Today’s Gospel begins with Jesus trying to get away. Matthew tells us that Jesus withdrew by boat to a deserted place. He had just learned that John the Baptist had been murdered by Herod. John—Jesus’ cousin, teacher, baptizer, and fellow prophet—had been executed because he dared to speak truth to power. Jesus must have been […]
I have to be quite honest. There is really nothing about this parable from Matthew that I like and is one of the reasons that I struggle with the Gospel of Matthew. “The weeping and gnashing of teeth” is one of my least favorite scriptural phrases and appears in Matthew a total of six times. […]