Wednesday of Week 13 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 8:28-34

Matthew’s version of this strange story is quite different from and much shorter than that told in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 5:1-20). It is usual for Matthew to pare down stories to just the essential details, while Mark tends to give a more dramatic presentation. In Matthew’s version, there are two possessed people instead of just one (as in Mark’s Gospel). This is similar to the version of the Bartimaeus story told by Mark (10:46-52) where Matthew (20:29-34) also has two blind men instead of one.

In the previous story about the calming of the storm, we saw that Jesus and his disciples were crossing the lake. They now come to their destination, a place known as the Gadarenes. It got its name from the town of Gadara on the south-east side of the lake.

Here Jesus was met by two people possessed by demons who completely controlled them. Unlike many of the ordinary people, the demons in these two men have an insight into Jesus’ identity although they may not recognise it fully:

What have you to do with us, Son of God?

Jesus usually refers to himself as Son of Man and never as Son of God.

The two men continue shouting:

Have you come here to torment us before the time?

There was a belief that demons would be free to roam the earth until the Judgment Day came. They did this by taking possession of people. This possession was often associated with disease, because disease was the consequence of sin and a sign of being in Satan’s power. That is why when Jesus expels a demon there is often a cure as well. By driving out these evil spirits, Jesus inaugurates the Messianic age which many of the people do not recognise, but which the demons do. Later Jesus will hand over this exorcising power, together with the ability to effect cures, to his disciples. We will see that in the discourse in chapter 10.

The demons then begged Jesus to let them go into a nearby herd of pigs. Jesus consented to this. As soon as they had entered the pigs, the whole herd rushed headlong over a cliff and into the water below. The swineherds rushed off to the nearest town to tell what had happened.

The townspeople immediately came out in search of Jesus and, not surprisingly, begged him to go somewhere else. It might seem rather high-handed of Jesus to destroy a whole herd of pigs in this way. We have to remember, however, that in Jewish eyes these pigs were abominably unclean. There was not a better place to put demons, and it was they who really brought about the destruction of the animals. But understandably, the owners of the pigs found it difficult to see things in the same way.

The purpose of the story, of course, is to focus on Jesus’ power to liberate people from evil influences which were destroying their lives. What these men were suffering could not be compared to the loss of the pigs’ lives and the pigs would have ended up in a cooking pot anyway! We, too, need to ask Jesus to liberate us from any evil influences or addictions which enslave us and prevent us from being the kind of persons he wants us to be.

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Wednesday of Week 13 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Genesis 21:5,8-20

At last God keeps his promise and Sarah, old though she is, bears her one and only son, the son through whom the promises to Abraham and his descendants will be kept. Abraham himself is exactly 100 years old.

The child Isaac grew and on the day that he was weaned Abraham threw a large feast. Weaning took place in the ancient Near East between the ages of two and three. However, when Sarah saw her son Isaac playing with his half-brother, Ishmael, the son of Hagar, the maidservant, she became very angry (while there is an impression in the story that Isaac and Ishmael are the same age, Ishmael would have been in his mid teens by this time). Sarah had not forgotten how Hagar had mocked her for sterility and not being able to give Abraham a son. She was also afraid that, if the brothers got too close, it would affect Isaac’s share of the inheritance. In fact, Isaac will get everything.

The word ‘playing’ here is another allusion to Isaac’s name, where the verb means ‘to laugh’ or ‘to play’. She tells Abraham to get rid of both Ishmael and Hagar. She does not want Ishmael to share any of the family inheritance with Isaac.

Abraham was very unhappy with this because he saw Ishmael as a real son whom he loved. But also according to law and the customs of the day the arbitrary expulsion of a servant girl’s son was forbidden and, especially as in this case, where the father is the head of the household. However, God tells Abraham to follow Sarah’s demands because Isaac and only Isaac is to be the father of future descendants.

At the same time, Ishmael, the son of the slave woman, will become a patriarch in his own right as a token of honour for Abraham, his father. God tells Abraham:

As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.

On the following day, Abraham sent Hagar off with her son and a supply of bread and water—in view of Abraham’s wealth only minimal provisions. She left with her boy and wandered in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water ran out, she put her son in the shade of some bushes and then went to sit down some distance off. She prays:

Do not let me look on the death of the child.

And she wept. It was the second time she had received this treatment. The boy too must have been crying because an angel spoke to Hagar from heaven:

Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy….Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.

‘God has heard’ is a play on the meaning of Ishmael’s name. When Hagar opened her eyes, there nearby was a well. She filled her waterskin and gave the boy to drink. And now, says Genesis:

God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow [i.e. an excellent huntsman].

In the next verse, not part of the reading, we are told that Hagar found an Egyptian wife for Ishmael. We remember that Hagar too had been brought from Egypt by Abraham. But this marriage only confirms Ishmael and his descendants as outsiders and leaving the field to Isaac.

We are seeing here, of course, the evolution of the Israelite people told through the eyes of the sacred authors. Certainly not everything in this story would meet with our approval today, neither the mockery of Sarah’s barrenness nor the sending away of Hagar. We are dealing with a much earlier society where many of the values which we take for granted had not yet developed in people’s consciousness.

But we also have to acknowledge that these values have not been appropriated by everyone in our own societies. We have only to think of the millions of people who have been driven from their homes and are without even the basic necessities of living. Most of these situations are the result of human (inhuman) behaviour.

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