The priests and elders who plot against Jesus determine not to do it during the Passover, to avoid an “uproar” (26:5). The word is used only one other time in Matthew, to describe the “uproar” among the Jews who are rioting in front of Pilate’s Praetorium (27:24). Because of the uproar, Pilate washes his hands and delivers Jesus up to the Jews. So much for the careful plotting, shown to be comically ineffective insofar as it opposes theh Scriptures and... Read more
“Jesus had finished all these words” (Matthew 26:1). Not only has Jesus finished the last of the five discourses; He has stopped speaking to Israel altogether. Through the next several chapters, He barely speaks at all. This is an announcement of judgment against Israel. From the beginning of His ministry, Jesus has been talking – He’s laid out a way of righteousness and peace for Israel, commissions His disciples, disclosed the secrets of the king of heaven, told His disciples... Read more
Joel 2:25 plays a strangely prominent role in the Arian controversy. In the NASB translation, the Lord promises to “make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust and the gnawing locust, my great army which I sent among you.” In the Greek translations of the fourth century, “great army” was rendered “great power” and one of the locust species was translated as “caterpillar.” The Arians used Joel’s statement about “great power” to relativize... Read more
The priests pay Judas 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus (Matthew 26:15). The amount of the payment takes us back to Exodus 21:32 and Zechariah 11:12-13. Here I want to muse on the connection between Matthew and the Exodus passage. The scenario in Exodus is this: A man owns a dangerous ox who has gored people in the past. If the animal gores and kills a free man or woman, the owner has to be put to death and... Read more
“Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” For nearly two millennia, Christians have been singing that every week, often without a second thought about the radical claims embedded in the hymn. In Isaiah 6, the song shakes the temple, but Christians sing it outside the temple. The Sanctus is a claim that the church is the new temple. In Isaiah 6 and Revelation, the song is sung by angels. The Sanctus... Read more
Gifts blind the clear-sighted and subvert justice (Exodus 23:8). In context, that’s statement about bribery, and the word used for “gift” here is almost invariably used for bribes of one sort or another (Deuteronomy 10:17; 16:19; 27:25; 1 Samuel 8:3; 1 Kings 15:29; 16:8; etc.). Occasionally, the reference seems a bit broader (cf. Psalm 15:5), and in any case, the principle holds even for those who are not judges and princes: Money and promises of money blind us to injustice,... Read more
From Nabokov’s lectures on literature, quoted in Smith’s book: “All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic relight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our... Read more
Jamie Smith’s latest book ( Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies) ) is excellent. He rightly challenges the tendency for “worldview-talk” to take a rationalist bent, and in place of the assumption that “man is a thinking being” he argues an anthropology based on the notion of man as a desiring, loving being. We are what we love, and the desires of our hearts are formed in us as habits formed through “thick rituals” that Smith... Read more
Athanasius points out to Marcellinus that the Psalms cover every “eventuality.” They are a mirror of the soul because they are a mirror of human experience – of suffering, of desperation, of exultation, of thanksgiving, of prosperity, of adversity, of garden and wilderness, of isolation and communion, and on and on. They are a mirror of the soul because they are a mirror of our emotional life, including every permutation of passion. More than mirror, though: Through singing the Psalms,... Read more
No one would dare, Athanasius writes to Marcellinus, to take the words of the patriarchs, or Moses, or the prophets as his own. No one would dare imitate the prophets by saying “As the Lord lives, before whom I stand today.” The Psalms are different. When someone reads, hears, chants, sings the Psalms, “he recognizes [these words] as being his own words.” He is “deeply moved, as though he himself were speaking, and is affected by the words of the... Read more
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