Wednesday of Week 11 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 6:1-6,16-18

We move today to a different theme, namely, the way in which we are to pay our worship to God. Jesus’ teaching is based on the three basic acts of religion expected of a devout Jew—almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. In each case, Jesus warns his disciples not to indulge in any form of ostentation so as to attract the admiration of others.

He presents exaggerated images of how we should not do things in the way of ostentatious hypocrites. He speaks about people who blow trumpets in the streets to draw the attention of everyone when they give alms to the poor. He speaks about hypocrites who say their prayers in the most conspicuous places so that people will marvel at how holy they are. He speaks about people putting on gloomy and drawn looks so that everyone will know that they are fasting. In fact, Jews were only expected to fast on one day in the year—on the Day of Atonement, but the practice of regular fasting had become more common in Jesus’ time.

All this, Jesus says, is not worship of God, but a kind of self-advertisement. Such people, he says, get their reward, namely, the admiration of the onlooker, but it is not the reward that comes from acts of genuine worship.

When his disciples pray or fast or give alms they should do it in such a way that their actions will be directed entirely to God and not to themselves. We do remember earlier in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus said people should be able to see the good works of his disciples, but then the purpose was not that they would be praised, but that people would be led to glorify God.

It should also be pointed out that Jesus’ recommendation that we pray in private where only God can see us shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning that it is not necessary for us to take part in forms of community prayer—which Jesus himself would have done whenever he attended the synagogue or went to the Temple. It would be a gross misreading of this text to argue, as people sometimes are heard to do, that it is not necessary to attend Sunday Mass because “I can pray equally well in the privacy of my home”. To speak in such a way is to misunderstand completely the essentially communal nature of the Eucharistic celebration.

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Wednesday of Week 11 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on 2 Kings 2:1,6-14

Today we move on to the Second Book of Kings and we continue where we left off with the First Book. The division into two books is artificial and no such division is found in the earliest Hebrew bibles. The passage we are reading today acts as an introduction to the story of the prophet Elisha. Today we bring the story of Elijah to a conclusion and see Elisha taking over as his successor.

As Elijah is about to leave to go to the Jordan in obedience to the Lord’s call, he tells Elisha to remain behind. Whether this was said to test Elisha is not clear, but Elisha renewed his commitment as a disciple of Elijah and insisted on following him.

They are followed by fifty fellow-prophets who will be witnesses to what is about to happen by the banks of the Jordan, which the two prophets have now reached. Elijah then takes his cloak, rolls it up and strikes the waters of the river. As with Moses long ago crossing the Red Sea, the water of the river divides to right and left and the two prophets walk across on dry ground.

It is then that Elijah, about to go away, invites Elisha to make a final request. The younger prophet boldly asks to be given a double share of Elijah’s spirit. Elisha was not expressing a desire for a ministry twice as great as Elijah’s, but he was using terms derived from inheritance law to express his desire for a full sharing in Elijah’s ministry. In Jewish society it was normal for the elder son to inherit a double share of his father’s property. So, in making his request, Elisha is asking to be regarded as the genuine heir to Elijah’s prophetic powers and spirit.

Elijah replies that it is a difficult request to honour, for ultimately the giving of such a gift lies with God and not with Elijah. But he promises that there will be a sign given by which Elisha will know whether his request has been granted. And that will be the Lord’s doing and not Elijah’s. God indicates that the request is granted by allowing Elisha to see what is hidden from other human eyes, namely, Elijah’s being taken up to heaven.

All of a sudden, a chariot of fire with two fiery horses came between the two men and Elijah was taken up in a whirlwind. Elisha alone could see this—a sure sign that his request had been granted. By riding the chariot, a symbol of Israel’s strength, it is clear that Elijah, and not the king, is the Lord’s true representative among his people. And Elijah, like Enoch before him (Gen 5:24), was taken up to heaven bodily without experiencing death; like Moses (Deut 34:4-6), he was taken away outside the promised land.

It was generally believed by later generations that Elijah would return to die the natural death that is the fate of all. And his return was expected to herald the imminent coming of the Messiah. In the Gospels, John the Baptist is seen to fill that role.

Elisha then tore his own clothes in half, perhaps in grief at the loss of his master and perhaps as signifying the end of his former life. He picked up the cloak of Elijah which had fallen off as Elijah was carried away in the chariot, thereby symbolically taking on Elijah’s ministry and mission.

Once again Elisha went back to the River Jordan’s bank. As he had seen Elijah do earlier, he struck the water with Elijah’s cloak while he prayed:

Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah? Where is he?

When he struck the water, it divided to right and left and Elisha crossed over. The power was not in Elisha or in the cloak, but only in the Lord God, of whom the prophet is an agent, but it was also a clear indication that the prophet’s role and powers had been passed on to Elisha.

In crossing the Jordan as Joshua had before him, Elisha is shown to be Elijah’s ‘Joshua’ (Elisha and Joshua are very similar names, Elisha meaning “God saves” and Joshua, “The Lord saves”). Elisha would play the role of Joshua (who led the Israelites into the promised land) as Elijah played the role of Moses (who did not get to cross the Jordan).

In this story we can see:

• the loyalty of Elisha’s discipleship,
• his being called by God to carry on the mission of Elijah,
• his becoming, like Elijah, the instrument of God for his people.

In some way, this applies to each one of us in our relationship with Jesus.

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