Saturday,
12/15/12
In
today’s Gospel the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do the scribes say that Elijah
must come first?”
It
was not unreasonable for the scribes to have believed that Elijah must return
to this earth before the appearance of the Messiah. That was the teaching of
the Old Testament.
In Chapter
Two of the Second Book of Kings they were told the story of Elijah being taken
up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Then, in The Book of Malachi, the last book in
our Old Testament, they read the very last words of the Old Testament. They
were, “Lo, I will send you Elijah the
prophet before the day of the Lord comes.”
Jesus
answered the question of the disciples by saying, “Elijah has already come.” He
led the disciples to understand that he was speaking of John the Baptist.
Earlier n Matthew’s Gospel, 11/14, Jesus had said of John, “If you are willing
to accept it, he is Elijah.”
Now,
Elijah and John were separate Individuals, with different DNA, living in
different centuries. So, in saying John was Elijah Jesus was using poetic
license. We must see this as the key for reading most of the Bible. It uses all
kinds of figures of speech that must be taken poetically.
In
Chapter Twenty-three of Matthew where Jesus told people to call no one on earth
your father or master, his meaning was that when compared with God earthly
fathers and masters have no importance, but he didn’t mean that we should stop
using the words master and father.
In
Chapter Five of Matthew we find another example of when Jesus did not want to
be understood literally. That was where Jesus told us to gouge out an eye that
causes us to sin. If we did that we would all be blind. James Hilton, the fine
author who gave us Shangri-La, wrote a novel called Without Armor. It was the
story of Christian White Russians fleeing the Reds. They nicknamed one of their
refugees Popeye. He had plucked his eye out for looking at something he
shouldn’t have. They treated him as a fool for not knowing that Jesus didn’t
want to be taken literally. God does not want us to be fools.
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