Casting Shadows Part 4: St. Matthew (continued)
I promise, I'll find my way out of St. Matthew's Gospel here pretty soon ... I can't help that he's the one Gospel writer of the four who seems to make the most use out of explicit Old Testament quotes. ;)
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Doesn't that just shatter some of our preconceived notions about God? What happened to the God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and who wants all men to be saved? It would appear here that God has hardened the hearts of His people specifically so that they will not be able to understand or perceive the truth.
But as we dig deeper into this section of St. Matthew's Gospel, and as we explore the prophecy which Our Lord quotes here, we will begin to glimpse the Divine logic that governs mercy, justice, punishment, and repentence.
Up until this point in the Gospel account, Our Lord has been speaking rather plainly and openly to the people. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy"; "I say to you that if a man looks at a woman to lust after her, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart"; "when you pray, pray like this..."; "everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man..."
Simple. Straight-forward.
But here, in chapter 13, something new is introduced, something that we have not really seen in Our Lord's ministry until this point: parables. Cryptic teachings wrapped in riddles. Why? Why here, why now, and to what purpose?
Let's look at the prophecy first.
This passage comes from Isaiah 6, which is a significant passage because it describes the beginning of Isaiah's prophetic ministry - his commissioning by God.
It begins with these well-known words: "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: 'Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.'"
Isaiah sees this vision of God in His holy temple, and immediately cries out, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips!" At this point an angel takes a burning coal from the altar, flies over to Isaiah and touches the hot coal to his lips, saying, "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven." This is the passage that is alluded to in the Mass when the priest prays before the Gospel reading, "Clease my heart and my lips, O almighty God, who didst cleanse the lips of the prophet Isaias with a burning coal, and vouchsafe, through Thy gracious mercy, so to purify me, that I may worthily announce Thy holy Gospel."
God commissions Isaiah after this purification to go out and preach the words of God to the southern kingdom of Judah, and also to the people of the northern kingdom of Israel, a people whose destruction was very close at hand. Isaiah prophesied during the reign of Uzziah in Jerusalem, who began to reign sometime around 765-760 BC; the northern kingdom was exiled in 722 BC, meaning that the elapsed time from the beginning of Isaiah's ministry to the exile of Israel is right around 40 years.
These, then, are God's words to Isaiah: "Go, and say to this people: 'Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.' Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed."
Isaiah wants to know how long he must preach in this unsuccessful manner. God responds, "Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without men, and the land is utterly desolate, and the LORD removes men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land."
This is the context in which Our Lord is operating when He quotes the words of God the Father: "'Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.' Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed."
Our Lord, then, is associating the historical condition of Israel at the time of Isaiah's ministry with the present-day condition of Jerusalem during His own ministry. Was Israel slow, dull, unwilling to hear the truth? Then so is Jerusalem of Jesus' time. Was Israel given 40 years to repent before they were destroyed by Assyria? Then so is Jerusalem being given 40 years (from 30 AD to 70 AD) to repent and return to God before the Romans come to raze their city.
Isaiah's prophecy is particularly a judgment upon the religious leaders of Israel. We read in chapter 28, "Woe to the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim," - Ephraim being the capital city of the Northern Kingdom- "and to the fading flower of its glorious beauty ... Behold, the Lord has one who is mighty and strong ... The proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim will be trodden under foot ... These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment." (28:1-7)
It seems that Our Lord, by quoting a passage that marks the beginning of Isaiah's ministry, is likening His own ministry to that of Isaiah. In this way, He implicitly condemns the religious leaders of His own day, who have become like so many drunken men, staggering around blindly and unable to make a proper judgment.
Indeed, what event immediately precedes chapter 13 in St. Matthew's Gospel, if not an account of the religious leaders making a grossly erroneous judgment?
It is extremely significant that Our Lord does not turn to parabolic teaching until after the religious leaders err in their drunken judgment by mistaking the work of the Holy Ghost with the work of Satan himself. A more absolute and total distortion can hardly be imagined; one could be forgiven for mistaking orange and red, or green and blue. But who would confuse white and black except for a man who was completely blind?
This utterly inverted sense judgment and perception also recalls a passage from Isaiah: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" (Is. 5:20)
It is only here, after the religious leaders of Jerusalem call evil good and good evil, that Our Lord links His ministry with Isaiah's ministry and begins to speak in parables.
But what does this suggest about parables? Are they not, then, a sign of judgment? This is, perhaps, a point that is too-often missed by modern readers. Our Lord's use of parables is often seen as a good thing, a kind of "down-home" way of making difficult teachings more accessible by the average layman, by putting those truths into down-to-earth pictures.
In actual fact, however, the parables are a sign of judgment. They are an indication that the people have hardened their hearts and will no longer listen to plain and clear teaching.
If we take seriously St. Paul's teaching about God and how He deals with unrepentant men, then we must understand that one of God's scariest judgments is when He simply lets Man have his own way. God will not force Himself upon Man, and so when Man says to God, "I do not want you, and I do not want the truth," God says, "Thy will be done."
Consider St. Paul's teaching in Rom. 1:18-32. He says that "the wrath of God is revealed" against men who willingly "suppress the truth." And how, exactly, does God reveal His Divine wrath? In fiery blasts? Great flashes of lightning? Earthquakes? Explosions, mighty winds, vast destruction and devestation?
Sometimes, yes. Egypt certainly experienced God's wrath in that way. But more often than not, such displays are the exception, and the normal rule is that God simply lets Man have his way. How does St. Paul describe the manifestation of God's wrath? Three times in verses 18-32 he uses the phrase, "God gave them up." God turned them over to their own desires, to be destroyed by their own disordered appetites.
God knows that sin is never content to remain where it is. Sin begets greater sin. It must, of necessity, spiral further and further into degeneration, into greater perversity, into more bold external displays.
Seen in this light, the greatest judgment God could unleash on a sinner is to simply let him keep sinning, without consequence. Let the porn-addict get away with his perversity, and never get caught; he will eventually become an adulterer, or a rapist, maybe even a murderer. A mercy from God, in this case, would be to visit such a person with all kinds of afflictions: let him get caught and lose his job; let him contract some kind of minor disease for a time; send him some horrible tragedy to wake him out of his sinful stupor.
Some would see that as a manifestation of God's judgment, when in fact those are the clearest examples of God's great mercy.
In the case of the Pharisees, they do not want the truth. They do not want the Messiah. God's response to them is, through the mouth of Isaiah, "Let their hearts become even harder, let them become even more dull." In essence, Jesus begins to speak parabolic nonsense at this point, as an external sign of the religious leaders' ignorance. It has the effect of, "You don't want to understand? You refuse to perceive? Fine, then I'll continue teaching, but from now on I'm going to teach in such a way that you won't understand what I'm saying - and you won't understand it because you don't want to understand it."
Which brings us back around to why Our Lord quoted from Isaiah, why in particular He quoted a passage that marks the beginning of Isaiah's ministry. It was through Isaiah that God said, "the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment ... Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from the milk, those taken from the breast? ... Nay, but by men of strange lips and with an alien tongue the LORD will speak to this people, to whom he has said, 'This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose'; yet they would not hear. Therefore the word of the LORD will be to them sav lasav, sav lasav, kav lakav, kav lakav, zeer sham, zeer sham; that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken." (Is. 28:7-13)
See how God explains His actions? He says "they would not hear" - they refused to accept the truth - and so "therefore the word of the Lord will be to them: sav lasav, sav lasav, kav lakav, kav lakav, zeer sham, zeer sham."
Huh??? What's all that mean? Precisely.
Most bibles have that bit of Hebrew gobbledy-gook translated as "Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there," or "precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little." That's not what it means.
It's a purposefully garbled stream of Hebrew syllables, meant to make the reader screw up his face and say, "What?!" And Isaiah's response is, "Exactly!" You refuse to hear the truth, you would rather stop up your ears and never understand - so God's response to you is to let you have your way, and from now on His word to you will be, "pluth-de-drimple-whop-zabba-da-zabba-sing-sing-boom." His word to you will be utter nonsense - child's babble.
Our Lord says essentially the same thing here in Matthew 13: you don't want to understand, so from now on my teaching will be to you like so many children's bedtime stories, like nursery riddles. My judgment upon you is to give you exactly what you want.
In the case of this quotation from the Old Testament, then, I believe that not only the context of Isaiah chapter 6 is intended to serve as the context for Matthew 13, but indeed the entire prophetic ministry and message of Isaiah must be imported as the background here, because there are elements of many parts of Isaiah's prophecy that shed light on Our Lord's words.
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Then the disciples came and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?"
And he answered them, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.
With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: 'You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.'" (Matt. 13:10-15)
Doesn't that just shatter some of our preconceived notions about God? What happened to the God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and who wants all men to be saved? It would appear here that God has hardened the hearts of His people specifically so that they will not be able to understand or perceive the truth.
But as we dig deeper into this section of St. Matthew's Gospel, and as we explore the prophecy which Our Lord quotes here, we will begin to glimpse the Divine logic that governs mercy, justice, punishment, and repentence.
Up until this point in the Gospel account, Our Lord has been speaking rather plainly and openly to the people. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy"; "I say to you that if a man looks at a woman to lust after her, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart"; "when you pray, pray like this..."; "everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man..."
Simple. Straight-forward.
But here, in chapter 13, something new is introduced, something that we have not really seen in Our Lord's ministry until this point: parables. Cryptic teachings wrapped in riddles. Why? Why here, why now, and to what purpose?
Let's look at the prophecy first.
This passage comes from Isaiah 6, which is a significant passage because it describes the beginning of Isaiah's prophetic ministry - his commissioning by God.
It begins with these well-known words: "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: 'Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.'"
Isaiah sees this vision of God in His holy temple, and immediately cries out, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips!" At this point an angel takes a burning coal from the altar, flies over to Isaiah and touches the hot coal to his lips, saying, "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven." This is the passage that is alluded to in the Mass when the priest prays before the Gospel reading, "Clease my heart and my lips, O almighty God, who didst cleanse the lips of the prophet Isaias with a burning coal, and vouchsafe, through Thy gracious mercy, so to purify me, that I may worthily announce Thy holy Gospel."
God commissions Isaiah after this purification to go out and preach the words of God to the southern kingdom of Judah, and also to the people of the northern kingdom of Israel, a people whose destruction was very close at hand. Isaiah prophesied during the reign of Uzziah in Jerusalem, who began to reign sometime around 765-760 BC; the northern kingdom was exiled in 722 BC, meaning that the elapsed time from the beginning of Isaiah's ministry to the exile of Israel is right around 40 years.
These, then, are God's words to Isaiah: "Go, and say to this people: 'Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.' Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed."
Isaiah wants to know how long he must preach in this unsuccessful manner. God responds, "Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without men, and the land is utterly desolate, and the LORD removes men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land."
This is the context in which Our Lord is operating when He quotes the words of God the Father: "'Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.' Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed."
Our Lord, then, is associating the historical condition of Israel at the time of Isaiah's ministry with the present-day condition of Jerusalem during His own ministry. Was Israel slow, dull, unwilling to hear the truth? Then so is Jerusalem of Jesus' time. Was Israel given 40 years to repent before they were destroyed by Assyria? Then so is Jerusalem being given 40 years (from 30 AD to 70 AD) to repent and return to God before the Romans come to raze their city.
Isaiah's prophecy is particularly a judgment upon the religious leaders of Israel. We read in chapter 28, "Woe to the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim," - Ephraim being the capital city of the Northern Kingdom- "and to the fading flower of its glorious beauty ... Behold, the Lord has one who is mighty and strong ... The proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim will be trodden under foot ... These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment." (28:1-7)
It seems that Our Lord, by quoting a passage that marks the beginning of Isaiah's ministry, is likening His own ministry to that of Isaiah. In this way, He implicitly condemns the religious leaders of His own day, who have become like so many drunken men, staggering around blindly and unable to make a proper judgment.
Indeed, what event immediately precedes chapter 13 in St. Matthew's Gospel, if not an account of the religious leaders making a grossly erroneous judgment?
But the Pharisees went out and took counsel against him, how to destroy him ... Then a blind and dumb demoniac was brought to him, and he healed him, so that the dumb man spoke and saw. And all the people were amazed, and said, "Can this be the Son of David?" But when the Pharisees heard it they said, "It is only by Be-elzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons." Knowing their thoughts, he said to them, "Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand; and if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand? ... Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever says a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come." (Matt. 12:14, 22-26, 31-32)
It is extremely significant that Our Lord does not turn to parabolic teaching until after the religious leaders err in their drunken judgment by mistaking the work of the Holy Ghost with the work of Satan himself. A more absolute and total distortion can hardly be imagined; one could be forgiven for mistaking orange and red, or green and blue. But who would confuse white and black except for a man who was completely blind?
This utterly inverted sense judgment and perception also recalls a passage from Isaiah: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" (Is. 5:20)
It is only here, after the religious leaders of Jerusalem call evil good and good evil, that Our Lord links His ministry with Isaiah's ministry and begins to speak in parables.
But what does this suggest about parables? Are they not, then, a sign of judgment? This is, perhaps, a point that is too-often missed by modern readers. Our Lord's use of parables is often seen as a good thing, a kind of "down-home" way of making difficult teachings more accessible by the average layman, by putting those truths into down-to-earth pictures.
In actual fact, however, the parables are a sign of judgment. They are an indication that the people have hardened their hearts and will no longer listen to plain and clear teaching.
If we take seriously St. Paul's teaching about God and how He deals with unrepentant men, then we must understand that one of God's scariest judgments is when He simply lets Man have his own way. God will not force Himself upon Man, and so when Man says to God, "I do not want you, and I do not want the truth," God says, "Thy will be done."
Consider St. Paul's teaching in Rom. 1:18-32. He says that "the wrath of God is revealed" against men who willingly "suppress the truth." And how, exactly, does God reveal His Divine wrath? In fiery blasts? Great flashes of lightning? Earthquakes? Explosions, mighty winds, vast destruction and devestation?
Sometimes, yes. Egypt certainly experienced God's wrath in that way. But more often than not, such displays are the exception, and the normal rule is that God simply lets Man have his way. How does St. Paul describe the manifestation of God's wrath? Three times in verses 18-32 he uses the phrase, "God gave them up." God turned them over to their own desires, to be destroyed by their own disordered appetites.
God knows that sin is never content to remain where it is. Sin begets greater sin. It must, of necessity, spiral further and further into degeneration, into greater perversity, into more bold external displays.
Seen in this light, the greatest judgment God could unleash on a sinner is to simply let him keep sinning, without consequence. Let the porn-addict get away with his perversity, and never get caught; he will eventually become an adulterer, or a rapist, maybe even a murderer. A mercy from God, in this case, would be to visit such a person with all kinds of afflictions: let him get caught and lose his job; let him contract some kind of minor disease for a time; send him some horrible tragedy to wake him out of his sinful stupor.
Some would see that as a manifestation of God's judgment, when in fact those are the clearest examples of God's great mercy.
In the case of the Pharisees, they do not want the truth. They do not want the Messiah. God's response to them is, through the mouth of Isaiah, "Let their hearts become even harder, let them become even more dull." In essence, Jesus begins to speak parabolic nonsense at this point, as an external sign of the religious leaders' ignorance. It has the effect of, "You don't want to understand? You refuse to perceive? Fine, then I'll continue teaching, but from now on I'm going to teach in such a way that you won't understand what I'm saying - and you won't understand it because you don't want to understand it."
Which brings us back around to why Our Lord quoted from Isaiah, why in particular He quoted a passage that marks the beginning of Isaiah's ministry. It was through Isaiah that God said, "the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment ... Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from the milk, those taken from the breast? ... Nay, but by men of strange lips and with an alien tongue the LORD will speak to this people, to whom he has said, 'This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose'; yet they would not hear. Therefore the word of the LORD will be to them sav lasav, sav lasav, kav lakav, kav lakav, zeer sham, zeer sham; that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken." (Is. 28:7-13)
See how God explains His actions? He says "they would not hear" - they refused to accept the truth - and so "therefore the word of the Lord will be to them: sav lasav, sav lasav, kav lakav, kav lakav, zeer sham, zeer sham."
Huh??? What's all that mean? Precisely.
Most bibles have that bit of Hebrew gobbledy-gook translated as "Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there," or "precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little." That's not what it means.
It's a purposefully garbled stream of Hebrew syllables, meant to make the reader screw up his face and say, "What?!" And Isaiah's response is, "Exactly!" You refuse to hear the truth, you would rather stop up your ears and never understand - so God's response to you is to let you have your way, and from now on His word to you will be, "pluth-de-drimple-whop-zabba-da-zabba-sing-sing-boom." His word to you will be utter nonsense - child's babble.
Our Lord says essentially the same thing here in Matthew 13: you don't want to understand, so from now on my teaching will be to you like so many children's bedtime stories, like nursery riddles. My judgment upon you is to give you exactly what you want.
In the case of this quotation from the Old Testament, then, I believe that not only the context of Isaiah chapter 6 is intended to serve as the context for Matthew 13, but indeed the entire prophetic ministry and message of Isaiah must be imported as the background here, because there are elements of many parts of Isaiah's prophecy that shed light on Our Lord's words.
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