“Merciful Father, as you have sent the Holy Spirit on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, to write all that You wished and wanted, we pray You, send the same Holy Spirit on us, so that we may understand, appreciate Your Word, and make it our plan of life. This we ask for the merits of Your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Let them be as grass that grows upon the housetops, and in no time, it will wither.”
18 …. As would be expected, where you have soil and clay, grass is bound to grow, especially when it rains. That is just what used to happen on their roofs, grass used to grow: Psalm 129:6 “Let them be as grass that grows upon the housetops, and in no time, it will wither.” Maybe many might have asked or thought: “But how can grass grow on roofs?’ Now we know the reason why. You can find more reference in 2Kings 19:26; and in Isaiah 37:27. We can imagine what a mini-jungle they would have had on the rooftops after the winter, if they did not take care to clean it up.
Houses with more than one room were built, but usually these were owned by those who were wealthy. For example the very wealthy class, made up mostly of the Priests and the Saduccees used to live in the northern part of Jerusalem. Theirs were not houses, but villas, palaces built in white marble, decorated with columns, they even had swimming pools and a good number of rooms for various purposes. But these were the elite, in the days of Jesus. No wonder He used to address them in strict and harsh words. They never knew what ‘poverty’ meant.
Certainly the poor section of the population living in a one-room house, lived in villages…where Jesus used to walk and preach. Whilst the luxurious, rich palaces where built in the reserved area of Jerusalem. The Saduccees never experienced the poverty, the hunger and misery of the ordinary, common people, made up of those “fifth bird that was given as an extra bonus”.
They lived in luxury. Thank God for the archeological finds, and the modern technology to decipher and study the past, for now we have a better idea of what life was like in the days of Jesus.
How could those Saducees accept this unknown Rabbi coming from a relatively unknown …. we could even say notorious …. part of the country, from Nazareth. It was common knowledge that “nothing good did ever come out of Nazareth…not even a Rabbi,” especially knowing His background, an ex-carpenter, like His father Joseph. And now, this Rabbi made it His business to go about to preach and teach to those who were the authority of the Scripture: ‘Blessed are the poor’.
Jesus must have turned their life-style topsy turvey. Again, when wealth was considered to be a’grace’ a ‘sign’, that God gave as a reward to those He loved, His favourites. That is why He granted them wealth, because, according to them they were on the right path…. a very FALSE idea, and NOW, Jesus is healing, befriending the destitute, the poor, the widows, the orphans, the sick and the lepers. Notwithstanding that they did see with their own eyes, signs, miracles.
Just the same they kept aloof as did most, almost all the Pharisees. No wonder, Jesus told them: “You have eyes, yet, do not see, you have ears, to hear, yet you do not listen.” We have to talk quite a lot about these groups of people, later on; the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Zealots. /19
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