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 →

Tossed about: it describes Jesus and the disciples. Jesus had already wanted to be by himself in prayer before the encounter with the great multitude of people who need “rescue” from hunger (Mt 13:12-21). Their need becomes the wind and waves that toss Jesus about as he responds in compassion. The disciples are directed to go ahead by boat – and they will be tossed about on the seas.

²² Then he made the disciples get into the boat and precede him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. ²³ After doing so, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When it was evening he was there alone. This is the only place after the initial period in the wilderness (4:1–11) where Matthew specifically mentions that Jesus chose to be truly alone, sending his disciples away. This pericope (scholar language for “story”) is the first time in the Gospel according to Matthew that Jesus is pictured as praying. Even in Gethsemane he will keep three of the disciples with him (26:37). Matthew does not elsewhere mention Jesus’ habit of praying alone, as in Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16; 6:12; 9:18, though he has of course recorded his instruction to his disciples to pray in this way, 6:5–6. It would be possible therefore to read this unusual note as indicating a particular crisis at this point in Jesus’ ministry. But that would be an argument from silence, and Matthew gives us no indication of the subject of Jesus’ prayer. In the narrative context the solitary prayer in the hills serves rather to explain how Jesus comes to be so far away from his disciples on this occasion when they find themselves in difficulties. (France, 569) Continue reading →

After the collection of parables in Mt 13, the 14^th chapter takes up what might well be a natural fall out of his teachings that are increasingly vague even as they point to coming judgment – weeds that will be burned and fish that will be discarded. People begin to wonder if Jesus is pronouncing judgment upon them or their “group.” The inevitable pushback or rejection will become more and more present in the narrative or at least in its subtext. Despite the pushback, Jesus must prepare the disciples. And so after teaching the disciples about the nature of the kingdom and why people do not necessarily believe (Mt 13), the Gospel reaches a pivot point in the telling of Jesus’ rejection at Nazareth, his native place (v.54). As usual the people are astonished, but in the end they took offense at him (v.57). Nonetheless Jesus continues to the preparation of disciples. Continue reading →