Friday, February 11
Mathew 12.9-14: This story continues the theme of the Lord’s relationship to the Sabbath. Rabbinical theory permitted acts of healing on the Sabbath only in danger of death; otherwise such actions had to be postponed. In this text, and generally throughout the gospels, Jesus ignores this distinction. In the present instance His enemies are completely frustrated, because Jesus does not do anything with which they can accuse Him. He does not touch the afflicted man; He does not speak one word that could be interpreted as an act of healing. He simply tells the man to extend his impaired hand, and immediately the hand is healed! In their frustration the Lord’s enemies take the action to which most of the narrative has been building up to this point — they resolve that Jesus must die. That is to say, they resolve to do what Herod had failed to do in the second chapter of Matthew.
Romans 4.1-12: In the present chapter the apostle illustrates and demonstrates that the principle of justification through faith lies at the heart of the Old Testament. He goes to this Gospel principle as illustrated in the lives of Abraham and David.
In the case of David, who had violated at least two articles of the Decalogue, justification came from the forgiveness of his sins. David had not observed the Law, but God had forgiven his lawless deeds and not imputed his sins unto him (verses 7-8).
In this non-imputation of sin, the verb employed is logizesthai, which Paul uses with respect to both David and Abraham. Such imputation is not some sort of legal fiction. This verb, in its normal and literal meaning, comes from the practice of accounting, bookkeeping, and the maintenance of ledgers. In the Greek Bible it is used metaphorically in the sense of a recorded account of man’s moral conduct, as though God and the angels were “keeping tabs” on him (Deuteronomy 24:13; Psalms 106 [105]:31; Daniel 7:10; Revelation 20:12). This figurative use of the verb in a theological sense seems to be an extension of its figurative use in a legal and forensic sense, such as in court records and similar official archives (cf. Esther 6:1-3).
Thus, when David writes that a forgiven man’s sins are not “imputed” to him, the meaning is that those sins are no longer kept on the ledger, so to speak. They have been erased or “whited over.” Our sins are removed from the divine calculation, as it were. Our sins are “covered” (verse 7), not in the sense that they still remain in the soul, but in the sense that God has put them out of His mind. They are over and done with. He remembers them no more. The blood of the Lamb has washed them away, and a man never again needs to remember things that God has forgotten.
In addition to David, Paul writes of Abraham, “our forefather according to the flesh,” which means “our biological ancestor” (verse 1; Matthew 3:9; Luke 3:8). Abraham lived in a period long before the Sinai Covenant and the Mosaic Law. Yet, he was justified in God’s sight, not by his observance of the Law, but through his faith in God’s word, a faith manifest in his obedience to God’s call (verses 2-5).
When the Sacred Text asserts that Abraham’s faith was “accounted [elogisthe] to him for righteousness” (verse 3), it means that God was never in Abraham’s debt. God did not owe Abraham anything. The initiative of salvation in the story of Abraham was entirely God’s. God sought out Abraham, not the other way around. Abraham’s task was to believe, to trust, to obey. In faith he left his justification in God’s hands.
Saturday, February 12
Matthew 12.15-21: Matthew, alone among the Evangelists, cites these verses from Isaiah relative to the “beloved servant.” This passage calls back to the scene of Jesus’ baptism, where God identifies him as the “beloved son.” Even as the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus in that scene, and the Father’s refers to him as “Son,” the vocabulary recalls the Servant from the Book of Isaiah, the image which will largely determine, in due course, our Lord’s understanding of His redemptive role. The Father’s Son, the true Isaac, is identified as God’s Servant.
More and more, as the events of His life unfold—especially the conspiracy of His foes—Jesus sounds the depths of that identification. In straight lines, both images point to the Cross.
In the experience of His baptism, then, our Lord received an earnest intimation of what it finally symbolized. The Gospel narrative will return to this motif in the later scene where Jesus foretells the strife and divisions attendant on the proclamation of the Gospel: “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how distressed I am till it is accomplished!” (Luke 12:50; cf. Mark 10:38).
One especially observes the references to the calling of the Gentiles, references which look backwards to the Magi and forward to the Great Commission.
Romans 4.13-25: Suddenly, and as though by parenthesis, Paul asserts that “the Law brings about wrath.” This means that the Mosaic Law, by adding to man’s moral responsibilities, increases the opportunities for further transgressions, and these transgressions, in turn, evoke the divine wrath. That is to say, the Mosaic Law actually makes man’s moral situation worse!
Consequently, the Law cannot be the instrument of man’s salvation. Paul barely introduces this idea here; he will elaborate it at some length in chapter seven.
Paul here begins to treat the theme of death, a topic he had introduced in 1:32. From this point on, the arguments of the Epistle to the Romans will be directed at the theme of death, expressed in both the noun thanatos (a word found in Romans twenty-two times) and the adjective nekros (found in Romans sixteen times). Paul commences his long argument that man’s justification has to do with Christ’s victory over death. That is to say, man is justified by the power of Christ’s resurrection, unleashed into this world by the Gospel.
Abraham, exemplifying salvific faith, believed in the God who could make fruitful his own “dead” flesh and the “dead” womb of Sarah (verses 17-19; Genesis 17:15-21). Paul compares this to God’s calling all of Creation out of nothingness. This call is the promise of the Resurrection, as he will make clear at the end of the chapter.
This ascription of righteousness to faith pertains not only to Abraham but also to us his children (verses 23-24), if we live by that same faith. Concretely, this means faith in the God who raises the dead, symbolized in the “dead” bodies of Abraham and Sarah. The God who raises Jesus from the dead is the same God who called all things from nothingness into being.
Sunday, February 13
Romans 5.1-11: Since Paul goes to considerable to pain to speak of the life in Christ in three tenses in this text, perhaps we will be most faithful to his thought if we make those three tenses the outline of what we want to say about it.
First, there is the past tense, which Paul uses to speak of our reconciliation and justification. Paul keeps using the aorist passive participle, “having been justified.” It is an act of God in the past that constitutes a new relationship to God. Our justification, our reconciliation is something that has already happened: “having been justified through faith” (verse 1), “having now been justified by His blood” (verse 9).
We observe how calm the Apostle Paul was with respect to his standing before God. He never forgot that God came seeking him, not the other way around. He knew from experience what he writes in this text—namely, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (v. 8). Starting on the road to Damascus that day, Paul did not think of himself as a sinner. He thought of other people as sinners, and he was going to put a stop to it. It had not occurred to him that he was the sinner, until the Voice from heaven called him up short. From that point on, Paul knew what he writes in today’s text: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (v. 6).
Second, there is the future tense, without which we could do none of these things. The future tense concerns what Paul calls “salvation.” Paul clearly thinks of salvation as still something yet to come. In the Epistle to the Romans, the “salvation” effected by God’s power in the Gospel most often refers to a future reality rather than an accomplished fact.
Paul returns to this idea over and over again in the Book of Romans. For instance, in today’s text he says, “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”
Paul keeps returning to this theme in Romans. He says in 10:8, “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” A few verses later he repeats this principle, “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (10:13). And finally, Paul says in 13:11, “now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.” That is to say, our salvation is something in the future, and we are moving toward it.
Third, there is the present tense to speak of our life in Christ right now. This is the dominant verbal tense of this chapter, in which, Paul says, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations” (vv. 1-3). All of those verbs are in the present tense: we have peace, we have access, we stand, we rejoice, we glory. This is the present Christian life, in which “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (v. 5). It is a life of peace with God, access to God, standing before God, rejoicing in hope, and glorying in tribulations.
Monday, February 14
Matthew 12: 31-37: Strictly speaking there is no “unforgivable” sin. Jesus does not say that this sin can’t be forgive; he says it won’t be forgiven. God’s mercy stands ready to forgive any sin of which repent. The whole point of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is that it is, by definition, the sin of which men do not repent. It is total and inveterate blindness of heart, in which men can no longer discern the difference between light and darkness. Such appears to be the sin of which the Lord’s enemies are guilty in these texts where we find them plotting His death.
For a pastoral perspective it may be said that those Christians who fear they may have committed such a sin should be take courage from the thought that their very fear is strong evidence that they have not done so. Those who are approaching the unforgiven sin are those who no longer even think about repentance and feel no need for it.
Romans 5.12-21: Having earlier treated of Abraham and David in regard to justification, Paul now turns to a consideration of Adam, whose sin introduced death into the world. Our mortality is the Fall that we sinners inherit from Adam. If, apart from Christ, sins reigns, “sin reigns in death” (verse 21). By reason of Adam’s Fall, man without Christ is under the reign of death and corruption, because “the reign of death operates only in the corruption of the flesh” (Tertullian, On the Resurrection 47).
In the death and resurrection of Christ, on the other hand, are unleashed the energies of life and incorruption. This is the foundation of Paul’s antithetical comparison of Christ and Adam.
Paul goes to Genesis 3 to explain what he calls “the reign of death” (verses 14,17). In the Bible death is not natural, nor is it merely biological, and certainly it is not neutral. Apart from Christ, death represents man’s final separation from God (verse 21; 6:21,23; 8:2,6,38). The corruption of death is sin incarnate and rendered visible. When this “last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:56) has finally been vanquished, then may we most correctly speak of “salvation.” This is why the vocabulary of salvation normally appears in Romans in the future tense.
Because of men’s inheritance of Adam’s Fall, “all sinned.” (Paul is not considering infants here, but this consideration makes no difference to the principle. What has been handed on in Adam’s Fall is not, in the first instance, a sense of personal guilt, but the reign of death. “Sin reigns in death” [verse 21]. Infants, alas, are also the heirs of death, and therefore of Adam’s Fall.)
Tuesday, February 15
Matthew 12.38-42: Both examples given here, the Ninevites and the queen from southern Arabia, are Gentiles, those of whom Matthew has just been speaking in 12:18-21. The figures of Jonah and Solomon should also be understood here as representing the prophetic and sapiential traditions of Holy Scripture.
Jesus is the “greater than Jonah,” whose earlier ministry foreshadowed the Lord’s death and Resurrection and also the conversion of the Gentiles. The Lord’s appeal to Jonah in this text speaks also of Jonah as a type or symbol of the Resurrection. The men of Nineveh, who repented and believed, are contrasted with the unrepentant Jewish leaders who refuse to believe in the Resurrection (cf. 28:13-15). Matthew will return to the sign of Jonah in 16:2. Jesus is also the “greater than Solomon,” who was founder of Israel’s wisdom literature and the builder of the Temple.
The Queen of the South, that Gentile woman who came seeking Solomon’s wisdom, likewise foreshadowed the calling of the Gentiles. She was related to Solomon as the Ninevites were related to Jonah—as Gentiles who met the God of Israel through His manifestation in the personal lives of particular Israelites.
It is a point of consolation to observe that in neither case—whether Solomon or Jonah—were these Israelites free from personal faults!
Romans 6.1-14: The sole person who has overcome the reign of death is Jesus Christ, who could not be held by the clutches of death. As soon as death grabbed hold of Him, it knew that it had met more than its match. The sin that reigned “in death” was thus vanquished, death of Christ atoning for the sins of the whole world. Thus, the death that He died, “He died to sin” (verse 10; 2 Corinthians 5:21). His death, embraced in obedience to the Father’s will, reversed the disobedience of Adam and redeemed, for God, all of Adam’s children. By His death, the sacrificial Lamb of God took away the sins of the whole world.
By his rising again, likewise, Jesus Christ conquered and brought to an end the reign of death. “Death no longer has dominion over Him” (verse 9). Thus the death (including the shedding of His blood and all the sufferings attendant on that death) and the resurrection (including the ascension into heaven, the entrance into the Holy Place, and the sitting at the right hand of the Father) of Jesus Christ form the single activity of our redemption. No part of that mystery is separable from the other, such is its integrity, its wholeness, its catholicity (kath’ holon=”according to the whole”).
Wednesday, February 16
Psalms 116 (Greek & Latin 114 and 115): This psalm breaks into two parts (separate psalms in the Septuagint and Vulgate), the first beginning, “I loved,” and the second beginning, “I believed.” The voice in both these psalms is that of Christ our Lord; it is He who says, “I have loved” and “I have believed.” Loving and believing, that is, are not simply religious requirements laid on the Christian conscience; they are, first of all, characteristics modeled in Christ the Lord. All love and all belief begin in Jesus. Any loving and any believing that we others may accomplish is an inner participation in his loving and his believing, for his loving and his believing form the font of our salvation.
When Jesus says, “I have loved,” the rest of the psalm shows that its special setting is the mystery of His suffering and death endured for the sake of our salvation in loving obedience. Firstly, Jesus did all these things because of His love for the Father: “But that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment, so I do” (John 14:31). Secondly, Jesus did all of these things because He loved us. Thus, St. Paul refers to our Lord simply as “Him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37). And because He loved us, Jesus gave Himself up to death on the Cross: “The life which I now live in the flesh,” wrote St. Paul, “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
The Savior goes on to speak of the supplication that he offered in the context of His sufferings, beseeching God that, if possible, the cup might be taken away: “The sorrows of death encompassed me; the hazards of Hades found me out. Affliction have I found and sorrow, and I called on the name of the Lord: ‘O Lord, deliver my soul.’”
This and so many other psalms testify that the Lord’s Passion was a sustained act of worship. This interpretation of His death was perfectly obvious to the early Christians, who said of Christ that “He offered up Himself” (Heb. 7:27), and who spoke of “the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10), and who described His self-oblation as “an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma” (Eph. 5:2).
This is the language of the temple and of the sacrificial worship, and we are probably so accustomed to hearing it that we have lost all sense of how terribly strange and improbable it must have sounded when the Christians first began to speak this way of the unjust death inflicted on a just man. This event outsiders would have considered as, at best, a great tragedy, but for the Christian mind the death of Jesus was not a mere miscarriage of human justice; it was the supreme act of worship that endowed all mankind with God’s justice. It was the single deed of such condign and consummate devotion as to render possible humanity’s access to God for all time and into eternity.
Thursday, February 17
Matthew 13.1-9: Matthew 13:1-9: As we now come to the third and central of the five great discourses in Matthew, Jesus once again sits down as teacher (Compare 5:1). Taking up a standard mystic number in Holy Scripture, this discourse will be composed of seven parables: the sown seed, the wheat and tares, the mustard seed, the leaven, the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price, and the fishing net. Four of these, as we will have occasion to note, are found only in Matthew. Even in wording this first parable is nearly identical with Mark 4:1-9.
In this chapter, a sharp distinction is made between those that understand the parable—the ‘insiders”–and those that don’t—the “outsiders” (verse 11). Thus, when the chapter opens, Jesus is speaking to large crowds (verse 2), but afterwards He speaks only to an inner circle and privately (verse 36). This move indicates a change in the focus of the Lord’s ministry and preaching. This change is not surprising, in light of the bitter controversies that have been mounting in Matthew’s narrative.
Jesus begins this sermon by sitting down (verse 1)—the posture of the teacher—just as when He began the Sermon on the Mount (5:1; cf. 24:3). A close reading of this text discloses a striking parallel with Revelation 7:9-12, where a great multitude stands before God seated on the throne beside the sea (4:6).
This first parable, in which most of the sown seed is lost, summarizes Jesus’ own experience, as narrated in the previous chapter. So little of the Gospel, it seems, has fallen on fertile ground. As directed to the Church, this parable urges a sense of modesty about “success” in fruitful preaching. A great deal of the sown Word will simply be wasted.
This first parable also provides the foundation for the other six; it is the fountain out of which they flow. Thus, the second parable (wheat and tares in verses 24-30), is concerned with the wasted seed that falls by the wayside and is eaten by birds. The “enemy” that sowed the tares in verse 24 is identical with the “wicked one” in verse 19. Similarly, the third parable (mustard seed in verses 31-32) and the fourth (leaven in verse 33) deal with the seed that is sown on stony ground. Parables five (hidden treasure in verse 44) and six (pearl in verses 45-46) are concerned with the seed sown among thorns, while the seventh parable (dragnet in verses 47-50) parallels the seed sown on fertile ground and bringing forth much fruit.
The seed sown by the wayside (verse 4) is the Word preached to the unworthy heart, an interpretation introduced by the quotation from Isaiah in verse 15: “Lest they should understand with their hearts.” The key is an understanding heart (verse 23). The failure in this case has to do with the first imperative of the Shema: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart.”
The seed fallen on rocky ground (verses 5-6) is the Word preached to a shallow soul, which is unprepared for the trials that the reception of the Word will bring. The failure in this case pertains to the second imperative of the Shema: to love God with the whole soul.
The seed sown among thorns (verse 7) is the Word preached to the worldly, who are concerned with wealth and the strength that comes with wealth. In this case the failure is related to the Shema’s command to love God with all one’s strength.
The seed fallen on good ground (verse 8) is the Word preached to someone with an understanding heart. Such a man is described in Psalm 1: the man who “brings forth his fruit in its season.” This is the man who fulfills all the imperatives of the Shema.
Friday, February 18
Romans 7.13-25: Although the “I” in these verses represents the human experience generally considered, it would be wrong to assume that Paul is not speaking from personal experience. Very wrong. Paul knew on his own pulses what it was to offend God. He had offended God grievously. He had experienced the dilemma described in these verses. He was well aware what it meant to be a great sinner, even while meticulously observing the smallest parts of the Mosaic Law (Philippians 3:6; Galatians 1:13-14).
Indeed, it was Paul’s own strict adherence to the Law that had led him to the most serious sin of his life, the only personal sin on which he ever comments — the persecution of Christians. In Paul’s conversion he was made aware, in a way that he would never forget, that his endeavor to achieve righteousness by the observance of the Law had led him into his worst sin: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?”
It was in that experience of his conversion that he discerned “another law in my members, working against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members” (verse 23).
That is to say, it was his very zeal for the Law of God that had occasioned his worst sin against heaven. He had not been doing what he had intended to do (verse 15). Sin had taken over his life. He had been acting as a slave of sin. Thus, in his conversion Paul learned the experience common to all the children of Adam—the radical inability to find justification before God without the reconciling grace of Christ.
No, this dilemma was not the fault of the Law. It was, rather, the manifestation of the power of sin in man’s very flesh, this flesh burdened with death. Sin is not in the Law; sin is in man’s very flesh, working through death (verses 13-15). Inherited sin is internal to man, which is why grace must become internal to man.
With his mind, then, man contemplates the Law, but it remains external to him. There is another “law” internal to man, the law of sin and death, the law that man really obeys (verse 19).
The dilemma that Paul describes here is well know to anyone who has “tried to be good,” and moralists have often commented on it (Epictetus 1.26.4; Horace, Letters 1.8.11; Ovid, Metamorphosis 7.20-21; Dante, Purgatorio 21.105).
A man forced to do what he really doesn’t want to do is properly called a slave (verses 16,23; 6:13,19), and a man without Christ is certainly a slave to sin. This is the reign of death. It abides in man’s very flesh, which Paul calls “this body of death” (verse 24; 6:6; Philippians 3:21). As we have had occasion to remark more than once, “sins reigns in death.” Death is the legacy left us by Adam. It reigns in our very bodies. It was to free us from death that Christ rose from the dead.
Verses 17 and 20 have occasionally been interpreted as excusing man from the responsibility for his sins. If this were the case, of course, man would not need a Savior. The whole of the Bible, however, and Paul especially, contends that the children of Adam are destined for eternal damnation except for the mercy of God poured out in the reconciling blood of Christ. Sin is never excused. Sin is paid for.