It’s that time again - time for another top secret excerpt of my next book, HA! The book walks the reader through various stories from the Gospel of Matthew (one story from each chapter) and looks at those stories through the lens of Matthew’s original readers (or, more likely, listeners).
The context of the Gospel?
Scholars believe the Gospel was written shortly after the Romans ransacked Jerusalem and leveled the Temple, leaving nothing more than puddles of blood and a pile of smoking rubble. Many who survived the assault relocated to a place called Antioch where a sect of Jews (the Messianic Jews or the Jewish Christians who believed that Jesus was the Messiah) separated from their Mother tradition and set out on their own.
It’s to these people (to these early Christians) that Matthew wrote his Gospel - to encourage them in the Way of Jesus The Christ as they navigated through unimaginable loss.
And so that makes me wonder all sorts things, right? Like, why Matthew included some stories and left some out? Or why Matthew told some stories differently than Mark, Luke, or John told them? Or why Matthew positioned certain stories the way that he did in his telling of the Jesus story?
So many questions.
And so in the book I pull one story from each chapter of Matthew’s Gospel and look at it through the lens of those questions and explore and wonder why on earth these stories have passed the test of time to endure 2000+ years and make it into our hands all these centuries later.
Why were these stories so important?
Why were they important to Matthew?
Why were they important to his readers?
The idea is to read one chapter a day and then there are some reflections questions at the end of each chapter with plenty of white space to write whatever is on your heart after reflecting on that day’s story. The book encourages you to get in touch with the “collapsed temples” of your own life (the disappointments, the unmet expectations, the broken dreams, the dead ends, the disasters, the losses, the grief) and leads you along a path to find some hope in the stories that Matthew includes in his retelling of the Jesus story.
And so here’s chapter 17 (raw and unedited, by the way!), I hope it encourages you. Thanks for supporting my work and my family - we are forever grateful.