Matthew 20 - Friday 30th August

Today’s reading is Matthew 20

Tom writes:

Jesus so often subverts the conventional wisdom about how to pursue God.  Most Jews believed physical blindness to be a barrier to communion with God.  The more merciful members of the community may, potentially, have prayed that a prophet would come to bring healing to the blind so that they could be accepted into the temple of God.  But surely none of them, not even the most compassionate Jew, would have thought that God would approach a blind man and ask him what he could do for him.  Surely no-one would have believed that God would even tolerate the presence of a disabled man, before his imperfection had been taken away from him.  And yet Jesus, God incarnate, while he is in the middle of something, while he has a crowd around him calling out reverence and request, stops, turns, and looks at the blind men. And when he says “what do you want me to do for you” you feel like he is taking all the world’s religious establishments, turning them upside down and shaking them all about.  He is putting himself, the all-powerful, all-conquering master of the universe at the service of two blokes who don’t even know whether they’re wearing odd socks. 

Jesus’ complete lack of presumption and his unquenchable desire to hear from people must have felt like a warm summer breeze to those who had been frozen out of the religious community for oh so long.  And his ability to follow through on their requests and actually bring them healing looks like a haymaker following the left-hand uppercut that Jesus has just landed on the chin of everyday religious life. This is a crazy wage being paid to the dismayed. This is a whole new fate being offered to those coming late. This is the parable of the workers enacted in our midst. Oh I so much want more of this empowered openness in our church. Oh I so much want more Jesus in my life. I so much want to be like this God who will welcome anyone into his presence, and then serve them up miracles for their deliverance. Please come my King. Oh please come and have your way in our land.

Question for reflection

What would you have felt and thought if you were in that crowd, seeing Jesus stop and respond to the blind men and then see them healed and following him?