Our rich young man from chapter 19, it seems, is serving his wealth. We’re told “he had many possessions” and his emotional response to parting with them reveals a heart that finds it’s worth in material things.

It might be easy to distance ourselves from a character like this, but a reality check reminds us that we are among the most affluent people in the world. We live in a society shaped around consumer culture and I know that everyone reading this will have “many possessions”.

Are we, then, to go and sell all we have and give that money to the poor?

This isn’t to condemn a wider reach of people as ‘sinners’, but to show the universality of a sinful heart. Not everyone will have committed certain acts, but everyone will have experienced feelings of anger, or lust, or jealousy. We are all in need of the loving mercy offered by God.

And we see that same process of Jesus directing us inwards here. He cleverly uses the picture of consumption to highlight the idea of being unclean or impure, and flips it around to reveal new depths.

I know I wrote in last week’s reflection that Jesus was an effective teacher because he communicated in a clear and concise way, but perhaps the crowing jewel in Jesus’ teaching arsenal is his use of Parables.

If you could talk your way into the Kingdom of God, I probably would!

Last week, we covered a few chapters containing wall-to-wall teaching from Jesus. We had ‘you’ve heard X, but I say Y…’ and warnings against religious hypocrisy; a group of teachings which have shaped the life of the church since their recording and which offer, perhaps, our most direct insight into the theological foundation of Jesus that we have access to.

The passages we’ve read this week are perhaps the greatest collection of sayings and teachings attributed to Jesus that we have. We know these chapters as ‘The Sermon on the Mount’, but whilst it’s unlikely that this was delivered as one sermon (Jesus didn’t have the privilege of a Tony on PA recording his talks word for word, so this was probably a summation of things Jesus taught on different occasions or sayings which represent his ethos and core message), Matthew 5-7 forms a foundation for our understanding of Jesus’ central teachings.

This is the Christ.

That is the resounding message of the opening chapters of Matthew’s gospel that we’ve been reading this week!