The Takeaway
I grew up Protestant. The only time we talked about Mary was at Christmas, when she obviously played an important role. Catholics place much more emphasis on Mary’s part in salvation history. The wedding at Cana is a scriptural (hugely important when making a case to Protestants) example of Mary’s purpose: to point to her son and say, “Do what he says.”
It’s also a great story about how wine cannot be intrinsically evil because Jesus made some. (However, he did not make it in a box. Box wine is in fact intrinsically evil.)
In all my years, there is one point in this story that I have never heard spoken about: Jesus deserves credit for doing more than just his first miracle. If you have a mom, then at some point you have had a problem and your mom has told you what to do. You, obviously smarter (and grown), want with every fiber of your being to do anything besides what Mom says you ought to do. The fact that you are alive to read this is probably evidence that you eventually got your head out of your own backside and did what Mom suggested. And Jesus gives us the prime example of doing what Mom says. He, grown man that he was, was obedient. So, maybe, the first act of Jesus’ public ministry was not pretending to be too cool to love his mom at a party. I bet he grabbed Andrew’s pork chop when nobody was looking.
For the Sake of the Dullards
Matthew 15:1–9
Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die.’ But you say, ‘If any one tells his father or his mother, What you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father.’ So, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said:
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’”
The Setup
The Pharisees are trying to humiliate Jesus and prove to the crowd that he’s just a charlatan. So they accuse the disciples of breaking the law because they (the disciples) don’t wash their hands before they eat.
What Went Down
Despite the apparent lack of proper parenting in his disciples, Jesus is having none of this. He points out a loophole in Jewish law that would make Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman blush, and then quotes Isaiah at them. In other words, someone does get humiliated in this scenario — and it’s not Jesus.
Jesus then turns to the crowd and uses the Pharisees’ complaint as a teachable moment about what’s in a man’s heart. I can only imagine the disciples standing behind Jesus, wisely nodding their heads. (Of course, later we find out that they don’t have any idea what he’s talking about.)
Then the disciples worry that some of the Pharisees are offended. Jesus tells them not to worry about it and makes a joke about blind people falling into pits. Seriously. Read it yourself.
Peter (who, you might recall, will be the first pope one day) takes everything way too seriously and, in classic android fashion, asks Jesus to explain the parable. My copy of the Bible doesn’t have a footnote stating that Our Lord rolled his eyes, but the NIV translation says he literally called the disciples “dull” (Mt 15:16).
As one reads about Jesus breaking down his lesson for the disciples (Peter was probably asking about the blind person joke, but Christ goes back to the lesson for the crowd), one can almost imagine Jesus grabbing a whiteboard from just out of frame and drawing a diagram of human anatomy, emphasizing every word as he goes, like you do with children: “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on?” (You know James elbowed John and pointed at the drawing’s butt.)
Jesus goes on: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man” (Mt 15:17-18).
Now, in the disciples’ defense, Jesus is shifting willy-nilly between the literal (what goes into the mouth) and figurative (what comes out of the mouth). At least four of the disciples are fishermen. Fish don’t do this kind of shifting. They are either real fish or … well, they’re pretty much all real fish.
The Takeaway
Don’t get hung up on the letter of the law. Actions and intent (which come from the heart) are the most important things.
Can’t you just imagine Peter following right behind Jesus as he starts to leave and asking, “Lord, can we make … like a signal for when things are ‘real’ and when they are ‘figurative’?”
“Game of Thrones” … in Galilee
Matthew 21:33–46
“Hear another parable. There was a householder who planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country. When the season of fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants, to get his fruit; and the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first; and they did the same to them. Afterward he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ And they took him and cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him. When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:
‘The very stone which the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?
Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it. And he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but when it falls on any one, it will crush him.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. But when they tried to arrest him, they feared the multitudes, because they held him to be a prophet.
The Setup
Jesus and his posse are in Jerusalem. He’s made a bunch of noise cleaning out the Temple and cursing fig trees (more on that later). Back at the Temple, several of the religious authorities start to question him about his authority to speak in public. After playing the “What is in my pocket?” riddle game with them, he launches into a few parables, this being one of them.
What Went Down
When thinking about the disciples in situations like this, I like to remind myself that the Scriptures are two thousand years old. That was way before TV was invented. I can’t even be sure the world was in color back then. (A quick Wikipedia search confirms that the world was