The sense of purpose in Jesus’s ministry is starting to fully emerge. He is aligning himself with John, who was already making disciples when Jesus started his ministry. He is hinting at himself as being the person John foretells, which is a rare occurrence of Jesus revealing who he is. (Usually he tells people not to tell anyone.) He is also starting to divide disciples from power-hungry religious politicians. All of these things are headed somewhere, and it’s shaped like a cross.

Hear and obey: that’s the thread that runs through both Moses’ speech and Jesus’ illustration of the house built without a foundation. It is the foundation of our own faith as well. Notice he didn’t say we need to invent anything new or come up with our own version of God’s timeless truth. We need to hear it and do it. The Hebrew word, “shema,” which is seen throughout the Old Testament, actually combines the two ideas together, hear and obey. They are inseparable. We should be ready to hear, and seeking opportunities to obey.

Jesus is laying out a pretty upside down Kingdom. It must have been a great comfort for the mourners and hungry to hear that they were blessed, even when they didn’t have it all together, but love enemies? Give without expecting a return? Surely a lot of people must have thought this Jesus guy had a screw loose. And yet that’s his Kingdom. It can’t be taken by force, because it has only the force of the Spirit working among us. It can’t be overthrown, because God is eternally sovereign. That’s a pretty secure situation for a Kingdom that seems to be based in utter weakness.

It could be that we all need a little more healing in our Sabbath. If the Kingdom is about wholeness, then the Sabbath is the day we ought most to be practicing that. We look at the Pharisees and religious leaders in horror, scarcely being able to imagine why they would have such an awful attitude. Our Sabbaths may have a different kind of wrong. Maybe we don’t look to enforce rules, but perhaps we take a casual approach. Maybe we don’t really consider it a day to be transformed by God. If it’s just a day to check the box for church every week, we may not be so different.

The calling of Matthew and his subsequent lack of reputable friends becomes an occasion for more than the recruiting of a new disciple. In that time Jesus also takes the opportunity to challenge the drinkers of “old wine” that they don’t even want the new wine. What is the new wine, and the new wineskin? It is the coming of the Kingdom. It’s the fulfilling of God’s promise to his people, and the breaking out of that Kingdom with the coming of Jesus. No wonder it bursts the old wineskins.

Coming in contact with Jesus seldom leaves people unchanged. Like Peter, it may be that we don’t immediately think that we have any need for a change, but then he shows his Lordship and we immediately see our smallness. Sometimes, we’re like the leper. The change we need is obvious, and we have become unable to hide it. Whatever the task, Jesus is up to it. The change he brings is always the one we need, and following him brings us ever closer to the Kingdom.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that being spiritual includes recognizing darkness. Jesus certainly did. His Kingdom was focused on bringing wholeness, but that couldn’t be achieved if there were forces working against it. Rebuking both demons and religious leaders, he wasn’t only preaching positivity. The same should be true of us. As we learned yesterday, sometimes we must tell those closest to us the things they really don’t want to hear. As we see today, there will be forces working against us if we follow Jesus.

Being tempted by the devil is certainly a challenge, and Jesus handled it masterfully. There was a second period of temptation in this story, and it must have also been great: the temptation to tell those who know you best what you know they want to hear. In his hometown, probably surrounded by a few people who had become his admirers through the years, Jesus instead decides to upset their comfortable worship service. He had just resisted the temptation from the devil to become great on the world’s terms, after all. He certainly wasn’t going to turn around and do it in the synagogue. But why did those people need to be upset so? Only Jesus knows, but I suspect their definition of him needed some redefining. He got his wish, and they almost tossed him over a cliff for it.

Long lists of names can seem a bit tedious, almost irrelevant. What do all these dead guys have to do with us? Looking through the list, Jesus' family tree is really full of some characters. King David, whom all of Israel revered. Jacob, a scoundrel and a trixter. The incarnation of the Son of God is not made out of nothing as creation was, but out of a line of real people who brought a family line through generations, bringing a real person onto the scene.

Jesus’ entry into ministry defies his universal Lordship in the same way as his birth. Why does he need the crazy man in the desert talking him up? Can’t he announce himself? But of course, that’s not how it works. Jesus didn’t come to be a one-man show, he came to establish a Kingdom. That Kingdom is made of many people, and humanity was in on the deal from the start. John’s important role put a man in the unique role of presenting God incarnate to the world. What God incarnate did after that was to keep showing what Kingdom life was all about.