Rack Focus: Returning to the Gospel of Matthew
A simple road map for the next month at R-Rated Movie Club
Good morning, Dear Reader.
It’s time to rack focus again and shift to a different part of the Bible for a few weeks. On Sunday, we’re going to change from a weekly entry of a scripture quote from Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, to Matthew, the first gospel and first book of the New Testament.
For more on why we “rack focus” here and how it works, check out the first Rack Focus post in the archives.
Over the summer of 2023, we journeyed through many of the major story beats and relationships in the fifty chapters that make up Genesis. That means we explored stories featuring Adam and Eve (Genesis 1-2), Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 12, 18, 21-22), Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 24-25), Jacob and Esau (Genesis 28-29, 32), and Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37, 45). We looked a lot at covenant and promise, lineage and inheritance, playing favorites, deception and forgiveness, romance and reconciliation, and lots and lots of family drama. I hope you read some familiar stories in a new way or enjoyed reading a story for the first time.
Now we jump ahead a few thousand years from the setting of those stories to the time of Jesus. The story of his life and teachings, death and resurrection are told in four books of the Bible called gospels (“good news”). These four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, share some characteristics while keeping something unique to each. For us, we’re turning to the Gospel of Matthew, to nearly the very middle of it.
This section is about Jesus and his ministry in the region of Galilee. The center of religious, political, and commercial power, Jerusalem, is to the south, while the poor regions of Galilee are to the north. That’s where we’ll find Jesus teaching the crowds, foretelling of his death, and making his way south toward Jerusalem and, ultimately, the cross. Here’s a sample road map to what we’ll cover in Matthew over the next few weeks:
August 13, 2023
Matthew 16:13-20 Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is, then asks who they say he is. It’s a moment of determining whether the disciples truly grasp the full picture of what is going on here.
Election (1999): High school teacher Jim McAllister refuses to face a year of working with presumed leading nominee for student council president, Tracy Flick. The lengths he’ll go to in order to stop her are terrible!
August 20, 2023
Matthew 16:21-28 Jesus foretells his death and resurrection and one of the disciples refuses to listen. I mean, to be fair, I’m not sure if I would be prepared to hear that out of the blue, either.
National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983): The Griswold family drives 2,460 miles cross country to spend a few days at America’s favorite family fun park. But everything. That could go wrong. Keeps. Going. Wrong.
August 27, 2023
Matthew 18:15-20 Jesus teaches the crowds what to do if they find themselves in a broken relationship with another person. His advice isn’t to make a YouTube video about it. He says go talk to them.
Witness (1985): A young Amish boy, Samuel, witnesses a pair of cops murder another cop. Officer John Book hides amongst the Amish to protect Samuel and himself as his fellow-but-crooked cops hunt them down.
September 3, 2023
Matthew 18:21-35 Jesus follows up his advice on how to engage someone you are in a broken relationship with by offering teaching and a story about the power of forgiveness.
The Blues Brothers (1980): Two brothers who can’t shake breaking the law put their old blues band together for a gig to raise the money they need to save the orphanage that took them when they were boys.
How do I choose scripture quotes?
If we go way, way, way back to the beginning with Sunday Matinee #1, you’ll find a succinct explanation of how I pull quotes from the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). A lectionary is a tool for preachers and worship leaders to select scripture readings to inspire sermons, liturgy, and music for worship services. There are several lectionaries out there, and while the RCL is far from perfect, it is also by far the well-known and widely-used.
In the RCL, each Sunday has an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, a Gospel reading, and New Testament epistle reading. The RCL has three annual cycles, Years A, B, and C, and we’re halfway through Year A, focusing on the Gospel of Matthew (these next four weeks are, according to plan, the last four entries focusing on Matthew for the rest of 2023). This is also a good time to remind readers that the scripture in a Sunday Matinee is posted two weeks prior to its RCL appearance to help R-Rated Movie Club be more helpful for preachers, Bible studies, and people who want to read ahead before their church’s worship service.
For the first year of R-Rated Movie Club, I plan to focus on these RCL texts:
January-April: Matthew (Gospel)
April-May: Acts (New Testament)
May-August: Genesis (Old Testament)
August-September: Matthew (Gospel) - You are here.
September: Philippians (New Testament)
October-November: 1 Thessalonians (New Testament)
November-December: Isaiah/2 Samuel (Old Testament) RCL Year B begins
I hope to be writing R-Rated Movie Club for a long time and using a variety of scripture readings keeps this project fresh for me, just like using a variety of movies does.
Thank you for your support!
In case you need a refresher on what “rack focus” means in the movies, once again here is the amazing video from No Film School about the Rack Focus technique. Know it, love it!