Coming on the Water. Alyce McKenzie is the George W. and Nell Ayers Le Van Professor of Preaching and Worship at Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She always has a good “take” on Scriptures. I enjoy reading her Edgy Exegsis column on the Patheos portal. I thought I would share her insights on this reading:
Twenty centuries earlier, another man looks out over another lake from the mountaintop to which he has retreated to pray. He is not a superhero who has retreated to his bat cave. He is not a ghost out to haunt the already terrified. He is a man. Fully God, fully human. He is the Son of God, though those around him don’t yet recognize him. His ship of faith is being battered by the rejection of his hometown folks and the beheading of his cousin John the Baptist by Herod. He knows his time is coming. Crowds of needy people press in on him constantly. Continue reading
The Net Cast Widely. The net pictured here is a large dragnet, usually about six feet deep and up to several hundred feet wide, positioned in the lake by boats and requiring several men to operate (hence the plurals of v. 48). The picture is realistic, portraying an ordinary event with no surprising twists: The net brings in “every kind” of both good and bad fish, which are then sorted, the good being kept and the bad thrown out. Whatever the original meaning of the parable, Matthew’s own ecclesiastical application already appears in the telling of the parable itself. The bad fish are called “rotten” (sapra), inappropriate to fish that have just been caught, but used four times previously in Matthew’s description of bad “fruit” (works) presented by Christians, where it is appropriate (7:17-18; 12:33 twice). The fishers “sit” for the sorting, as will the Son of Man at the end (19:28; 25:31). 
friarmusings 