Friday, March 11
Matthew 19.1-12: Matthew introduces this part of his narrative by mentioning the end (etelesen–verse 1) of Jesus’ previous discourse—namely, the preceding chapter on life in the Church. Each of Jesus’ five large discourses in ended in the same way (cf. 7:28; 11:1; 13:53; 26:1).
Jesus, moving south, goes somewhat eastward across the Jordan, avoiding a trip through Samaria. He is followed by “large” crowds (contrast with Mark 10:1), “to follow” being the normal word for discipleship.
The treatment of marriage and divorce comes in response to the question that the Pharisees put to Jesus, which question Matthew (alone) says was meant to “try” Him (peirazontes–verse 3). The context of the teaching, that is to say, was one of controversy. It is well known that the various rabbinical schools were distinguished from one another by what restrictions they placed on divorce—some stricter, some not so strict. Jesus was being invited to enter that controversy.
Instead, He went straight to the creation account in Genesis, using it to forbid all divorce (cf. also 5:32). Jesus mentions no exceptions. Even the expression “not including fornication” (me epi porneia), which is often taken as a reason for divorce, is no exception to the rule. It simply means, “I am not talking about fornication.” That is to say, the prohibition against divorce applies only to a true marriage, not cases where a man and woman are living together in sin.
What is most striking about Jesus’ prohibition is that our Lord thereby abrogates the application of Deuteronomy 24:1, which did provide for divorce. Jesus would have none of it. Divorce for the purpose of remarriage with someone else is adultery.
It is unfortunate that many readers find in this text only another species of legalism with respect to marriage. In fact, this biblical passage has as much to say of Christology as of marriage. However, when this page is “consulted,” some question about marriage is usually the reason for the consultation, so the important Christological weight of the text is simply overlooked. Inspected more carefully, however, the Christological significance of the passage could hardly be weightier. Jesus, boldly abrogating a concession given in the Mosaic Law, laid claim to immense authority—truly, “all authority”–pasa exsousia, as He will say at the end of Matthew (28:18). This authority is nothing less than divine, and it is in recognition of this total authority that we find so many people in Matthew’s stories falling prostrate before Jesus.
It is curious that those who objected to Jesus’ prohibition against divorce were not his enemies, but his disciples. They wondered, if divorce was not permitted, whether remaining celibate might not be a more attractive option (verse 10). (We wonder why the prospect of a happy marriage did not cross their minds!)
Perhaps to their surprise, Jesus agreed with them, not because of the indissolubility of marriage, but because celibacy is a superior expression of the Kingdom of Heaven (verse 12). Nonetheless, Jesus declared, celibacy is a gift from God, a grace not accorded to all men (verse 11).
Most Christians recognize that in this passage the reference to self-castration is a metaphor of irony, akin to the amputation of a hand or the gouging out of an eye mentioned in the previous chapter.
Saturday, March 12
1 Timothy 1.1-11: When the Apostle Paul appointed St. Timothy to be the bishop at Ephesus in the mid-50s, he sent the young pastor a series of wise pastoral directions. He told him, for example, to “give attention to reading,
to exhortation, to doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:13). He urged Timothy to “fight the good fight of faith” (6:12) and to “reject profane and old wives’ fables” (4:7). He warned him to “observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing with partiality” (5:21). He exhorted him to “be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love” (4:12), and so on. Paul instructed Timothy, in short, with many pieces of wise counsel.
We know what Paul thought of him. He told the Macedonians, “I have no one like-minded, who will sincerely care for your state” (Philippians 2:20) and went on to speak of his “proven character” (2:22). Indeed, Paul refers to Timothy
as “our brother” (2 Corinthians 1:1; Colossians 1:1; 1 Thessalonians 3:2; Philemon 1), “as a son with his father” (Philippians 2:22), and “my beloved and faithful son in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:17). Paul addresses him, moreover, as “son Timothy” (1 Timothy 1:18), “Timothy, a true son in the faith” (1:2), and “Timothy, a beloved son” (2 Timothy 1:2).
Paul knew that Timothy had been raised in a devout, believing family (2 Timothy 1:5), where he was trained in the Holy Scriptures (3:15).
Still young, Timothy had joined Paul’s company during the second missionary journey (Acts 16:1–3) and remained with him through the ensuing years, carefully following his “doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance, persecutions, afflictions, which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra” (2 Timothy 3:10–11).
Along the way, Paul found that he could entrust Timothy with important
responsibilities in the ministry. The young man had not been a missionary even a year before Paul sent him from Athens to Thessaloniki for a needed pastoral visit (1 Thessalonians 3:1–5). Later, from Ephesus, Paul sent Timothy to visit the Macedonians (Acts 19:22; Philippians 2:19–23) and the quarrelsome, spiteful congregation at Corinth (1 Corinthians 4:17; 16:10). It was to Timothy, finally, that Paul wrote the last letter of his life, asking him to “be diligent to come to me quickly” (2 Timothy 4:9).
Sunday, March 13
Matthew 19.23-30: We can discern, over the centuries of Old Testament history, a deep transformation in Israel’s thinking about wealth. The ancient Wisdom tradition had associated the accumulation of wealth with the virtuous life, as we see in Proverbs. That earlier literature, while not unaware of the spiritual dangers associated with wealth, had spent little space expounding on those dangers.
It was Israel’s prophetic voice, rather, beginning with Elijah’s denunciation of Ahab in the 9th century, that began to elaborate the theme of the dangers posed by too much preoccupation with wealth. This was a major theme, of course, in the great social prophets of the 8th century. Gradually it found its way more explicitly in the Wisdom literature as well, Sirach 31:3-5 being one of its more eloquent expressions. Jesus’ approach to the subject in the present text is of a piece with what we find in Sirach.
Matthew omits the initial wonderment of the disciples mentioned by Mark (10:24), but he does include the Lord’s elaboration of the theme in the hyperbole of the camel and the eye of the needle.
As an image of “great difficulty,” this seems an unlikely hyperbole. It strikes the reader, rather, as a simple metaphor for impossibility. Indeed, there is a clear parallel to it in rabbinical literature, which speaks of the impossibility of passing an elephant through the eye of a needle (Babylonian Talmud, Berakoth 55b). Does Jesus mean, then, “very difficult” or “utterly inconceivable”?
Since there appear to be no circumstances in which it is humanly possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, various fanciful interpretations have been advanced to explain away the toughness of the text. One of these, manifestly invented by someone who had no idea what he was talking about, refers to a small gate in the wall of Jerusalem. There is not the faintest evidence of such a gate.
On the other hand, since the Lord’s hyperbole contains a bit of metaphor-mixing, others have tried their hand at “correcting” Him. After all, why would anyone try to pass a camel, to say nothing of an elephant, through the eye of a needle? What purpose would it serve? You can’t sew with an elephant. It was apparently to address this difficulty that a tenth century copyist devised a very slight textual change in Luke’s version of the parable. He altered kamelos (camel) to kamilos (rope). A rope, after all, has an obvious affinity to a thread, whereas camel clearly does not.
This reading of “rope” for “camel,” first found in a manuscript penned in A.D. 949 and copied into a few other manuscripts, is rather clever, even ingenious, but it is also too late in history to be taken seriously. One should be very cautious about biblical interpretations, much less biblical readings, that don’t appear at all in the first thousand years of Christian history!
What, then, about the impossibility implied in the Lord’s saying? The subsequent verse, in fact, confirms it. Yes, says Jesus, the salvation of the rich man is humanly impossible. This does not mean, however, that there is an impossibility on God’s side. God can pass a camel through the eye of the needle (verse 26). Let the rich man take care, however. Let him reflect that he is asking God for a miracle.
This metaphor of the camel and the needle, therefore, is something of a parallel with the moving of mountains. Both parables have to do with the power of faith in the God. Salvation is ever a gift of God, not a human achievement.
Monday, March 14
1 Timothy 2.1-17: This is the only Pauline text that speaks of Jesus as the “Mediator,” a Christology title dominant in the Epistle to the Hebrews.
The entire Christian thesis is postulated on the reality of a beyond .
God’s eternal Son, we confess, came from beyond, outside of time and space, but he assumed our own experience of time and space. The term “Mediator” (Greek Mesites means that the incarnate Word brings the beyond within our reach. In our communion with Him, we are in communion with the eternal Father.
When Jesus declares, for instance, that He and the Father are one, when He affirms that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him, when He claims that those who see Him see the Father (14:9); in all such assertions, Jesus of Nazareth forces Himself on the conscience of every human being who has ever lived.
The radical nature of these claims implies that their validity concerns the very being of God and, hence, the meaning of human existence. If these assertions are true, then there really is no God except the God
revealed as the Father of this Palestinian carpenter.
Jeremiah 27: This chapter continues the theme of the growing antagonism between Jeremiah and the false prophets; this is the theme that joins it to chapter 26.
The vocabulary and style of this chapter, however, link it even more closely to chapters 28-29. Indeed, it is possible that these three chapters at one time represented a literary unit, eventually incorporated into the full prophetic corpus edited by Baruch.
The “situation” in chapters 27-29 was an assembly of international diplomats, gathered at Jerusalem, sometime in 594-593. These representatives came from neighboring nations for the purpose of persuading King Zedekiah to join a general revolt against Babylon. This is the meaning of the symbol of the yoke. Jeremiah warns Zedekiah and the others against false hope, in contrast to the false prophets (such as Hananiah in chapter 28), who were encouraging rebellion against Babylon.
Tuesday, March 15
Mathew 20.17-19: This section begins with the Lord’s third and final prediction of the His coming Passion (verses 17-19; Mark 10:32-34; Luke 18:31-34). This prophecy is much more detailed than the earlier two (16:21; 17:22-23), mentioning the Lord’s manumission to the chief priests (26:57), His condemnation by them (26:66), His handing over to Pilate (27:2), and the mockery and scourging (27:26-30). Unlike Mark (10:34), Matthew also specifies crucifixion (27:32-44), a form of execution practiced by the Romans.
Psalms 32 (Greek & Latin 31): This psalm is listed among the “penitential” psalms, those prayers that express the themes of sin, repentance, mercy and forgiveness.
The correct interpretation of certain psalms comes more readily than others, and the task is rendered easier still if a psalm’s meaning has already been made plain in the New Testament. The New Testament is, after all, the key to the full (that is to say, Christian) understanding of the Old. When the New Testament tells us the meaning of some passage in the Old Testament, then the matter of authentic interpretation, for us Christians, is settled. Such is the case with Psalm 32, which begins: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity.” Saint Paul explicitly quotes these lines near the beginning of Romans 4 to illustrate “the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works” (v. 6).
The apostle’s thesis here, as in Romans generally, is that we believers are not justified before God by our own merits, by the effort of our “works,” by a correct and meticulous observance of the Mosaic Law, but by receiving, in faith, God’s gracious justification of us for the sake of Christ our Redeemer. Psalm 31, then, is the prayer of those who, standing at the foot of the Cross and forswearing all righteousness of their own, commit their lives and entrust their destinies entirely to God’s forgiving mercy richly and abundantly poured out in the saving, sacrificial blood of His Son, because “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them” (2 Cor. 5:19).
Such is the key to the proper understanding of Psalm 32; such is the correct context for praying the rest of the psalm: “I acknowledge my sin to You, and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said: ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.” Our justification by God is no contrivance, no legal fiction. It truly renders us holy, even glorious, in His sight: “whom he justified, these He also glorified” (Rom. 8:30). Thus, Psalm 31 speaks of the justified as “blessed,” “godly,” “righteous,” and “upright in heart.” This forgiveness of God has ongoing implications for how we are to live. Inasmuch as we have been “bought at a price” (1 Cor. 6:20), we may no longer live as though we belonged to ourselves: “Do you not know that . . . you are not your own?” (6:19); “He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again” (2 Cor. 5:15).
Wednesday, March 16
1 Timothy 3;1-7: The requirement that the “overseer” (episkopos) or “elder” (presbyteros) in the Church be a “man of one woman” was not a prohibition of polygamy. That sort of prohibition would have been unnecessary, since polygamy was forbidden to all Christians. The text refers, rather, to any second marriage, whether a second marriage following one’s conversion (the situation addressed in 1 Corinthians 7:12-16) or a second marriage after the death of one’s first wife.
In either case, a second marriage, according to the present text, is a disqualification for ordination. The reason seems to be a practical one, namely, it has to do with the sorts of domestic and social complications often attendant on a second marriage and the establishment of a second family. It is a practical application of the more general principle that a man cannot be expected effectively to pastor a congregation unless his own household is completely in order (verses 3-5).
Jeremiah 29: Saint Augustine of Hippo, in his treatise Against Faustus (13.36), comments at length on this letter of Jeremiah:
As regards the departure to Babylon, where the Spirit of God by the prophet Jeremiah enjoins them to go, telling them to pray for the people in whose land they dwell as strangers, because in their peace they would find peace, and to build houses, and plant vineyards and gardens (Jeremiah 29),—the figurative meaning is plain, when we consider that the true Israelites, in whom is no guile, passed over in the ministry of the apostles with the ordinances of the gospel into the kingdom of the Gentiles.
So the apostle, like an echo of Jeremiah, says to us, “I will first of all that prayer, supplications, intercessions and giving of thanks be made for all men, and for those in authority, that we may live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and charity; for this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
Accordingly the basilicas of Christian congregations have been built by believers as abodes of peace, and vineyards of the faithful have been renewed, and gardens planted, where chief among the plants is the mustard tree, in whose wide-spreading branches the pride of the Gentiles, like the birds of heaven, in its soaring ambition, takes shelter.”
Thursday, March 17
Matthew 20.29-34: This story, found also in Mark 10:46-52 and Luke 18:35-43, is linked to the city of Jericho, though not in exactly the same way in each gospel. In Mark’s account Jesus has entered and is the course of leaving the city when the blind man invokes Him. In Luke’s version this event occurs as Jesus is approaching Jericho. Indeed, in the Lukan story Jesus, on leaving Jericho, encounters the publican Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10), a narrative not found in the other gospels. Here in Matthew, on the other hand, the meeting with the blind men occurs when Jesus is leaving Jericho. What is to be said about this threefold discrepancy?
First, it presents no problem from the perspective of history. The site of Jericho shifted about somewhat over the centuries, as archeologists have demonstrated. One of these shifts took place during the very period under consideration, when Herod the Great constructed a winter palace near the ancient site of Jericho, and a new settlement rose around it. That is to say, it was possible to be both entering and leaving Jericho simultaneously.
Second, there appears to be no theological or literary significance to the differences among the three Evangelists on this point. If there is such a significance, the present writer has failed to discover it.
It appears that in Matthew’s two accounts of blind men (here and in 9:27-31), both stories, as they were narrated in the Church’s preaching prior to the written Gospels, came to be told in much the same way. This would account for the similarities between them, such as the identical use of certain expressions: passing through (paragein), touching (hapto), and following (akoluo). We observe, for instance, that the first of these two verbs are not found in the parallel accounts in Mark and Luke.
The major difference of Matthew from Mark and Luke here is, of course, that Matthew has two blind men instead of one. This is surely another instance of Matthew combining two accounts of the healing of blind men from Mark (8:22-26; 10:46-52) into a single story. Why does Matthew do this? Well, his construction effectively juxtaposes these two men with the two sons of Zebedee, who are symbolically healed of their spiritual blindness with respect to the mystery of the Cross. Thus healed, says the text, “they followed “him” (20:34). They become part of the congregation that will accompany Israel’s true King into Jerusalem to accomplish the mystery of Redemption.
To “follow” Christ means to live by the pattern of the Cross, to pursue the implications of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist, the one a mystic identification with His death and resurrection, the other a proclaiming of His death “until He comes.” These two men have accepted the challenge just made to James and John.
Friday, March 18
Hebrews 8.1-13: Much of this passage is made up of a quotation from Jeremiah 31:31-34. Indeed, it is the longest Old Testament quotation found in the New Testament. By using the expression “new covenant” at the Last Supper (Matthew 26.28), Jesus implicitly invited Christians to consult Jeremiah’s description of it.
In addition to this long quotation in Hebrews, the passage from Jeremiah was referenced by St. Paul, who wrote that God “made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
Paul had this Jeremian text in mind when he wrote: “You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men— clearly an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:2).
This text, often described as the best lines of Jeremiah, is also one of the most emphatic passages to come from his pen. It is emphatic in the sense of its repeated insistence that God is the one who speaks. Four times this text affirms, “says the Lord.”
The significance of this repetition become clear in a consideration of its context: the fall and destruction of Jerusalem.
Jeremiah, like the others citizens of the Holy City, saw the obliteration of everything connected with it: the temple, the priesthood, the worship, and so forth. What was left? Nothing but the covenant of the heart. Jeremiah still knew God in the heart.
This heart-knowledge of God, Jeremiah believed, would become the substance of a new covenant with the people of God. The Torah would be written in the heart, not on tables of stone. God would be known immediately, not simply as the content of someone else’s teaching. God would act with the sovereignty of His grace: “I will make . . . I will put . . . I will write . . .I will be . . . I will forgive.”
This new covenant is contrasted with the old: “not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers.” This contrast appealed to the author of Hebrews, who often uses the vocabulary of contrast when he speaks of Christ’s relationship to the Old Testament. He stresses this contrast here: “In that He says, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.”
In context, this final comment apparently refers to the coming destruction of the temple by the Romans in the year 70. The prescribed worship in that temple was becoming obsolete and would soon be gone. Meanwhile, the God of the covenant had already fulfilled His promise to unite His people in a new covenant of the heart. This was the gift of the Holy Spirit, poured out on all believers, who knew the Lord in the forgiveness of their sins.