**Because we’re going to be at a conference from tomorrow until next Friday, I won’t be able to send out our reflections this week–kinda bummed that it has to happen over Holy Week, but I’ll try to at least send out the link to the reading so we can all still be reading and praying about the same things

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Here is today’s reading on YouVersion:

Matthew 26:1-13 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

I sometimes identify with the disciples when I read the story of the woman anointing Jesus with perfume, but Jesus uses the episode to teach a number of truths–not least of which is that an action taken out of love for Jesus is a historic happening. The practical side of me agrees with the disciples when they think (in N.T. Wright’s words):

Here we are in a place set aside to look after the poor, and you go pouring out a month’s wages just like that? What can you be thinking about? . . . Jesus speaks. ‘What’s your problem?’ he asks. ‘This was a good thing she’s done. As for the poor, there will be plenty of time to look after them; but you haven’t got long to look after me. You know what she’s done? She has prepared my body for burial!’

I’m reminded of Jesus’ response to being asked why his disciples didn’t fast in Luke: “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” Like fasting, caring for the poor is necessary and expected–but while Jesus is around, it’s a good thing to party and to express love and affection–in this case, extravagantly! But at this point N.T. Wright points out the twist in the narrative:

The woman is both thrilled at Jesus’ affirmation and distraught at the mention of burial . . . If he is actually going to die, what good news will there be to tell around the world? How does that make any sense?. . . After his actions in the Temple the chief priests would be looking for a chance to kill him. What none of the disciples yet realized is that, for Jesus, this was not only the direct and foreseeable result of his whole kingdom- mission. It was the means by which that mission would be accomplished.

Paul wrote, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” As we are preparing for Holy Week, we have the privilege of knowing that Jesus’ seemingly-insane mission ends in victory–and we, like Jesus, can share that hope and certainty with everyone around us. And let’s continue to listen for what Jesus has for each of us today:

Matthew 25:31-46 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

Jesus’ image of the sheep and the goats comes up frequently in discussion of various topics in Christianity–social justice, hell, sanctification . . . and it seems fitting, as we approach Holy Week, to revisit this passage and see what Jesus has for us in it as we examine our hearts before Easter. This simile clearly demonstrates some of the ways that people who love and follow Jesus are different from people who don’t–that Christians naturally act out of loving character to feed, clothe, and care for people around us. We have to be careful, though, as Wright says, not to turn this new nature into a checklist:

It’s paradoxical to say that these actions need to come naturally, but they don’t come naturally to us–that they are the evidence of the new life that we have in Christ, but our old life hangs on tenaciously and still feels more “natural” at times than acting out of our adopted sonship or daughterhood. Wright notes:

This [new way of being], of course, demands effort, particularly in the early stages. But it’s an effort which springs, and has always sprung right through the course of Christian history, from people knowing Jesus, worshipping him, hearing his word and feasting at his table . . . That was how Christian faith spread even when the Roman emperors were determined to stamp it out. People saw the Christians behaving like this and wanted to know why. The world was full, alas, of people who didn’t help, didn’t feed the hungry, and didn’t care for the weak and vulnerable. The Christians were modelling a new way of being human. It was, and remains, compelling.

Transformation and changed hearts are some of the most obvious and influential pieces of evidence for the truth of the gospel and the reality of the healing that comes through Jesus. Once we choose to follow Jesus and take on this new nature, we should be different from who we were before–not in a way that eliminates our personality, but that gives us new life, purpose, and identity. Wright concludes:

Matthew has highlighted the fact that Jesus intended his followers to be utterly different, people who reflected God and his love in a whole new way into the world. That is what will ultimately count. There will be surprises all round when the things people have done without thinking about them turn out to reveal their deepest characters. But there will be no doubt which of the two ways of being human is the genuine article.

As we meditate on the prayer for today, let’s ask Jesus to continually renew us, that we may at all times be “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus,” that our new nature would overcome our selfishness and sin.

Matthew 25 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

When I was younger and first hearing the parable of the talents, the teacher didn’t immediately point out that the word “talent” here doesn’t mean “skill, so I was confused for much of the story–I hope I’m not the only one who mistook this word here! To add to my confusion, the exposition on the story focused largely on people using their skills at church. While that is a possible application for us today, here is what N.T. Wright says about how the original audience would have understand this parable:

For Jesus’ first hearers, a story about a master and his servants, and about the servants being given responsibilities in the master’s absence, would without a doubt have been understood in terms of God and Israel. God was the master, Israel the servant; and God had left Israel with responsibilities, with tasks to perform . . . God had called Israel to be the means of carrying forward his great project to rescue and renew the whole creation. God had given Israel the means to do this: the Land, the Temple, the Law, the great structure of family life. Sooner or later, according to the prophets, God would return to see what his people had been doing with these gifts.

Like the passage yesterday of the servant in charge while the master was gone, it’s clear from today’s reading that God expects his servants to be about his business until he comes again–and equally clear that Jesus is pointing out the Jewish people’s failure to do so. N.T. Wright says:

Matthew 24:45-51 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

Wright introduces today’s passage:

Jesus is addressing his close followers, warning them of a coming time when they will have to get on with their work, staying faithful to him in his absence. They will have to look after his ‘household’ whether they think he’ll be coming back the next minute or not.

Matthew 24 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

N.T. Wright summed up how I feel about this kind of prophecy in scripture–I can pick up the major themes, but to understand the details I need a lot of guidance as we’re now so far removed from the context in which the prophecies were given. I would guess many of us feel that way Here is how Wright introduces this prophetic chapter:

At the heart of it is Jesus’ own solemn prophecy (verse 2) that the Temple is to be destroyed. We might have guessed from his action in driving out the money-changers that, like Jeremiah half a millennium earlier, he was denouncing the Temple and prophesying its fall, just as in the previous chapter he had denounced the Pharisees and warned of their imminent judgment. And, frankly, it didn’t take much insight to see that if Jesus’ contemporaries went on plotting and scheming against the power of Rome, sooner or later Rome would lose patience and send in the troops. So the disciples asked him when all this would happen — and what would be the sign of his ‘coming’, his royal enthronement, and of ‘the close of the age’, a cryptic way of saying ‘the time when God finally does what he’s promised and makes all things new’.

Psalm 130 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

There is a reason that so many people cite the Psalms so often–almost any emotion that we experience has been expressed, with a great deal more eloquence than many of us could manage, in one of these poems. I think particularly of sadness, hopelessness, and depression, as we see in today’s psalm. N.T. Wright says of it:

No matter how deep we have sunk, no matter what sorrows or tragedies we may encounter, the Psalms have been there before us . . . [This] Psalm doesn’t hide. There’s no point pretending, putting a brave face on it before God.

Matthew 23 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

Jesus never went easy on the Pharisees–and for good reason. To think that those whom the people trusted to understand and uphold the Law were making their proselytes “twice as much a child of hell as [them]selves” is frightening and infuriating. N.T. Wright interprets Jesus’ anger toward the Pharisees:

Jesus looked back, up into the far hills of Israel’s history, and saw a long line of prophets and righteous people who had been rejected by the leaders and opinion-formers of their day. Again and again it had happened. Little by little the streams have grown into a flood; and now Jesus sees the present leaders, his own contemporaries, flowing along in the same tradition. Right back as far as Abel, the first murdered man, right on to the more recent prophet Zechariah son of Barachiah, Israel’s leaders have rejected and killed those who were sent to them; and now they are doing the same one more time.

To Jesus, it is clear that what the Pharisees are doing is nothing new, but rather the continuation of Israel’s failure to listen to God speaking through the prophets. And what’s more, he sees the eventual end of it, as Wright says:

What Jesus can see as well, though, is that there is a great waterfall just ahead . . . A mighty disaster is on the way. Many others had warned of similar things; Jesus, like the prophet he was, can see it only too clearly. And when it happens it won’t be arbitrary. It won’t be an accident. It will be the direct result of all these small streams of rebellion coming together into the greatest rebellion of them all.

Although Jesus can clearly see the looming disaster, he laments how much he wants to save Jerusalem. This is one of my favorite few verses, illustrating as clearly as it does how deeply God loves his people and how he wants to keep them from destruction. Wright says:

Matthew 22 & N.T. Wright’s commentary

The different banquet parables in Matthew and Luke have always been interesting to me. Matthew’s version here is much more forceful and (to borrow N.T. Wright’s language) “lurid.” The parable’s very characters and setting (a king planning a wedding feast for his son) indicate the important nature of the story, but the unexpected intensity of it is what makes it so engaging. Wright says:

[Jesus] exaggerates the detail to make it lurid, almost surreal. The guests, finally summoned, beat up and kill the slaves sent with the invitation, and the king sends troops to burn their city. But then comes the second shock. The king sends out some more slaves, and invites all and sundry to come to the party. In they come, ‘good and bad’ alike (there are echoes here of the ‘good and bad’ fish found in the Great Net of 13.48).

To the people and religious leaders listening, this must have sounded completely insane–and it seems that the Pharisees understood Jesus’ point, for afterwards they try once again to plot against him. They still cannot bear the idea that they have somehow missed the invitation (and worse, killed the messengers)–and that, as a result, the feast is now open to everyone, “good and bad.” Wright points out, nevertheless, that there is more to getting into this feast than just being invited:

The king has now invited the whole world to the wedding party originally planned for Israel. But those who attend as part of this suddenly enlarged guest-list must take care to turn up in the proper outfit . . . what he is saying, as he does in one way or another throughout, is that just because God’s wedding party has been thrown open to all and sundry — to Gentiles as well as Jews, as Paul never tired of insisting — that doesn’t mean that once they’ve accepted the invitation they can carry on as though it wasn’t God’s wedding party. All are welcome; but all must dress appropriately.

Matthew 21:23-46

Throughout our reading of Matthew, we’ve seen over and over again that the plan that God has to bring reconciliation, salvation, and restoration through Jesus does not make sense to many people. N.T. Wrights points out a continuation of this misunderstanding through the parable of the tenants in this passage:

In the Bible, the ‘vineyard’ is often used as an image for the people of Israel. In the old prophets, the vineyard has often gone wrong, gone wild, rebelled against its planter. In this story, though, it’s the tenants who are at fault. The ‘vineyard’ itself seems to be God’s inner purpose, Israel as the bearer of his saving plan for the world. As in the Old Testament, God sent prophets to his people, but his people refused to listen. Now at last he is sending his son — and his people, instead of listening, think that if they kill the son they can have the vineyard for themselves.

Although the religious leaders thought they had the right idea about the coming of God’s kingdom, Jesus once again tells this parable to show them where they have gone wrong. Wright says:

As with the young man two chapters earlier, [Jesus'] contemporaries couldn’t match the total demand of God’s kingdom. And, to explain the result, Jesus called on other biblical images: the stone that won’t fit the wall but will go nicely at the very top (Psalm 118.22—23), and the stone that will crush all opposition (Daniel 2.34) . . . The rejected son, like the rejected stone, will become the Lord of all and judge of all. 

In the season of Lent, we must continue to examine ourselves to determine if there is any place in our hearts that does not perceive and welcome the true coming of the kingdom of God–to ask Jesus to show us and heal us from pharisaical pride that says we know best and will have the kingdom our way or not at all. N.T. Wright poses this question to us:

This parable is Jesus’ own explanation for what was happening. Once again, telling cryptic stories is the only way you can say the really important things. As we watch, we find ourselves drawn into the action. Are we part of the group that don’t want the Owner to take control of his own vineyard? Would we rather keep it for ourselves?

Matthew 21:1-22

We’re a little early with the Palm Sunday reading, but it’s probably for the best to be able to dig deeper into everything that happens between now and Good Friday.

The “triumphal entry,” as Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem is sometimes called, is a bittersweet moment in the story of Easter. Jesus arriving in the midst of a worshiping crowd, it’s an exciting moment–but it takes on a different feeling when we remember the events that will follow this. N.T. Wright says of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem:

St John put it like this: he came to his own, and his own didn’t receive him. All along Jesus had made it clear that his particular vocation was to present the arrival of heaven’s kingdom to the people of Israel. Having prepared the way by his work up in the north, he has now arrived, with a great throng of Passover pilgrims, at the holy city itself.

This is, of course, the culmination of Jesus’ ministry on earth. And as soon as he reaches the temple, it becomes even clearer how necessary his mission was. Wright says:

Jerusalem, the city chosen by God as his own resting-place, had also been chosen by many as their place of profit . . . But Jesus’ protest against the Temple wasn’t just about it being, in that sense, ‘a den of robbers’. He was quoting the prophet Jeremiah at that point, and Jeremiah wasn’t just worried about economic exploitation. Something deeper and darker was afoot. Behind all the outward trappings of the Temple, Jesus could see that the whole place, and the whole city, had come to symbolize the determination of Israel to do things their own way; in particular, to embrace a vision of God and God’s kingdom which was fundamentally different from the vision which he was announcing and living out.

As usual, the people surrounding Jesus did not expect him to fulfill the mission he had been given in this way–Wright likens it to them expecting the Messiah on a “war-horse” instead of on a simple donkey. Jesus’ actions at the temple–not only overturning tables, but also bringing in the lame and the blind–would also have shocked those around him, but N.T. Wright points out Jesus’ special relationship to the temple in today’s devotional:

The Temple was, after all, the place where the one true God was supposed to live on earth with his people. For Matthew (1.23; 28.20), Jesus himself has become that place . . . If Jesus is the true Temple, we might expect that it is in him, rather than in the Temple, that healing and forgiveness are to be found. Matthew draws our attention to the odd fact that ‘the blind and the lame came to him in the Temple, and he cured them’. In 1 Samuel 5.8, the blind and the lame had been excluded from the Temple, following the orders of David himself. Now the Son of David likewise keeps the Temple free from the blind and the lame — by healing them. It would be hard to sum up any better the difference between what Jesus was offering and what his contemporaries were wanting.