This article was first published in Jan 2009

In the 1980s the UK was polarised. Thatcherism reigned as the Conservative party sought to quash the power of the trade unions and establish a market based on the free movement of labour and capital. In the wealthy parts of England, particularly the south-east, this was a welcome opportunity to prosper. Business flourished and the economy grew. But in the industrial heartlands, discontent brimmed as strikes took hold. Miners, steelworkers and jobless public sector workers locked horns with a government convinced these groups no longer had a place in modern Britain.

In Jesus’ world the north and the south were estranged in a similar divide. The south east (Judea) – home to the Jewish capital Jerusalem – was the powerhouse of its political and religious establishment, while the northern region of Galilee was a hotbed of political revolution. As we step gingerly into chapters 16 – 20 of Matthew, the politics of geography becomes all-important.

In 16:13 Jesus arrives at Caesarea Philippi, deep in the belly of the revolutionary north. Hopes for a Messiah were rife here; dreams of a liberator who would overthrow the Roman oppressors and establish a kingdom of heaven in Jerusalem. And so the moment of truth for Matthew’s gospel shimmers in these few verses; what we have been set up to assume is now, with Peter's confession, made unambiguously clear: Jesus is this Messiah.

But straight away the dream is shattered. Jesus will go to Jerusalem and be killed, he says (16:21). Peter, the rock on which Jesus will build his ekklesia (his revolutionary movement), is rebuked as ‘Satan’ for daring to hold him back from this path. All the would-be messiahs that littered the history of Galilee fell to this unhappy end; this seems like a quest for failure from the beginning!

But Jesus goes further. ‘If you want to follow me’, he says, ‘you must take up your cross as well.’ This is suicide, martyrdom. Peter, the twelve, anyone interested in being part of Jesus’ ‘church’ must walk intentionally to their death. For ‘what is the point of trying to save your life and losing it, when by losing it for Jesus’ cause you will find it?’ (vs.25-26)

This is not some deep, spiritual, wisdom. For Jesus (and for Matthew’s first readers) it was real and practical. The revolutionary madness of the northern rebels risked their destruction by Rome. Jesus’ mission to die in Jerusalem was reconfiguring how the kingdom of heaven could come into being.

During the so called ‘transfiguration', Jesus stood atop a mountain with Elijah (symbol of the kingdom of heaven’s revolutionary judgement) and Moses (symbol of the kingdom of heaven’s reestablishment of the Law). Having been told by Yahweh to listen to his Son, we hear Jesus tell his disciples, ‘you only need faith as small as a mustard seed to say to this mountain, ‘move’, and it will move. In other words, the vision of Elijah can be ‘moved’; indeed Jesus says he had already come (in John the Baptist - not quite the revolutionary stereotype). The self-destructive oppression of the violent revolutionary dream – like the boy possessed by seizures – can be shifted, and healed. All that Moses and Elijah have come to represent can be reimagined. It just takes a little faith, and some guts.

As if to illustrate the point, Jesus welcomes a little child. ‘These are the great ones in the kingdom of heaven,’ he says. ‘These are your example.’ (18:2–4) It is the least that matter most, the last that come first. Strength is not shown in oppression but in forgiveness. To cancel a debt is kingly; to continue to pursue revenge is to set oneself on a path to a living hell (18:21–35).

As if to build the tension further, Matthew takes us down south to the lands of Judea, the self-professed destination for Jesus’ demise. Having dealt with Elijah in Galilee, he now turns to Moses.

In the Pharisees’ attempt to undermine Jesus (19:3-11) they give him the opportunity to expose the weakness of Moses’ Law. Without criticising Moses – instead by criticising the Pharisees – he calls for a higher standard, just as he did on a mountainside in Galilee in chapters 5–7. To constrain husbands in their ability to divorce their wives protected women from the whims of a society in which men had all the power. And Jesus re-authoring of Moses’ law steps up a man’s requirement for the kingdom of heaven.

This is the context of the famous passage with the Rich Young Ruler. A man who followed Moses to the letter found himself exposed by Jesus’ additional requirements: that he give up his wealth, the weight behind his power. ‘It is impossible for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven’, says Jesus, ‘but what seems impossible is always possible with God!’ (19:23–26)

So there we have it: that the revolutionary lay down his arms, and the rich man give up his wealth – impossible ideas made possible by God. The kingdom of heaven is ready to welcome anyone in to share in one new world, regardless of how much they deserve it (20:1–16), because this kingdom will come about by a revolution of grace, of giving, of generosity. Envy and greed strangle the soul of a society; power and wealth chain it down, grounded by blindness (20:20–34). But just a little faith, like the faith of a child, could open our eyes to this vision and see it become a world-changing reality.

In the mid-1990s, the UK turned away from the Conservative hegemony to the leadership of the quasi-messianic Tony Blair. To Labour party faithfuls Blair was a sell-out, embracing the free-market capitalism of Thatcherite Britain. To Conservative hardliners his public spending plans spelt the rebirth of tax-hikes and hyper-inflation. But Blair’s Labour government pursued his ‘third way’, of free-market socialism and it spawned a period of significant economic growth with epic public spending.

But now the charismatic leader has left and like John Major in Thatcher’s aftermath, Gordon Brown is floundering in a post-Blair recession.

We can fight between free-market capitalism and state-controlled socialism. But both of these ides are founded on the belief that people will not be generous, the former playing to that ‘strength’ as a way to stimulate economic growth, the latter regulating that ‘weakness’ in the redistribution of wealth. Why have we allowed ourselves to be gripped by the idea that we can’t be more selfless than we are? In this reading of Matthew, Jesus calls me to say to this mountain, ‘move!’ For what seems impossible, isn’t really.