November 12th, 2022

After the Sunday celebrations of Reformation Day and All Saints’ Day, there are only two more Sundays in this church year. We are nearing the end. We are also at the end of the three-year series. This year has been series C, and we have been looking at the last of the three very similar gospel accounts, the Gospel according to Luke.

With all of those endings, you may not be too surprised that, for these last two Sundays, the Old Testament readings are from the very end of the Old Testament, the writings of the prophet Malachi. And, at first glance, it may be considered a bit unusual that, this next Sunday has the text is from the fourth chapter (4:1-6), while next Sunday, the last Sunday in the church year, is from the previous chapter (3:13-18). But the Old Testament readings are designed to fit with the gospel texts. And there are two significantly different endings described in the gospel texts for those Sundays, and, understandably so, there are two different endings described in those two chapters of Malachi.

It is not a bad thing to read or study the bible from beginning to end. But the four gospel accounts are extremely important and cover a very important topic. There are sometimes in other places where the same events are important enough to be given another time, and obviously from a different perspective. That there are not just two but FOUR gospel accounts make this focus EXTREMELY important. And both the differences and similarities are important as well.

This Sunday’s gospel text [Luke 21:5-28 (29-36)] deals with the signs of Jesus’ second coming, a significant ending indeed. And there are certain situations where the ending is extremely important. Endings are important in the media today because they want you to go back to them again sometime soon. How many times is the ending of a movie remembered much more easily than its beginning? Endings are certainly important. But the ending would not happen without a beginning.

As was said, endings are certainly important, but I would like to suggest that beginnings are even more important, especially from a literary point of view. There are clues within a book’s beginning to help guide the one who will be studying it.
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The beginning of the gospel account that will be the focus in a very short period of time is the Gospel according to Matthew, and that beginning has a very interesting beginning. Here is a somewhat-literal translation of the first verse: ‘A book of genesis of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.’ The literal translation helped to show the connection to the first book of the bible. And in that book of the bible the first verse or sentence has seven words in the Hebrew, with the second verse having exactly double that.

There are also other things that are prominent in Matthew 1:1. The number of Greek words of this sentence is eight, and that is a very Jewish number. It should also be noted that the chronology of the people noted in this verse is backward. When you get to the genealogy, the direction goes the other way, and you start at the oldest person, and, in this case, it is Abraham. And at the end of the genealogy, it is pointed out that fourteen generations are in each section of the genealogy. What is interesting is that there are not fourteen generations in the last section of the genealogy—unless you count someone else twice. This has bothered many people for a while, especially since Matthew was said to be a tax collector, and that is someone who should be able to count! But he makes up for it in the texts which follow. Some of the details are so intricate that you would be able to say that he is a master of the connection between words and numbers. But that may be saved for another time.