Episode 96: Mark Part 36— The Leaven of the Leadership

Things are heating up and Yeshua/Jesus tries to teach the disciples an important lesson—but they miss it entirely because they have their mind on temporal concerns. What exactly is the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of the Herodians and what does it mean in our own lives?

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¹⁴ Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. ¹⁵ And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” ¹⁶ And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. ¹⁷ And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? ¹⁸ Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? ¹⁹ When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” They said to him, “Twelve.” ²⁰ “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” And they said to him, “Seven.” ²¹ And he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?”

Remember last week I told you how much I hate Mark chapter eight? This is why. I mean, episode after episode of people being annoyingly clueless and dense. Last week it was the Pharisees of the district of Dalmunatha asking for a sign because Yeshua/Jesus evidently hadn’t been doing enough already. This week, the disciples are arguing about not having bread when they just witnessed Yeshua making bread multiply miraculously for the second time. By the way, have you noticed how many incidents in the Gospel of Mark involve bread? This is the sixth time. (1) we had the Sabbath controversy with the grain plucking incident where Yeshua justified it by reminding the Pharisees about David eating the forbidden shewbread on the Sabbath, (2) there was the feeding of the five thousand Jews in the wilderness, (3) the rebuke to the Syrophoenician woman about stealing the children’s bread, (4) the handwashing controversy in Mark 7 with the Pharisees, (5) the feeding of the four thousand Gentiles (plus possibly Jews as well), and now this. Provision of food and the eating with one another and hospitality are so important in the Bible and in the ancient world. We see snack time but what they saw was far more profound. They didn’t have grocery stores and they actually cared who they sat down with. They were not like us and so we must put ourselves in their cultural shoes when we read these accounts or we will sometimes miss the point.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that teaches them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.

¹⁴ Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. 

So, remember, Yeshua had just gotten into a major challenge with the Pharisees where they demanded a sign from Heaven and we discussed the four possibilities of what exactly they were looking for in a sign. But the reason why is evident—they were setting up a trap. If a sign would convince them then they would have believed long ago. Yeshua swore an oath not to give them a sign and they got back in the boat and took off across the Sea of Galilee again. Next week we will learn what happens when they land in Bethsaida. But this account would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. They had forgotten to bring bread. What happened to the seven human-sized rope-baskets full of bread is unknown. But there in the boat there is one solitary loaf. And in this type of relationship, with disciples and a teacher, it was not the job of the teacher to bring the bread. It was the job of these guys and you would think one would have made provisions but perhaps with the drama on shore with the Pharisees, which must have been somewhat unexpected, there was just no time before they retreated to the boat again. And this is the third boat account in the Gospel of Mark—not counting the time that he told the Parable of the Sower from the boat. Right after that, we have the incident with Yeshua calming the storm at sea, and the next time is when the disciples are caught in the storm and Yeshua walks across the Sea to them and now this. Important things happen in boats. Yeshua always reveals Himself when they are in boats in this Gospel. It’s what is called a self-manifestation where He reveals Himself as the divine Messiah in some way. The first time, He muzzles the sea, which only Yahweh can do in Scripture. The second time He treads the waves which, again, only Yahweh can do. This time He is going to remind them of what they have just experienced—twice—and will challenge them about what it must mean. So anyway, thirteen guys, one loaf, and probably at least ten of them were still growing boys. Taking advantage of this, Yeshua decides to tell them a parable:

¹⁵ And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” 

Before we talk about the leaven of the Pharisees and the Herodians, we need to have a lesson about what leaven is and is not. First, leaven is not the same as yeast even though they do the exact same thing. Leaven is what happens when bread and water react with the microbes in the air and ferment. Now last year I made a sourdough starter so that I could get the context on this—I used barley flour and water and put it in a mason jar (which they didn’t have in Bible days, of course) and put it on top of my water heater. Within a few days, it was nice and gross and bubbly and I could make bread with it. Only it isn’t very easy to make bread with leaven and so my bread was yucky. But if you have skills, you can do this. My baby brother Adam makes sourdough pancakes with his starter because he has mad skills and I just hang my head in shame and misery. But the thing about leaven is that it is full of living organisms and can become infected and you can get sick from it. So, leaven was serious business. And these guys knew this—that leaven was awesome but leaven could also be deadly if you weren’t diligent and couldn’t recognize the warning signs. And it’s tempting to hold on to that old lump of leaven because it’s a pain to make more—it takes a few days at least and unleavened bread ain’t called the bread of affliction for nothing. I am not a big fan.

But He begins a parable here, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” We’re dealing with two different types of leaven here, that of the Pharisees and another kind that is associated with the Herodians but because Yeshua is too busy correcting their concerns about bread, He never interprets this. So, we’ll do that here. Let’s first talk about the leaven of the Pharisees. As this is presented as a warning with a “Watch out! And Beware!” we know that this sort of leaven is going to be of the infected and even poisonous variety. This won’t be about their positive contributions to society, and they did make positive contributions. This is about their anti-Kingdom agendas. Of course, they thought all of their agendas were in service to the Kingdom (just like all of us) but they were wrong on some pretty significant issues that were poisoning the Jewish people.

I am going to lazily and shamelessly lift this next material from the jewishencyclopedia.com website article on Pharisees which I will, as usual, link to the transcript http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12087-pharisees. The Talmudists had a real love/hate relationship with the Pharisees. On one hand, they considered them as sort of spiritual forefathers and on the other hand, they blamed them for destroying the nation in the first century. But we see them in the Bible portrayed positively and negatively as well. According to Sotah 22b, there were seven types of Pharisees and five types were bad. Why this shows up in Sotah is beyond me but as I have said before when they were writing the tractates dealing with women’s issues, they would often add stuff at the end of them that had nothing whatsoever to do with the content. I mean, the Sotah was the jealousy test when a husband suspected his wife of adultery but had no proof.

Nothing could have been more loathsome to the genuine Pharisee than Hypocrisy. “Whatever good a man does he should do it for the glory of God” (Ab. ii. 13; Ber. 17a). Nicodemus is blamed for having given of his wealth to the poor in an ostentatious manner (Ket. 66b). An evil action may be justified where the motive is a good one (Ber. 63a). Still, the very air of sanctity surrounding the life of the Pharisees often led to abuses. Alexander Jannæus warned his wife not against the Pharisees, his declared enemies, but against “the chameleon- or hyena- [“ẓebo’im”-] like hypocrites who act like Zimri and claim the reward of Phinehas:” (Soṭah 22b). An ancient baraita enumerates seven classes of Pharisees, of which five consist of either eccentric fools or hypocrites: (1) “the shoulder Pharisee,” who wears, as it were, his good actions. ostentatiously upon his shoulder; (2) “the wait-a-little Pharisee,” who ever says, “Wait a little, until I have performed the good act awaiting me”; (3), “the bruised Pharisee,” who in order to avoid looking at a woman runs against the wall so as to bruise himself and bleed; (4) “the pestle Pharisee,” who walks with head down like the pestle in the mortar; (5) “the ever-reckoning Pharisee,” who says, “Let me know what good I may do to counteract my neglect”; (6) “the God-fearing Pharisee,” after the manner of Job; (7) “the God-loving Pharisee,” after the manner of Abraham (Yer. Ber. ix. 14b; Soṭah 22b; Ab. R. N., text A, xxxvii.; text B, xlv. [ed. Schechter, pp. 55, 62]; the explanations in both Talmuds vary greatly; see Chwolson, “Das Letzte-Passahmahl,” p. 116). R. Joshua b. Hananiah, at the beginning of the second century, calls eccentric Pharisees “destroyers of the world” (Soṭah iii. 4); and the term “Pharisaic plagues” is frequently used by the leaders of the time (Yer. Soṭah iii. 19a).

It is such types of Pharisees that Jesus had in view when hurling his scathing words of condemnation against the Pharisees, whom he denounced as “hypocrites,” calling them “offspring of vipers” (“hyenas”; see Ẓebu’im); “whited sepulchers which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones”; “blind guides,” “which strain out the gnat and swallow the camel” (Matt. vi. 2-5, 16; xii. 34; xv. 14; xxiii. 24, 27, Greek). He himself tells his disciples to do as the Scribes and “Pharisees who sit on Moses’ seat [see Almemar] bid them do”; but he blames them for not acting in the right spirit, for wearing large phylacteries and ẓiẓit, and for pretentiousness in many other things (ib. xxiii. 2-7). Exactly so are hypocrites censured in the Midrash (Pes. R. xxii. [ed. Friedmann, p. 111]); wearing tefillin and ẓiẓit, they harbor evil intentions in their breasts. Otherwise, the Pharisees appear as friends of Jesus (Luke vii. 37, xiii. 31) and of the early Christians (Acts v. 38, xxiii. 9; “Ant.” xx. 9, § 1).

I will only add that some Pharisees sometimes appear as friends to Yeshua, but that many Pharisees became followers of Yeshua after the resurrection when their eyes were opened finally and their knowledge of the Bible was put to good use in the early church. The Pharisees had great intentions (we all do, right?) but their focus on external piety blinded them to the matters which truly defile us. And despite all of their fences around the Torah and focus on bringing Temple-level ritual purity into the home, they were very much blinded and even those Pharisees who believed in Yeshua during His life were afraid to admit it for fear of Jewish leadership. And that might be a part of what Yeshua is talking about here but I think the biggest problem, and we will see this again with the Herodians, is what NT Wright calls a “clash of Kingdom expectations.” The Pharisees had certain wrong expectations of God’s coming reign and what the Messiah would look like and, as we will see in three weeks, so did the disciples. The biggest problem with the Pharisees and, indeed, with probably almost all if not all of the Jews in the early first century, is that they were expecting a Jewish Kingdom made up of Jews only and that this Kingdom would crush the Gentile nations. They looked at the Scriptures which described Yahweh coming in power and destroying His enemies and never in a million years thought that He would instead come destroying the evil spiritual powers behind the Gentile oppressors. When Yeshua came to Nazareth talking about the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian being fed and healed, the people were incensed because they were being told that God was opening up the kingdom to the enemy! They were counting on being on top again, being vindicated violently and avenged for their suffering at the hands of the Gentile kingdoms. This leaven is incompatible with the Kingdom of God. And even today among some Messianic Jewish congregations and organizations, there is very much a ranking system where the Jews are automatically considered to be superior to the Gentiles. It’s the same poisonous root that leads to antisemitism. Racism is always evil and anathema to the Kingdom. God is no respecter of persons but the Pharisees sure were. Even the righteous ones.

Next, we have the leaven of the Herodians. Of course, the Herodians were Jews, kinda. By the loosest of definitions. The grandfather of Herod the Great was an Idumean (descendant of Jacob’s brother Esau) who (along with the rest of their countrymen) were forcibly converted to Judaism during the reign of John Hyrcanus. Side note: forcible conversions are never a good idea. Not then and not during the Spanish inquisition. Not only is it an evil thing to do, but it leads to trouble. In this instance, it led to them being reigned over by a crazy murderous pretend Jew of whom Julius Caesar once said “I would rather be Herod’s pig than his son.” And, I mean, Herod ate pigs—oh wait, that’s an assumption and it might be wrong, but he murdered a handful of his sons. His sons after him were less crazy but just as evil, with the exception of Herod Agrippa who wasn’t as bad but certainly wasn’t good. None of them were as excellent builders or administrators as Herod the Great either. But the Herodian leaven had to do with their own kingdom outlook, which was totally secular compared to the Pharisees. They were interested in power and money and collaborated with Rome to achieve it. They were completely sensual—meaning they lived to indulge themselves—and violent. They and the Sadducees were Roman collaborators and getting rich because of it. The Herodians controlled the politics of everything except Judea, Idumea, and Samaria and the Sadducees controlled the Temple. The Herodians had a fully developed Greco-Roman political vision and built Imperial Cult temples, cities dedicated to Roman Emperors, theaters, gymnasiums, and even cities atop graveyards, which is a big no-no with Jewish sensibilities. I mean geez, didn’t he ever watch Poltergeist? You don’t do that. (For the record, I watched it when I was 13 and I still remember it!)

Both of these Kingdom visions were incompatible with what was happening all around them. Both groups are totally blind to what is going on—which is why Mark makes sure to spend so much time on why Herod is terrified that Yeshua is a raised John the Baptist. And as we saw from the last incident with the Pharisees demanding a sign and Luke 23 where Herod Antipas demands a sign, we can see that when people have incompatible visions for the coming Kingdom of God, even when they are in opposition they will still often fight it the same way. In the early church, Pharisees like Saul of Tarsus and Herod Agrippa violently persecuted the early believers. Wrong Kingdom visions=wrong tactics in the fight against it. Let’s get back to the story, now that we have looked at what is about to fly right over the disciples’ collective heads. We’ll repeat verse 15:

¹⁴ Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. ¹⁵ And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” ¹⁶ And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. 

Oh my gosh. Really? Everyone with children totally gets this. You try to teach a profound lesson and all of a sudden they figure you are just passive-aggressively talking about something else entirely because of their guilty consciences and they start bickering. Because that word “discussing” doesn’t do it justice, they figure that Yeshua is rebuking them because they didn’t bring any bread and the lesson gets totally lost and now he has to deal with this foolishness. Remember, these are probably all teenagers except for Peter and Levi. Peter because he is married and Levi because he is a tax collector. That being said, teenagers then were not like teenagers now. They hadn’t spent most of their lives in school and watching tv and playing video games. They maybe got some schooling, usually from their mother in a small town, and then went to work with their fathers as soon as they were old enough. They were responsible, hardworking men despite their age. But that doesn’t make them wise or particularly mature. They still bicker about their standing and about whose fault it is that there is only one loaf of bread.

¹⁷ And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 

And Yeshua, evidently, reacted exactly the same way we did. “I just shared with you this important life lesson and you totally missed it and you are bickering about bread? Are you serious? Are you really that dense?” We haven’t talked about insider/outsider language in a while but here it pops up again. Yeshua gives them private instruction and yet they often completely miss the point of the lesson—although I think this is the first time they genuinely didn’t even realize that there was a lesson! It’s an important lesson to learn ourselves. Sometimes we can be so busy with temporal concerns that we miss the bigger picture—sometimes we are so engrossed with what we think we need and who’s to blame that we don’t have it that we miss what God is trying to communicate to us.

But here, in the presence of a Jewish-only audience again, we see the Exodus language popping back up. Remember that when He fed the four thousand, unlike the feeding of the five thousand, we didn’t see any of the classic Exodus language but here we have some very unflattering references. Arguing about having no bread, Hardened hearts. Not only are they being compared to the bickering, faithless Israelites in the wilderness but they are also being compared to Pharaoh who couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Pharaoh, thinking he was a god, thought He could hold out against the onslaught of Yahweh and come out a winner. The disciples, in the presence of the divine Messiah who can provide enough bread to feed an army, are arguing about not having enough bread for thirteen. It’s a matter of perspective and they still lack that perspective.

I want you to especially notice the words, “Do you not yet perceive or understand?” Understand what? Understand who He is. The time has come where they need to understand who He is and what is about to happen. In fact, they don’t know it but they are on their way to Caesarea Philippi, on the slopes of Mt Hermon, to do something very important and from that moment on, Yeshua will hide nothing from them. The time for secrecy will be over.

¹⁸ Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? 

This is a direct reference, not to Isaiah 6 this time, but Jeremiah 5:21-24, and the context is anything but complimentary.

²¹ “Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not. ²² Do you not fear me? declares the Lord.  Do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as the boundary for the sea,  a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail;  though they roar, they cannot pass over it. ²³ But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;  they have turned aside and gone away. ²⁴ They do not say in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.’

Gosh, He’s shown them over and over again that He is the arm of the Lord, the Yahweh Warrior of Isaiah leading the New Exodus. He has reconciled the verses that said Yahweh would personally come and deliver His people. He has provided food in the desert, twice. He has calmed the storm and walked on the water—showing the same supremacy over the water as in the Psalms and Jeremiah that was the claim only of Yahweh to be able to accomplish. He raised the dead. He healed the deaf man with a speech impediment. Next week, we will see Him heal the blind. He healed the leper—something unrecorded in history among the Jews as only Naaman the Syrian was ever healed of leprosy. He proved his authority to forgive sins by healing the paralytic. He taught without appealing to authority. He healed and cast out demons without appealing to a higher authority. He was recognized by His demonic enemies for who He is. He was recognized by John the Baptist as the coming one for whom He was making Yahweh’s path straight. He has shown them, in so many ways, exactly who He is but they aren’t seeing it. He asks them, ”And do you not remember? Remember what? Just the bread? No, remember everything they have witnessed. Their witness was chosen to change the world and bring the Kingdom of God to the ends of the earth. It was the original vocation of Adam and Eve, to make the entire world an extension of the Garden so that all would glory in God’s presence in relationship with and in allegiance to Him. Let’s look at Acts 1:6-8 real quick:

⁶ So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” ⁷ He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. ⁸ But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

After the resurrection, they were still a bit clueless about what was about to go down but He reminds them of their job. They are to be witnesses of everything they have seen and have been taught. That’s why they have to remember. That’s why we have to remember what God has done for us too. We get bogged down in our lives and often forget all the times we have seen the miraculous or have been blessed in the midst of a crisis. “Remember”—zakar in Hebrew and mnemeneuo in Greek, is a very common word out of God’s mouth. I think zakar is used over two hundred times in the Hebrew Scriptures in one form or another. We are commanded to remember and it isn’t because we are not inclined to forget. We are very inclined to forget, which is why we come through one crisis praising the Lord for preserving and providing and enter into the very next crisis bitter and complaining. It’s true. We all do it. We’re just as pathetic as these guys arguing about bread. I imagine that, after the resurrection and the blinders are fully off, if they spent a lot of time kicking themselves for not asking Him better questions. Of course, if they were anything like us, the questions would still be ridiculous stuff like, “So can you explain Ezekiel’s wheels?”

¹⁹ When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” They said to him, “Twelve.” ²⁰ “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” And they said to him, “Seven.” 

Amazingly, these guys really do have a great memory for the numerical details and they even remember which kinds of baskets were used to pick up the leftovers (remember last week we discussed the two different words that are unfortunately both translated as generic baskets here). But it’s like someone who can accurately quote from the Bible but it never really shows up in their behavior. In fact, and this is a really sad story. I had a friend, years ago, who could tell me any Bible verse just by my describing it—this was before Bible Gateway saved my hide. Man, it was like she knew the danged book backward and forward. I couldn’t stump her. But there were problems because she had no depth in herself—something I wouldn’t learn until it was too late. For her, the Bible was an intellectual exercise, something to be conquered. I don’t know if she ever had a real knowledge of Yeshua. I mean, she had all the right words because she knew all the verses—she was really very intelligent—but when you know the Bible in an intellectual way only, you are going to find fault with it. Anything we tackle with the intention of mastering it will be found lacking—even the Bible. Obviously, the Pharisees were this way with Yeshua as well—they would only consider Him to be a bonafide prophet if He conformed to their agendas of what Judaism needed to be. Of course, He was never going to do that. And same with the Bible—if you want to promote Constantinian-inspired violence and portray that as a Christian virtue, you have to do so at the expense of Yeshua’s hard words in the Sermon on the Mount. If you want to refuse to forgive unless they apologize first, again, you have to ignore Yeshua’s teachings. In fact, I was reading a really great article by David Instone-Brewer yesterday about how difficult it often is to find our dearly held doctrines in the Bible and how we resort to proof-texting. Now, proof-testing is what we do when we want to support a belief but cannot do it from Scripture in context. The Pharisees and Talmudists were masters at this and we are pretty talented at it ourselves. For example, if we want to hate our enemies we can find Psalms to back that up—but we have to ignore God’s action of repeatedly forgiving enemies throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and being, by modern human standards, a shameless enabler. We also have to ignore Yeshua’s teachings that we are to instead bless and pray for our enemies. But, you know, we can take a verse here and there entirely outside of Biblical context and quote it and justify our flesh. And, if we are really sneaky, we can just quote the verse and not even give chapter and verse and hope that we are talking to the kinds of people who aren’t wanting to check out the context. To be honest, most people don’t want to check and so we’ve gotten sloppy. We do what we get away with.

Yeshua didn’t fit any of the established first-century Messianic templates. It wouldn’t be for another eight hundred years that someone would finally (outside of Messianic Judaism) start writing about Messiah ben Joseph/aka Ephraim. At this point, they were very much looking for a Bar Kochba figure or a second Moses that would make their nationalistic dreams come true because, in some ways, the Pharisees weren’t all that different from the Herodians in wanting political power. They just came at it from another angle but they still had serious nationalistic goals. But Yeshua’s goals weren’t even remotely nationalistic in any way that would be acceptable to any of the powers that be—not to the Pharisees, the Herodians, the Sadducees or even the Essenes. Each group was bent on being on top when the dust settled. That’s why they all failed to see the Messiah when He was with them. As we will see in three weeks, the disciples were also very much tied up in nationalistic hopes—hopes that would be violently dashed and replaced with a much bigger picture that included the Gentile nations and would not happen at their expense or with their destruction.

But, back to the bread and fishes. Yeshua is having to deal with their temporal concerns—He is kind to us in this way when we are being silly and untrusting. He deals with us where we are and this is a classic example of that. He could have just refused to talk about it but instead, He interrupted His lesson in order to give them a reality check. They needed to remember what they themselves saw but didn’t just see. They say the original loaves and the original fishes—they knew there was no more than they had brought to Yeshua. They saw Him speak the blessings and break the bread and then the fishes—but then it got handed to them and it never ran out. What happened, happened in their own hands. I often wonder how exactly that played out. Did people really not notice the bread multiplying? Were they partially blinded? So many things we don’t know.

²¹ And he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?”

Not to be melodramatic but He still asks us this question all the time and we are fools if we reply, “Well, yes, of course, I have all my little doctrines and beliefs in a row so yes, I can teach wisdom to the simple and knowledge to the wise,” and I probably butchered that Proverb but I am too lazy to go check on it since it is rather tongue in cheek.

The Pharisees would have sworn up and down that they had the understanding and that they would never miss the Messiah. The Essenes would have sworn up and down that they knew exactly what terrible things were going to happen to everyone except for them. The Sadducees and the Herodians were just riding the wave of wealth and power without being the slightest bit concerned about a Messiah—well, with the exception of worrying that claimants would upset the apple cart of their power. The disciples, as we will see soon, also thought they understood. Just a head’s up. Yeshua will reveal His fate in living color for them three times between now and the end of chapter ten and not only do they object to it, going so far as to rebuke their Master, but they are still obsessed with how they fit in and they aren’t seeing that this will end in their suffering and martyrdom. Somewhere, Saul of Tarsus is sitting at the feet of Gamaliel, totally convinced that he has a pretty good bead on everything. He’s so sure that he will end up participating in the persecution and martyrdom of his own people.

These people weren’t idiots. Well, okay, some of them undoubtedly were but by and large, these were people (with the exception of the Herodians) who were fully convinced that they were serving God the way He wanted to be served and had His seal of approval on their lives. It’s the age-old problem. Thinking that our understanding is so entirely guided by God that we often make disasters while convinced we are preventing them.

We need to understand that we don’t understand. A lot of problems within the Body of Messiah would be solved if we backed down from our level of certainty over anything other than what Paul stood firmly on in I Cor 2:2, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Years ago, when I was ridiculously divisive over a lot silly side issues (many of which I no longer hold to or even care about), Yahweh spoke to me and told me to focus on that in my dealings with people. It is a life-changer. If the first-century Jewish leadership had focused on listening for God’s voice instead of assuming that all prophecy had ceased hundreds of years ago, there would have been room for understanding Yeshua’s message. We can fall into the same trap when we don’t realize that we see things as though through a darkened glass. So, I am going to end now with I Cor 13.

13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. ⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;^[b] 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.⁸ Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.