What a fitting passage we have for the first week of Lent. Judas and the band put together by the religious leaders of Jerusalem have just arrested our Lord, his disciples have scattered and now we are given the story of one of the leaders of the disciples and how he denies his Lord. And it isn't just one denial. He does it again and again. And that is what sin is. It's the denial of God and of who he is to us and for us. But what brings the change in Peter? What brings his tears of repentance? What brings them is the words of our Lord. This is just like our own life. Our own sin is a denial of our Lord and his words still bring us to repentance.

Christians have always been made up of all kinds of different folk. The disciples demonstrate that for us very clearly. They come from different backgrounds and have different personalities and seem to have significantly different faith stories. It's no wonder then that just like the church, there were those in the midst of the disciples who had spent years with followers of Jesus, had sat at his feet and dined at his table, had gone out and shared the gospel and seen God work through them, and then betrayed the Lord. Judas is not far from us. And though there are many lessons to learn from Luke's narrative of the betrayal and arrest of Jesus, likely the greatest lesson for us is: take heed, lest we do likewise.

Leaving the Upper Room, Jesus takes his customary evening trip to the Mount of Olives and his disciples accompany him. Jesus goes to pray to his Father. In Jesus' prayer we see both his agony as well as his desire and commitment to follow the will of his Father even if it means his own death. This prayer is put in stark contrast to the sleepy disciples, to whom he twice commands to pray that they may not enter into temptation. The truth is that not entering into temptation is the very key to why Jesus alone can drink the cup of God’s wrath for the redemption of the world. The cup of the agony of our Lord is the cup that also brings the blessing of his people. 

Still in the upper room, having just transformed the great salvation meal of Passover around his own work of salvation through his broken body and shed blood, Jesus now has to deal with some misconception of the Christian life with his disciples. You could say these are parting words, last words to accompany his last supper. The disciples began to argue over who will be greatest in the Kingdom of God and Jesus says you must become like a servant. He then says the Christian life will be a life of faith. Finally it will be a life of trials and adversaries. None of this should surprise them or us, given that the Christian life is the life of following the way of Jesus, but it sure isn't what we so often expect or hope for.

Having just taught his famous Olivet Discourse, our Lord and his disciples celebrate the Passover meal together. While it is the Passover, the great meal that Israel would eat that would celebrate what God had done in rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, Jesus works this great salvation meal around himself. In so doing, he gave us the great meal that marks the Christian life, Communion, the Lord's Table, the Eucharist. This meal is the act of Christian faith because in it so much that is in the heart of Christian faith is found.

As we return to Luke for the next few months, we hear Jesus' last extended teaching before his death. Here he tells us to stay awake, to keep watch, to be careful to not fall asleep in our faith or to be overcome by the cares and delights of this world. There is debate around this passage, whether or not it spoke just to the destruction of the Temple or whether it speaks primarily of the time to come when Jesus's returns. But the big picture is the same for both ideas - stay awake! Keep watch! Don't let the cares of this world or the delights of this world numb you to being ready for our Lord!

Part of the wonder of Christmas is God saying that the way things are not the way they should be and he's going to do something about it. Isaiah says it like this: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall become level; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Part of how Luke teaches us this is the way John the Baptist comes into the world, preparing the way for Jesus. His parents are barren, long desiring a child. And God does the miraculous, saying again to us that his power is made perfect in our weakness.

Mary comes at the end of the genealogy and, really, at the end of a long and painful story. And when she comes, for Matthew, she comes with scandal. Joseph is a righteous man, we are told, and he wants to divorce her quietly. After all, how did she get pregnant? It's all wrong. And the story keep going with the wrong! No room in the Inn, Herod killing babies. So much wrong. And Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and exile. All of this wrong. But God is working in all of it. "But when the time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman"! In all of the long, painful darkness, God knows just when to let the light in!

Flemming Rutlage wrote that, "Advent is designed to show that the meaning of Christmas is diminished to the vanishing point if we are not willing to take a fearless inventory of the darkness." In his genealogy of Jesus, Matthew has forced us to look at the darkness. Tamar and the hard-hearted and hurtful hubris of Judah, Rahab and the sickening sin of the Cannanites, and the sad reality of family and death in the story of Ruth. And yet, in each of these dark stories, light begins to break. They all prepare us for Jesus. And then Bathsheba, or maybe we should just say, like Matthew says, "the wife of Uriah the Hittite". Lust and murder bound up in the light coming. God's mercy of the victimizer and the victim. What grace! What scandalous shining in darkness!

Matthew is intent on us not missing the point: Jesus comes with the deep and wide mercy of God! Tamar was an Adullamite, Rahab a Cannanite, and Ruth a Moabite. He just keeps saying it again and again: "This gospel is for everyone!" Of course, each of these women teach us more than that. Ruth teaches us that God's good news is even in the particulars of our own stories, our own longings, our places of deep desire for God to show up. And Ruth teaches us to look for the kinsman-redeemer, the one like us who would redeem us. It teaches us to about Jesus in so many ways, Jesus, the was born as one of us in the incarnation and redeems us in his crucifixion and resurrection.