MATTHEW 15
Watch out for hypocrisy! God hates it! “These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules” (Isaiah 29:13). The longer a faith becomes entrenched within a society, the more it seems that an outward observation is all that matters. The oral tradition of the Jewish rabbis, established after the return from the Babylonian exile, began to set out rules and regulations that went way beyond the requirements of scriptures – and over every aspect of a believer’s lifestyle.
So ingrained did these rules become, that they effectively superseded the Law of Moses in terms of day-to-day authority. And it was all for outward show; obey these rules and you were considered a fine upstanding member of society. The food laws, in particular, were rigid and demanding. In a culture where people always ate together, they were rules from which you could not hide!
However, they totally missed the point. Jesus summed it up when he said that it was not what went into your mouth that mattered or made you acceptable to God – it was what came out of your mouth, in terms of Godly speech. As James 3:2 puts it: “Anyone who is never at fault in what he says is a perfect, able to keep his whole body in check”. Godly living is all about the inward life invading the outward, rather than the outward cleansing the inward. What is our inner life like – that which is only seen by God, not men? Our inward life is actually part of heaven. And are we motivated to please the unseen God or the visible and cheering crowds?
A Gentile woman whose daughter was suffering demon-possession, cried out to Jesus for help. To test her faith, he claimed that his ministry was only to God’s existing chosen people – analogous to a man’s children being fed from his abundant meal table. The woman, full of faith – where did that come from? – pushed the analogy to argue that even the family pets manage to feed from the abundance of the father’s provision. Jesus could not resist that kind of bold, audacious faith and granted the woman’s request instantly. How audacious is our faith? Do we insult the God of all the Earth with our low expectations and our timid requests? Rather, should we not honour him with the size and scope of our prayers!
Some more liberal scholars think that the ‘Feeding of the Four Thousand’ was just a textual repeat of the ‘Five Thousand’ episode and that, as usual, Matthew was seeking double! However, Mark also mentions both events in his gospel. Furthermore, if we look ahead to the next chapter in Matthew, we read Jesus asking his disciples: “Don’t you remember the five loaves for the five thousand… or the seven loaves for the four thousand…?” (16:9-10). So, clearly Jesus recalled them as two separate events.
What surprises me is that the disciples seemed to forget the ‘5000’ event and the lessons they learned, when they encountered the same kind of catering challenge with the ‘4000’. Surely their faith should have been strengthened by their first experience and they would have readily expected Jesus to do a similar miracle. Jesus seemed to wait for them to make the first move this time around – in the spirit of true discipleship – and perhaps there was a slightly ‘resigned’ tone to his voice when he eventually asked them: “How many loaves do you have?” (v34).
Do we learn from previous answers to prayer? Do we even remember them? Perhaps we need to read more biographies of great people of faith – or spend times with those kinds of people living around us – in order to learn from their faith and energise ours! One of the saddest phrases in the scriptures is usually: “… and Israel forgot the Lord’s miraculous provision for them…”.
GENESIS 43 and 44
We are in a stand-off situation. Jacob refuses to risk letting Benjamin travel to Egypt and so they cannot obtain food from Egypt to survive a famine in which Benjamin would otherwise certainly die, along with the whole family. Who blinks first? Jacob! Judah took total responsibility for Benjamin’s safety and, of course, there was no option but for Jacob to place his trust in God’s mercy and agree that Benjamin could accompany his brothers. On arriving, Joseph had them all diverted to his own palace for a private lunch meeting – including the relieved Simeon.
Of course, the two people that most concerned Joseph were Benjamin (his true brother) and Jacob, his father. Understandably, seeing the former and having news of the latter had an emotional effect on Joseph, and he raced into his private bathroom to weep and then freshen up. At lunch, the brothers were gob-smacked to realise that they have been seated in chronological order – a statistical impossibility! – but even then, they didn’t guess the reason for it. Benjamin clearly already had a reputation for having a healthy appetite!
At that point, a happy family reconciliation could have occurred if only Joseph had ‘spilled the beans’ about his identity; yet he seemed determined to make his brothers feel what he had felt so many years previously. A simple trick with a valuable goblet provided sufficient pretext to have Benjamin arrested and brought back to face trial – with the rest of the brothers having no choice but to follow.
Judah, in desperation, and conscious of the promise he had made to his father, begged Joseph to take him as a slave instead of Benjamin, on the basis that his father would probably not recover if Benjamin failed to be returned safely. It may have been the mention of Jacob’s potential demise, or it may have been the shock at hearing selfish Judah acting self-sacrificially for perhaps the first time in his life, but Joseph could not hold it in any longer and wept for so long and so loudly that even the neighbours were tempted to complain!
The Big Picture 