s racism issue, but it still seemed to persist.
Now, today we might find ourselves thinking that it’s not a big deal if someone was Jewish or a Greek Christian. After nearly two thousand years, I think it’s safe to say that we no longer care about Gentiles and what not, at least not in the literal description of the word. Unfortunately, Christians have maintained different prejudices throughout the years. While the exact prejudices shift, their existence is what makes the world view Christians as hateful, old-fashioned, judgmental, hypocritical, and intolerant, to name just a few.
Just like the early Church had its issues with racism, we now have our own issues with judging others. Instead of approaching non-Christians in love, the way that Jesus did throughout his ministry, too often our reaction is to point out the different ways someone is sinning. Unfortunately, telling someone who doesn’t profess to be a Christian that they are sinning because the Bible says not to do certain things only reinforces the perception of Christians that the world has of us.
This thinking doesn’t even just apply to our interaction with non-Christians. A friend of mine on Facebook recently pointed out, to use his words, “That has me thinking of how different camps (Calvinists, Arminians, liberals, conservatives, high church, low church, emerging, social gospel emphasis, philosophical based apologists, healing ministry emphasis, fundamentalists, etc), treat each other today. Many think they are the only way or the only right way.”
Instead of being open to other interpretations of Scripture that may indeed be right, we close ourselves off to only that which we are comfortable with, something that, in a way, flies in the face of what our faith should be all about. Be it with Christians or non-Christians, we hold the prejudices close to our hearts.
Today, Epiphany Sunday, serves as a reminder to us that God has revealed himself to the whole world in the person of Jesus Christ — not as an iron-fisted king or dictator who desires our absolute obedience, but as a servant of all who only wants us to follow him. We only need to look to Jesus’ interactions with the “sinners” he spent time with to see how we ought to act, not accusing nor judging, but simply loving them, caring for them, forgiving their sins, and most of all praying for them. He didn’t distinguish between Jews and Gentiles or “sinners” and “non-sinners”, in fact his most bitter rebukes were directed at the people who claimed to be closest to God. That by itself is a sobering thought.
As sinners ourselves, it’s not our place to judge the people around us. Instead it’s to act as Jesus did and bring the message of hope and love that he preached, not just to one group or another but to all people, trusting God to work in us and in them to bring about His perfect will.