The Lord will judge not only the shepherds but the sheep and
goats as well. There are apparently
those who have acted selfishly and without regard for others and who have
treated the poor with contempt or indifference.
These, the Lord will judge and will restore justice and righteousness
for those who are characterized as “lean sheep.” When Jesus taught the Beatitudes, He was
teaching us not to act selfishly, but to look around us and see that there was
injustice, righteousness, mourning, a lack of peace, those in need of mercy,
etc. If our situation is good, we are
called to look to others and see the suffering of the world. The promise is that He will rule and
establish David, “my servant.” Jesus is
the fulfillment of both these promises, He is both God incarnate and also the
Son of David. The promise is that these
will be established, blessed, prospered, and live peacefully in the land. So we are taught to pray, “your kingdom come,
your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We are praying for the reconciliation and restoration
of all things in Him.
It would have been somewhat scandalous for Mary to have sat
with the men to listen to Jesus teach.
Women weren’t discipled by rabbis, they were taught in the home by
fathers, husbands, mothers, other women.
For Mary to have chosen to sit rather than serve would have raised
eyebrows. There was the work of
hospitality to be done and her choice forced Martha to attend to all the work
herself. Hospitality was one of the most
important mitzvot in Judaism, as we see in Abraham’s extension of it to the
three men in Genesis 18. She makes a
complaint to Jesus as lord, the one who is in charge of the situation, that He
tell Mary what to do, help her serve these men.
Jesus, however, gives a completely unexpected response, not only is it
fine for Mary to be there learning, it is the preferred action, more important
than hospitality. This would have been a
radical teaching for the church to assert in the culture, easier to leave it
out of the Gospels than to put it here.
Something remarkably new in those words.
The argument here is from Platonic philosophy. The language of copy and shadow point to the
forms and archetypes of Plato. The idea
is that we create things on earth that are copies of an ideal form that exists
but it not in the present world. The
tabernacle and temple plans were given directly by God rather than from the
mind of man and these then were more perfectly realized forms because they were
given by God. Jesus would be the perfect
man as opposed to all other men, a perfectly realized form of God’s image,
without sin. Because of this, He is the
priest of a better covenant than can be realized among men. The covenant itself is based upon an improved
mankind because of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We can know the mind of God in a different
way, a direct way. Ultimately, the
argument rests on rejecting the form for the ideal. Who would want the imperfect if they could
have the perfect?
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