Monday of Week 14 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 28:10-22
Today and tomorrow we read of two strange experiences which Jacob has. On the way from Beersheba to Haran, Jacob stops for the night. Haran, we may remember, was the place between Ur and Canaan where Abraham lived before moving down to Canaan. It was there, too, that he had found Rachel, the wife of his son Isaac.
Using a stone for a pillow, Jacob lies down to sleep just where he is. As he sleeps, he has a dream. He sees a staircase reaching from the earth right up to heaven. And on it there were angels or messengers of God going up and down. We normally speak of “Jacob’s Ladder” but, in fact, the Hebrew word sullam, means a stairway.
The image in Jacob’s dream is derived from the Babylonian ziggurat or temple tower. On the outside was a flight of brick steps leading to a small temple at the top. As we saw in our earlier readings from Genesis, the Tower of Babel was modelled on such a tower.
The angels or messengers of God going up and down the staircase between earth and heaven are a sign that the Lord is offering to be Jacob’s God. Later, Jesus would tell Nathanael that he would:
…see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. (John 1:51)
Jesus himself becomes the stairway between heaven and earth (see John 14:6), the “one mediator between God and humankind” (1 Tim 2:5). He is also called the Pontifex or Bridge-maker.
Jacob then sees God standing above him and speaking to him. This continues the image of the ziggurat where the god is present at the top of the tower. And God identifies himself to the sleeping Jacob:
I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac…
Then come the promises: The land on which Jacob is lying will be given to him and his descendants. Once again God promises that his descendants will be as numerous as specks of dust on the earth, that they will spread in every direction and that all the tribes of the earth will bless themselves by Jacob and his descendants. God promises to be with Jacob and his descendants always, and to bring them back to this land. God will not desert them and all of his promises will be fulfilled. In this, God is unlike the gods of pagan religions, who were merely local deities giving protection only in their own territories. Here God assures Jacob that he will be with him wherever he goes.
This promise, of course, has relevance to the later periods of exile. Jacob then wakes up and realises:
Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!
If he had known, he might not have chosen just that place to have a sleep. He is filled with fear:
How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
“This” refers both to the stone used as a pillow and the staircase of his dream.
To commemorate his experience, Jacob takes the stone he had used for a pillow and sets it up as a memorial stone, consecrating it with oil. A ‘memorial stone’ (in Hebrew, messaba) might vary in shape or size, and would be set upright and usually intended for some religious purpose. The custom of erecting such ‘sacred pillars’ went back to the pre-Israelite period and their pagan associations were often retained. For that reason, the Israelite’s religion later forbade their being erected (see Lev 26:1) and ordered the destruction of those with pagan associations (Exod 34:13).
The stone used as a pillow now marks the place of God’s presence. The place, formerly known as Luz, is now named Bethel—“a house of God”. Jacob anoints the stone with oil as a formal act of worship and consecration. Practices of this kind were common in the Canaanite world and in the Semitic world in general, but as already mentioned, were later condemned by both the Law and the prophets (see also Exod 23:24).
Before leaving the place, Jacob makes a final vow. If God keeps his promises and protects Jacob, then Yahweh will be his God and the stone he has set up as a memorial will become the house of God. The passage is not fully clear about the concept of God at this point, especially with terms like “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob”. The later concept of a unique universal God seems yet to be conceived. Each of the peoples of those days had their own protecting god who had to be served. The Israelites had their God too, a powerful God, a God who was always with them wherever they went, but not seen as the God of other peoples.
Several of the Church Fathers later saw in Jacob’s ladder an image of the providential care God exercises on earth through the ministry of the angels. Others saw in it a foreshadowing of the incarnation of the Word who linked heaven with earth—Jesus as the Mediator mentioned above. The liturgy makes use of verse 17 (“How awesome is this place…”) in the Office and Mass for the dedication of a church.
The story is a continuation and a confirmation of the covenant promise God had made earlier with Abraham. The same promises are now made to the grandson, who, as we shall see, will be the father of the Twelve Patriarchs, from whom all God’s people are descended. And that promise reaches down to Jesus himself and through him to us, who are the spiritual offspring of Jacob. In a sense that Jacob or the Israelites could never have imagined, God’s people—with Jesus as Lord—have become a blessing for countless millions of people all over the world.
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Monday of Week 14 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Matthew 9:18-26
There is a great contrast in the way Matthew tells this double story compared to that told by Mark (Mark 5:21-43). Matthew strips it down to the bare details. The twenty-three verses that Mark needs are reduced here to nine. Matthew makes no mention of the large crowd that was following Jesus, only that his disciples are present. He concentrates on Jesus and on what Jesus does and says.
A synagogue official approaches Jesus and says that his daughter has just died. He is in fact the head of the synagogue, and in Mark and Luke we learn that his name is Jairus. In Mark’s version, the girl is seriously ill and dies only later in the story. The man says to Jesus:
…come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.
It is an extraordinary act of faith in the power of Jesus. Up to this he had not brought anyone back from the dead.
As Jesus and his disciples were on the way to the house, a woman who had suffered from a bleeding problem for twelve years unobtrusively touched the hem of Jesus’ garment.
If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.
Again, we are presented with a deep faith and trust in Jesus’ power.
This was really the only way this unfortunate woman could approach Jesus with other people around. Her bleeding was not only a physical ailment. It also involved ritual uncleanness, and she was not supposed to be in close contact with people. If they had known, they might have done something terrible to her. Nor, for the same reason, could she approach Jesus openly about her problem, so she quietly touched the hem of his robe. She trusted that that would be enough and she was right.
Jesus, realising she had touched his garment, turned and said kindly:
Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.
And the bleeding stopped instantly.
We now go back to the original story. As Jesus and his disciples approach the house, they find a large crowd of mourners, many of them wailing and weeping in the fashion still common in West, South and East Asia. Jesus tells them all to:
Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.
Hearing this, the crowd laughed at him. Whether the girl was actually dead or was simply in some kind of death-like coma does not really matter. As far as everyone there was concerned, she was dead.
Jesus went into the house, took the girl by the hand and she “got up”. There are overtones of resurrection in the words “got up”.
In both these stories, using the literary device of ‘inclusion’ (one story wrapped inside another), we have a common theme of Jesus as Lord of life. It is Matthew’s way of saying what we read in John:
I am the resurrection and the life. (John 11:25)
That life is to be understood in the fullest possible sense, involving the physical, social, intellectual and spiritual aspects.
In one story, the girl is not only given back her physical life, but is restored to the bosom of her family and all that means. In the other story, not only is the woman’s haemorrhage stopped, but she can be fully reinstated into normal relationships with the people around her. She is in a very real sense made whole again. Let us today pray for Jesus to heal us and make us whole—the wholeness that is holiness, the holiness that is wholeness.
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