The Problem with Empire (Matthew 4:12-23)

Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

But this new realm Jesus announces is the kind of good news that appeals to everybody else—the other 99%. In fact, the news is so good that, according to Matthew, "Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in [the] synagogues and proclaiming" it—healing the social, physical, and economic disease in the land.

Because this new realm is best exemplified not so much by Jesus' rhetorical gifts but through his traveling about and “curing every disease and every sickness among the people."

In other words, the “kingdom of heaven” concerns itself with healing instead of domination and violence. It seeks out not the most powerful but the people everybody else walks past without noticing—the sick, the poor, the hungry, the houseless, and those who've lived virtually every day with the fear of what tomorrow holds for them.

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Sermon text: web | doc