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The Third Sunday of Epiphany

Isaiah 9.1–4

1 Corinthians 1.10–18

Matthew 4.12–23

Was Jesus waiting for a signal?

The Gospels agree that he didn’t begin to announce the Kingdom until he heard that John had been arrested. Something about that sinister moment told him that the time had come. He had fought with the powers of darkness, and had overcome. Now one of their earthly representatives had closed in on the Baptist, the one who had prepared the ground for the Kingdom message. Jesus could wait no longer. The darkness had reached its height; it was time for the great light to shine.

The precedents, echoing down the history of Israel, pointed in this direction. Isaiah addressed the problems of his own day by referring back to the Midianite crisis. The enemy power grew stronger, and God saved Israel through an unexpected deliverer. Isaiah’s theme of the coming child (omitted from today’s reading) provides his own equivalent. Whatever threats the powers of darkness may provide, a child will be born through whom God’s zeal will shine the true light in ‘Galilee of the nations’ (then, as in Jesus’ day, Jewish territory permeated with foreign influences). Matthew, invoking Isaiah, draws on this millennium-old tradition in order to say: now at last the story reaches its complete fulfilment.

The very first thing Jesus did, according to Matthew, was to call followers. The beginning of a community, the Kingdom people; the first sign, earlier even than the remarkable healings, that something new was afoot. They left jobs, they left family – both vital symbols of who they were – and became part of that something new, without knowing where it would lead.

This Kingdom people, called into existence by Jesus’ announcement and invitation, grew quickly into the twelve, and has grown from that into a great multitude which no one can number. But it is still the same family, formed by the Kingdom proclamation and its accompanying summons, formed of people who have seen the light shining in the darkness and have chosen to follow the path it illuminates.

It was out of concern for that family that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. We cannot now tell which, if any, of the subsequent problems in the letter were connected to the warring personality cults in the young Church; but the existence of such groups was itself a first-order disaster. Confused and muddled, the Corinthian Christians seem to have lined up Paul, Apollos and Peter with Jesus Christ himself as cult-figures into whose entourage one might be initiated. Paul insists that his role is simply that of the herald, announcing Jesus, the crucified king of the world. That strange message has created a new family out of nothing, a family whose very existence, and particularly whose unity, was supposed to be shining God’s great light into the dark culture around.

As we prepare to celebrate Paul’s own conversion, and to keep the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 1 Corinthians provides a salutary lesson. What are we waiting for? Is the world not dark enough yet?