Friday, March 15

Romans 16.17-27: Having finished his greetings to friends at Rome, Paul next sends the salutations of those who are with him at Gaius’s house in Corinth (verse 23; cf. 1 Corinthians 1:14; Acts 19:29).

Prior to sending these salutations, however, Paul warns the Romans against schism, heresy, and dissension (verses 17-18). He knows there are trouble-makers abroad. Indeed, among the Jewish Christians who were returning to Rome during those years, he may have recognized some of the very individuals who had been sowing dissent among his own congregations in the East.

The tone of Paul’s warnings here differs greatly in style from the rest of the Epistle to the Romans. One would think that Paul, as he thought on the friends in Rome that he had just named, had somewhat forgotten that he was writing to a church that he had not founded. He reverts to his more usual style, so that these few verses more closely resemble the other epistles. For example, one may compare verses 17-20 with Galatians 6:12-17.

Once again Paul commends the good reputation of the Roman Christians (verse 19; 1:8).

The crushing of Satan underfoot (verse 20), of course, fulfills the prophecy in Genesis 3:15.

Greetings are first sent from Timothy, who had recently arrived at Corinth and will soon be leaving to accompany the collection to Jerusalem (Acts 20:4).

In verse 22 we learn that Paul’s scribe, who has written this epistle at his dictation, is named Tertius, a Latin name signifying that he is the third son in his family. Tertius sends along greetings from his younger brother, Quartus (verse 23). Their older brother, Secundus, will be one of those carrying the collection to Jerusalem (Acts 20:4).

“Erastus, the treasurer of the city” (verse 23) has become a Christian. This municipal commissioner for public works is well known from archeology. Visitors to Corinth can still see his name on a Latin inscription on a marble pavement block.

Saturday, March 16

Matthew 25.14-30: Central to the message of this parable is the theme of stewardship, the stewardship of gifts, opportunities, and time. With respect to the last of these, we observe that the present parable is Matthew’s third about the passage of time. The irresponsible servant says in his heart, “My master is taking his time (chronizei mou ho kyrios).” That is to say, “my master will probably not come back today, so let’s wait until tomorrow.”

The word “tomorrow” (cras in Latin) is often treated as a noun. It is not a noun, however; it is an adverb. It is not a something but an if. This is a philosophical mistake. And this was the mistake of the irresponsible servant; he did not know the difference between something real and something hypothetical.

Tomorrow has existence only as a concept. It is a product of thought, and it has no existence outside of thought. It does not have substantial existence; it is not a res.

The irresponsible servant in today’s parable, because he isn’t thinking clearly, loses his custody of chronos, “Tomorrow” is one thing we’re never sure of. We have no custody of it. We only have custody of “right now.”

In the parable of the ten maidens, the same theme is developed. The maidens slept, we are told, because the “bridegroom took his time (chronizontos de nymphiou).” Then comes the parable about the lord who left his servants with talents to develop while he himself went away. He did not return, we are told, until “after a long time (polun chronon). Similarly, the unfaithful servant is given ample time to repent, but he spends his whole life without regard to the end of it; he refuses to face the fact that he will eventually have to account for it.

And his excuse? “I was afraid.” What’s this? You were afraid? What do you mean, you were afraid? Wrong answer!

The fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom, young man, and you are, emphatically, not wise.

Clearly, you have not only misunderstood time; you have also misunderstood fear. You are using fear as an excuse. The first thing a young person is supposed to be taught is that fear is never an excuse. Fear is an incentive.
When the Bible says that the fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom, it does not mean a crippling fear. It does not a servile fear. It is not a sniveling cowardice.

The fear of the Lord means reverence. It is an ennobling fear, and it is an enabling fear. The fear of the Lord is a reverent piety, expressed in obedient stewardship.

Sunday, March 17

Matthew 21:33-46: In this parable of the vine-growers, Jesus identifies himself with three names: Son, Heir, and Cornerstone. Today we will reflect on these three images of the Savior. Clearly it is in these terms that he wants us to think of him

First, Jesus identifies himself today as God’s Son, whom He sends into the world to inaugurate the final stage of history. “Then last of all,” declares the parable, “He sent His Son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my Son.’” God has never left Himself without witness in this world. He has spoken to the human race through the wisdom and power manifest in His Creation. He has addressed Himself to men through the testimony of conscience. In special times and circumstances, God has “spoken in past time to the fathers by the prophets.”

In this last stage of history, however, God has revealed Himself to the human race by the appearance of His own Son, “the brightness of His glory and the express icon of His person.”

It is the eternal Father who reveals His Son and draws the human heart and mind to that Son. Recall the words of the stern Pharisee who gave a brief account of his own conversion: “. . . it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me . . .”

Who was the God who did this? What God spoke to Saul of Tarsus and revealed His Son? It was the same God whom Paul had served as a serious, devout, and conscientious Jew. It was not a God different from the God who spoke in times past by the prophets. It was not a God different from the God who speaks to the human conscience in wisdom. It was not a God different from the God who made all things out of nothing. It was the identical God ever present in the conscience of that loyal Pharisee. This very God spoke to the heart of Saul and said, “This is My beloved Son.”

No one comes to Christ the Lord unless the Father draws him. The identity of Jesus is known only as the Father reveals him, because “no one knows the Son except the Father.”

When Simon Peter confessed, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” how does Jesus answer him? “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Flesh and blood—human power—is not adequate to identify Jesus as God’s Son. We make this confession because the eternal God reveals His Son to our hearts and minds. We listen to His voice on the mountain of the Transfiguration: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Second, when Jesus identifies himself as the Son in this parable, he goes on to call himself the “heir” of the vineyard. Indeed, within the Gospels this parable is the only place where the word “heir” is to be found.

Jesus is the heir of the vineyard precisely because He is the Son. Indeed, in the parable this is the very reason He is killed. His murder represents the attempt of the vine growers to usurp the lordship of the vineyard.

This association of sonship and inheritance, affirmed by the Apostle Paul (cf. Romans 8:17; Galatians 4:7), is one of the striking points of contact between this Gospel parable and the Epistle to the Hebrews. The latter work begins, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things”(1:1-2).

In today’s parable, the theme of inheritance is related to the history of Israel—the earlier stage of salvation history. Jesus is the true heir of the covenants by which God joined Himself to the Israelites by distinct interventions in their history.

The image of the heir, then, looks to the past, which Jesus describes as a series of historical missions. It was obvious to his enemies that in this parable Jesus was giving his own interpretation of the entire history of the Chosen People. He was making the claim that the vine growers, the Jewish leaders, had repeatedly rejected God’s messengers, the prophets, and now were about to culminate that dolorous history in a resolve to murder God’s very Son.

Third, if Jesus is the heir with respect to the past, he is the cornerstone with respect to the future. After speaking of Himself as the “Son” in this parable, Jesus went on to call Himself the “stone” of Psalms 117 (118):22—“The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone.”

In this transition of titles—from son to stone—we detect, resonating through the Greek text, a nuance of the Semitic original. Jesus was employing a play on words: The Hebrew word for “son” is ben, and the Hebrew word for “stone” being eben. The immediate tension of that very dramatic moment, then, is preserved in this subtlety just below the surface of the canonical text.

God’s choice of the rejected “stone” to become the chief stone of the building is important to the Lord’s own interpretation of His parable, because it refers to the final vindication following His murder at the hands of the vine growers. It is a prophecy, that is to say, of His coming Resurrection.
The Resurrection motif of this psalm is recognized by the Church’s traditional liturgical use thereof at Matins and in various services of Pascha.

As Son, Heir, and Cornerstone, Jesus is the one figure in history who actually sustains and upholds history. He is Jesus Christ, God’s beloved Son, whom we know to be the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

Monday, March 18

Psalm 44 (Greek & Latin 43): Second Chronicles 20:1–19 describes a special liturgical service at the Jerusalem temple, in which King Jehoshaphat (873–849) led the people in a prayer of lamentation and intercession during a time of great crisis. He also proclaimed a period of fasting, for the plight of the people seemed desperate; their enemies were upon them, and “Judah gathered together to ask help from the Lord” (20:4).

There were many such occasions in biblical times, and many more since then, for the enemies of God’s people are both numerous (“My name is Legion; for we are many,” Mark 5:9) and powerful (“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places,” Eph. 6:12). Indeed, we are continually at war, we children of God, and we sometimes feel simply overwhelmed, almost empty of hope.

Psalm 44 was obviously written for such times: “You have given us as sheep to the slaughter and scattered us among the nations. You have bartered Your people for a pittance and made no profit on the sale.” A useful prayer, this psalm of despondency, because the life of faith is not a sustained, uninterrupted series of triumphs.

The prayer begins, however, with an appeal to Tradition: “We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us.” Such an appeal to the lessons of history is, of course, standard in the Bible, for the biblical God is, first and last, “the God of our fathers.” Thus, the message of Genesis has to do with God’s fidelity to Israel’s patriarchs, while Exodus tells of Israel’s redemption by that same patriarchal God. Other historical books of the Bible narrate the continued faithfulness of His promises to an unfaithful people. The prophetic literature, likewise, constantly looks back to God’s redemptive work throughout Israel’s history, as both paradigm and prophecy of what He will do for His people in the future.

A similar note is sounded strongly in the Wisdom literature of the Bible. The Book of Proverbs, for instance, is forever appealing to the moral lessons of history, that complex of disciplines and standards learned by experience, prescribed by the authority of Tradition and handed down through succeeding generations. In this case too, biblical religion is essentially an inherited religion, and its Lord is “the God of our fathers.”

Tradition is also the note on which our psalm begins, then, almost its entire first half being taken up with a review of past experience. But God is not only the God of the patriarchs in the past; He is also our own God, one and the same: “You are my king and my God, You who command victories for Jacob.”

Then suddenly the psalm’s tone changes, for the reassuring lessons from the past are now being put sternly to the test: “But You have cast us off and put us to shame. You no longer march forth with our armies; You have turned us back from the foe, and our enemies plunder us at will.”

The situation here may be likened to that of Job. He too had ever endeavored to be pleasing to the God of the fathers, steadfastly following the high moral precepts handed down from authorities of old. If one reads carefully what is said of Job in the first chapter of the book that bears his name, it is clear that he is a perfect embodiment of the traditional prescriptive norms treated in Proverbs and Israel’s other wisdom literature.

Thus, when Job is undeservedly afflicted, his sentiments are very much what we find here in our psalm—shock, surprise, and disappointment. He complains to God, very much as this psalm complains: “You have made us the taunt of our neighbors, a derision and scorn to those about us.” Such is the prayer of those who, like Job, feel overwhelmed by the sense that, in spite of His salvific deeds in the past and His promises for the future, God has simply forgotten. There are days when, if we are believers at all, we can only be described as “men of little faith.”

Psalm 44 is the prayer of an individual, or a people, being sorely tried with respect to faith. Were it not for such experiences of being abandoned by God, there would be no test for the important proposition that the just man lives by faith. Whatever the trial (and its possible forms are manifold), it is finally the voice of faith—albeit, little faith—that prevails in this psalm. We pray to the Lord with those other men that our Lord describes as “of little faith,” the frightened disciples on the stormy lake: “Awake! Why do You sleep, O Lord? Rise up, and do not cast us off forever. . . . Arise and come to our help; deliver us for the sake of Your name.”

From Romans 8:35, 36 we know how the Apostle Paul prayed this psalm, seeing in its lament a reflection of the sufferings in his own soul by reason of his fidelity to Christ: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: /‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; / We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’“

Tuesday, March 19

1 Corinthians 3:1-17: The Church as a building. In fact, we are accustomed to thinking of the Church as a building. Perhaps we are too accustomed to thinking of the Church as a building. We are so accustomed to it that we forget that Paul is here using a metaphor. He is not saying the Church is a building. He is saying that it is like a building.

“You are God’s building,” he says; “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? 1 If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.”

Paul is talking about an historical institution, not some abstract, invisible reality. The Church that Paul is talking about is a real body, a religious organization, in the sense of a living organism. This church is composed of actual people who live and worship together in a common faith. Specifically, it is the Church at Corinth. This church at Corinth is composed of real people. Paul would not countenance for one minute the idea that the real Church is something distinguishable from the Church at Corinth.

Paul did not write his epistles for some invisible, trans-historical reality. He wrote for specific groups of people who were joined together in organic, institutional ways. Later on in this epistle he refers to the joints and ligaments that hold the body together. These are the organizations of communion, without which there is no such thing as Church. The visible, organized Church is the only Christian Church recognized in the New Testament. Like any other historical institution, it has an invisible life and being, but that invisible life and being cannot be separated from the visible, social institution itself.

Like any other visible, organized group of people, the Church has its problems, and it was to address these problems that Paul wrote this epistle. Paul specifically addresses problems associated with strife and bickering among the Corinthian Christians. This is significant, because there is no strife or bickering in an invisible, trans-historical reality. One must not attempt to escape from the concrete problems of the visible church by joining some imaginary invisible church. That is simply an exercise in religious fantasy.

On the contrary, it is imperative that we believers stay in the communion of the visible, social, institutional Church founded by Jesus Christ. It is imperative, furthermore, that we strive together to work out our salvation.. Paul tells the Philippians, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” This is a very important mandate, deserving of careful inspection. In the original Greek, the noun is singular, and the verb is plural. That is to say, we all have the same salvation, and we work it out together.

None of us works out his salvation on his own. It is a share effort for a shared goal, and not one of us must dare to try to go it alone without the others. This is why Paul says it must be done “in fear and trembling.” The mandate to strive together is a mandate based on a healthy measure of fear. Salvation belongs to none of us as a private enterprise that we can somehow take away on his own. On this matter Paul gives us a solemn warning about fear and trembling. We must not divide the social, corporate institution for which Christ shed His blood. Paul saw exactly that danger at Corinth, and this is why he wrote this epistle, to insist:

Wednesday, March 20

Matthew 22:23-33: Part of the Christian faith declares that through one man’s offense sin entered into the world, and, through sin, the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics is not a theorem. It cannot demonstrated by mathematical operations and arguments. It is not the logical consequence of an axiom. It cannot be argued deductively.

The second law of thermodynamics is, rather, a scientific law. It is demonstrated inductively, by experiment. The second law of thermodynamics rests on the foundation of accumulated experience. As it applies to human beings, thermodynamics means death.

The certainty of death is a scientific certainty, like the law of gravity. Although the force of gravity is measured by mathematics, is not demonstrated by mathematics. It is demonstrated by experience.

Now, the world is largely peopled by those who believe scientific truth expresses the ultimate or final truth. To them it appears that the second law of thermodynamics represents the final verdict with respect to physical reality. They may not know how death came into the world, but they do insist that death is the ultimate truth about world.

What I am about to say may come as a shock to the scientific mind, but such “laws”—like the second law of thermodynamics gravity or the law of gravity—are intrinsically shaky. By this I mean, the discovery of single exception would completely destroy them. If a single physical object were unaccountably—on its own, as it were—to resist the law of gravity, the law of gravity would no longer be a law.

Likewise, if a single person should rise from the dead, that would be the end of the second law of thermodynamics.

Now this is, in fact, what the Christian faith asserts. The Nicene Creed empties the second law of thermodynamics by declaring, “on the third day He rose again from the dead.” And the Nicene Creed eviscerates the law of gravity by proclaiming, “He ascended into heaven.”

In tonight’s reading Jesus is approached by men who adhere firmly to second law of thermodynamics. The deny that the dead will rise. These men are conservatives. They are conservatives in several senses. For instance, they claim to adhere only to the Torah; they deny the authority of the Prophets. And, denying the authority of the Prophets, they refuse to accept ideas more clearly elaborated by the Prophets, chiefly the hope of the resurrection.

It is curious—to me, at least—that these Sadducees, when they object to the idea of a resurrection, imagine that they can make their case on the grounds of logic. One thing is clear: they have not thought the matter through.

Real men of science would never argue that way. No true physicist would try to prove the law of gravity by recourse to logic. And no biologist would pretend that the certainty of death was equal to the certainty of the value of pi. No man of science would confuse the periodic table with the multiplication table.

As they approach our Savior of this point, the Sadducees seem to have no idea how on what shaky ground they stand. When they tell their pitiful little story about the lady with seven husbands, they resemble no one so much as a group of village idiots.

Two things you do not know, responds Jesus. You do not know the Scriptures, and you do not know the power of God.

With respect to the Scriptures, we observe that Jesus appeals only to the Torah, because these men do not respect the Prophets. And from the Torah, Jesus demonstrates that they do not understand the meaning of the Burning Bush.

And with respect to the power of God, the Sadducees imagine that the Maker of heaven and earth would be bound by laws He Himself created. Even less is He constrained by a “law” He did not create, such as the second law of thermodynamics. Not having read the Torah very carefully, they imagine that the world was created in a fallen state.

No, it was by man’s disobedience that death entered into the world. God had nothing to do with it. Jesus argues that what man did, God can undo. As Jesus makes this point, only a few days remain until God abrogates the rule of death.

Thursday, March 21

Matthew 22.34-46: The Pharisees, perhaps not entirely displeased with the discomfiting of the Sadducees, meet again among themselves (verse 34). One of their number, likely representing the rest, approaches Jesus to test Him (verse 35).

Matthew’s version of this story differs considerably in tone from the parallel text in Mark 12:28, where the questioner appears well disposed toward Jesus. The corresponding text in Luke 10:25 comes much earlier in the narrative, in a quite different setting, where it introduces the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In Matthew, however, the question put to Jesus is integral to the series of skirmishes between Jesus and His enemies (21:15—22:46), which precedes the Lord’s lengthy denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees in the next chapter (which is also proper to Matthew). The present scene also takes up the theme of biblical interpretation, which was inaugurated in the previous story (verses 23-33).

Some manuscripts call the questioner in this story a “lawyer” (nomikos). Inasmuch as this word is not found elsewhere in Matthew and is missing in the better manuscripts of this passage, it is possible that an early copyist borrowed the term from the parallel account in Luke 10:25.

The rabbinic tradition counted up to 613 Commandments in the Torah, 248 of them positive (“you shall”) and 365 of them negative (“you shall not”)—one for each day of the year. The were not considered all to be of the same weight. The prohibition against idolatry, for instance, clearly carried more weight than laws about the maintenance of a man’s sideburns.

Jesus answers the questioner by reciting part of the Shema, which devout Jews recited several times each day (Deuteronomy 6:5). As Matthew cites the text, he slightly alters (“mind,” or dianoia, instead of “strength,” or dynamis) the LXX reading. We notice that Mark’s text includes the whole Shema.

Jesus cites only two positive commandments, not the prohibitions. Love is the fundamental commandment on which all the others rest.

As the Sadducees had failed to notice the implications of Exodus 3:14-15, so the Pharisees had somehow missed the true meaning of (and relationship between) Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Not really loving God, they have also not loved their neighbor, whom they were currently plotting to kill. They were not rendering unto God the things that are God’s (verse 21).

Matthew’s version of the second commandment is more strongly expressed than it is in Mark. It is “like unto” the first.

We should also read the account of these two commandments as addressing a practical pastoral question posed in the church for which Matthew wrote. In that Jewish Christian congregation it was of great importance to know how the Lord wanted the Law to be observed. All the Law, says Jesus’ answer, hangs on (krematai) these two commandments. Since this was the Lord’s own perspective on the matter, it is not surprising that His answer is essentially what we find in the various writers of the New Testament (cf. Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8).

Since Matthew (unlike Mark and Luke) places these two verses of the Torah in the context of a dispute with the Pharisees, we suspect that on this point (“which is the greatest commandment”) such a dispute continued between the Pharisees and Matthew’s Christians.

The Apostle John reverses the order of these two commandments, not in an absolute sense, but in the sense that the second commandment is the easier to check on. He writes, “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also” (1 John 4:20-21).

The inquirer had asked only about the Torah, but Jesus says that these two commandments dominate not only the Torah but also the prophets (verse 40).

Friday, March 22

Matthew 23.1—24.2: Although individual verses of this chapter correspond to verses in the other gospels, this chapter’s construction as a whole and in its setting in the last week of Jesus’ life are peculiar to Matthew. It fittingly follows the long series of altercations between Jesus and His enemies in the two previous chapters.

The present chapter commences with a warning that the Lord’s disciples are not to imitate the hypocritical, self-absorbed religion of the Pharisees. It is instructive to observe that this censure is not extended to the chief priests, the Sadducees, the Herodians, and the elders. Only the scribes and Pharisees are criticized here.

This restriction of the censure indicates the setting in which Matthew wrote, sometime after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, at which point the priests, the Sadducees, and the Herodians were no longer part of the Jewish leadership. The Judaism with which Matthew was dealing was that of the Pharisees and the scribes, the only ones left with the moral authority to lead the Jewish people. Those other social and religious elements, though powerful at an earlier period, were not of immediate concern to Matthew. Although the priestly class are Jesus’ chief enemies in the story of the Passion, they do not figure here in chapter 23, because Matthew has in mind his own contemporary circumstance, in which the priestly class is no longer significant.

This discourse is directed to Jesus’ disciples, who are warned not to follow the example of the scribes and Pharisees (verses 1-3). The “seat of Moses” is a metaphor for the teaching authority of these men. We observe that Matthew regards these men as still having authority, very much as we find the Apostle Paul recognizing the authority of the high priest and the Sanhedrin. This authority, says the Sacred Text, is to be respected. It is the men that hold that authority who are not to be imitated!

In what respect are they not to be imitated? They lay heavy burdens on men’s backs. In context these are the burdens of legalism, a weight that makes the service of God onerous and unbearable (verse 4). This is a form of religious oppression. These “heavy burdens,” which contrast with the “light burden” of the Gospel (11:30), consisted of the numerous rules, regulations, and rubrics that governed the lives of their fellow Jews. Matthew is at one with Paul that these myriad matters were no longer essential.

It is worth mentioning, in this context, that legalism tends to return to the Christian Church from time to time, though no longer associated with the Mosaic Law. We are seldom short of Christians who like to oppress their brethren with an endless recitation of rules and rubrics. This sort of mentality renders the service of God a dreadful burden. It constitutes a scandal in the strict sense of turning men from the love and service of God.

The real motive of the Pharisees, however, was nothing but unsubtle self-aggrandizement (verses 5-7). A phylactery is a small leather box containing passages from Holy Scripture. These were worn strapped to the forehead and the arm during morning prayers, a rather literal interpretation of Exodus 13:1-16; Deuteronomy 6:4-9; and 11:13-22. The rabbis referred to these as tefillin. The fringes are the tassels that adorn the prayer shawl, in accord with Numbers 15:38-39; Deuteronomy 22:12.

By implication Matthew encourages Christians to avoid this sort of preoccupation, and he explicitly rejects the use of certain honorific titles (verses 8-10). With respect to the title of “Rabbi” (“my lord”), it is worth noting that in Matthew’s Gospel only Judas addresses Jesus by this title (26:25,49).

For Christians, who are to serve one another humbly as members of the same family, these displays are negative examples.

Matthew then begins a series of “Woes” against the scribes and Pharisees (verse 13). Leaving out verse 14 (not found in the more reliable manuscripts and apparently borrowed from Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47), there are seven “Woes” in this series, seven being the number signifying completion and fulfillment. That is to say, these hypocritical, self-satisfied men have brought to completion and fulfillment the myriad infidelities recorded in biblical history (verse 32). In denouncing them, therefore, the Lord uses the traditional formula of the prophets, whom their forefathers had murdered—“Woe!”