Tuesday, March 18, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Words
Do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but do not practice.
Always I have been fascinated by words, the interplay of nouns and verbs, adjectives and prepositions, expletives and explanations. The words sometimes take over, and I just follow them toward whatever destination they discover, mostly on their own.
This is a different way with words than the Pharisees had, which Jesus described clearly enough as deceptive and arrogant. We’re right, and you’re wrong was a message they felt compelled to preach to shore up their own soggy, shaggy defenses.
They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and then lay them on people’s shoulders, never lifting a finger to move them or help carry them.
That Jesus, his words, especially in these few chapters of Matthew, he knocks them dead. Matthew might himself have had it in for the Pharisees, and in the notes he took of Jesus’ off the cuff remarks, the Pharisees look more and more foolish, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. Told by idiots, Shakespeare said. This way to dusty death!
All of what they do is performed simply to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels.
Imagine tassels that brush the ground as they walk, robes swaying in their own hot air. And those phylacteries wrapped around their heads, hanging over their foreheads so they can barely see? Jesus’ ridicule paints a ridiculous picture. I think he is looking straight into their midst, right into their eyes, and they cannot break their gaze away.
Jesus turns his eyes away from the religious bigots and toward is penniless, rag-tag disciples. He knows exactly what he wants for them.
As for you, do not be called ‘Rabbi.’
You have but one teacher, and you are all brothers.
Call no one on earth your father;
you have but one Father in heaven.
Do not be called ‘Master’;
you have but one master, the Christ.
And what is more, don’t get those big heads that the Pharisees walk around with. Be humble, be small, be broken … keep your mouths quiet and let God talk through what you do.
The greatest among you must be your servant.
Whoever exalts himself will be humbled;
but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
This might be easier in our humble apartment complex where we are surrounded by 165 other apartments that were built in 1980 and that house quiet folks with regular jobs all over Austin. I think it’s more difficult downtown, in high rise office buildings or apartment houses, where it’s a race to get to the top.
Trouble is, most of the time those ambitious men and women are climbing up the wrong ladder.
(Isaiah 1, Psalm 50, Ezekiel 10, Matthew 23)
posted at www.davesandel.net)
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