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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Monday of Week 14 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Hosea 2:16,17-18,21-22
Today we begin reading from the prophet Hosea. Hosea belonged to Israel, the Northern Kingdom, and began his prophetic career in the last years of Jeroboam II (786-746 BC). Some believe that he was a priest, others that he was a cult prophet, but the only information on his life comes from this book.
He was a man of great feeling and could go from anger to extreme tenderness. The prophecy is built around his difficult marriage to Gomer, and this affected and deepened his teaching. Gomer was guilty of adultery (very humiliating to anyone, but especially in those times, to the husband) and comes to symbolise the sinful Israel. And just as Hosea could not give up his wife in spite of her infidelity, so neither could Yahweh abandon Israel, who was betrothed to him, in spite of her faithlessness and treatment of the poor. There would be punishment, but its purpose was to heal and restore the first love. In fact, it was Hosea who began the tradition of describing the relations between Yahweh and Israel in terms of marriage, and this is taken up in the New Testament by Paul and John.
Today’s passage is full of tenderness and a spirit of reconciliation. In the verses just prior to today’s reading, God speaks to Israel, his chosen people saying:
I will now allure her
and bring her into the wilderness
and speak tenderly to her… (Hosea 2:14)
He wants to lead his people into the desert for, in the eyes of Hosea, like Amos before him, the years the Israelites spent in the desert were idyllic times when the people had a particularly close relationship with their Lord. Israel was then childlike, knowing nothing of pagan gods, and loyal to Yahweh whose presence was manifest in the cloud. (In fact, it was not quite as idyllic as all that, but we know how nostalgia can romanticise the past.)
Then, says the prophet, Israel:
…shall respond
as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
(Hosea 2:15)
Just as Gomer had treated her husband Hosea, so Israel has behaved like an unfaithful wife, but now she will come back to Yahweh, her spouse, who, of course, has always been faithful to her.
Picking up on today’s reading, Hosea says:
On that day, says the Lord, you will call me “my husband,” and no longer will you call me “my Baal.”
There is an ironic play on words here. For a long time, the word ‘baal’ which means ‘master’ was applied to husbands and also to God. It had been from ancient times an element in certain proper names, without any idolatrous significance. Yahweh was the ‘master’ to whom the bearer of the name was thus dedicated.
But after the corrupting influences of the Canaanites, the word ‘Baal’ came to be identified in people’s minds with the Canaanite gods. There was such a vigorous reaction against that worship that this Hebrew word for ‘master’ was no longer used of the Lord. He says:
For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more.
And then the Lord will take Israel back:
And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice…
Yahweh takes back his unfaithful wife with the fervour of first love and showers her with spiritual gifts—with right and justice, with love and mercy.
‘Righteousness’ and ‘justice’ are two terms dear to Hosea and are used by him especially to condemn the popular social injustice and corruption of the legal processes. Here they mean right conduct in general.
The primary meaning of the word ‘love’ (Hebrew, hesed) is that of a bond, or contract. When used of human relationships it comes to mean friendship, union, loyalty, especially when these are the outcomes of a treaty or formal agreement.
Used of God, the term refers to his faithfulness to his covenant and the kindness he therefore shows his chosen people (Exod 34:6). Used by Hosea in the context of married love, the word assumes and from then on retains a still warmer significance: it means the tender love God has for his people and the benefits emanating from it.
But this divine hesed calls for corresponding hesed in human beings towards Yahweh, consisting of self-giving, loving trust, abandonment, deep affection and ‘piety’; a love (in short) which is a joyful submission to the will of God and an active charity to fellow humans. This ideal, expressed in many of the Psalms, will later be that of the Hasidim, or Hasidaeans where, however, it takes rather extreme forms (see verses beginning with 1 Macc 2:42).
Hosea continues:
I will take you for my wife in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.
“Know” here means much more than an intellectual knowing. It implies a deep and intimate relationship of love and unity. God ‘makes himself known’ to man when he engages himself to him by covenant, and shows his hesed-love for him by the benefits he confers. The word ‘know’ is used in the Bible sometimes to express sexual unity as when Mary (in some translations) told the angel that she “did not ‘know’ a man”, but it also refers to active acknowledgement of a covenant partner.
Similarly, man ‘knows God’ when he loyally observes God’s covenant, shows gratitude for God’s gifts, and returns love for love. In the wisdom literature ‘knowledge’ in this sense and ‘wisdom’ are practically synonymous. The two words ‘know’ and hesed are closely interlinked.
Passages like this, of course, are laying the groundwork for the love of God for us, which was shown in such a dramatic fashion by Jesus, the Incarnate love of God. All the Gospels are suffused with this love, and we are called to be filled with that love which is extended to God, to every single person without exception and also to ourselves.
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