First Reading · Sirach
A prophet like fire
Sirach 48:1–14
Where we are
Ben Sira, writing in Jerusalem around 180 BCE, ends his book with the long section usually called the Praise of the Fathers — a gallery of Israel's great figures from Enoch to the high priest Simon. Elijah gets more space than any other prophet. Today's reading is his panel, and Elisha's beside it, and it comes at the end of a fortnight in which the lectionary has read the underlying narrative itself.
What happens
Then the prophet Elijah arose like a fire, and his word burned like a torch. He brought a famine upon them, and by his zeal he reduced them to few. By the word of Yahweh he shut up the heavens and three times brought down fire. Ben Sira recites the deeds: raising a corpse from death, casting down kings, anointing kings as avengers and prophets to succeed him. You were taken aloft in a whirlwind of fire, in a chariot with fiery horses. You are destined, it is written, in time to come to put an end to wrath before the day of Yahweh, to turn back the hearts of fathers toward their sons, and to re-establish the tribes of Jacob. Blessed is the one who shall have seen you before he dies. Then Elisha: When Elijah was taken up in the whirlwind, Elisha was filled with his spirit; he worked twice as many marvels, and every word out of his mouth was fulfilled. During his lifetime he feared no one, nor could any man intimidate his will. Nothing was beyond his power; beneath him flesh was brought back into life. In life he performed wonders, and after death, marvellous deeds.
What to notice
The governing image is fire, and it is applied four times in the first two verses: the prophet arose like a fire; his word burned like a torch; he brought down fire three times; he went up in a whirlwind of fire. Ben Sira's Elijah is a combustion event. It is worth setting beside what the lectionary read six days ago on Horeb, where the man was told, in three flat clauses, that Yahweh was not in the fire. Both readings are in the canon and the tension between them is not resolved anywhere: the tradition remembers Elijah by exactly the register that Sinai emptied.
The count of three fires is precise. Carmel is one; the two companies of fifty consumed at Ahaziah's summons in 2 Kings 1 are the other two. Ben Sira is not being decorative — he has the chapters in front of him, and this is a reader's summary, made from a scroll.
The most consequential verse is a quotation of another prophet. Sirach 48:10 — to put an end to wrath before the day of Yahweh, to turn back the hearts of fathers toward their sons — is the closing sentence of Malachi, the last two verses of the Hebrew prophets: I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes, and he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children. Ben Sira quotes it as scripture, with the phrase it is written. This is the hinge on which the whole later Elijah expectation turns: the question at the transfiguration, the crowd at the cross wondering whether Elijah will come, and the Gospels' identification of John the Baptist. Malachi wrote it, Ben Sira canonised it by quoting it, and everything after depends on it.
And the promised work is domestic. Not the overthrow of empires: the hearts of fathers turned back toward their sons. For a prophet whose recorded career consists of droughts, fire, coups and confrontation, the assignment reserved for his return is family reconciliation — which is a strange and quiet thing to give the man who is like a fire.
The Elisha panel corrects a phrase. Ben Sira writes that Elisha worked twice as many marvels — epoiēsen diplasia sēmeia — which is his reading of pi shnayim, the request the lectionary read yesterday. He has taken the firstborn's double share as a quantity of miracles, which is probably the earliest surviving interpretation of the phrase and, on the legal evidence, not the likeliest one. It is a useful reminder that a text can be read in one direction for two thousand years starting from a single early paraphrase.
The last line is the strangest compliment in the chapter. In life he performed wonders, and after death, marvellous deeds — a reference to 2 Kings 13:21, where a corpse being buried in haste is thrown into Elisha's grave, touches his bones, and stands up. Ben Sira lists a posthumous miracle among a man's achievements, which tells you something about how the Praise of the Fathers understands a life: the deeds are not finished when the person is.
Responsorial Psalm
Fire goes before him
Where we are
Psalm 97 is one of the enthronement psalms — Yahweh reigns — and it is the most volcanic of them. The lectionary has chosen it for the day the first reading calls a prophet a fire, and the psalm supplies the original of the imagery.
The selected verses
Psalm 97:1-2. "Yahweh is king; let the earth rejoice; let the many islands be glad. Clouds and darkness are around him, justice and judgment are the foundation of his throne."
Psalm 97:3-4. "Fire goes before him and consumes his foes round about. His lightnings illumine the world; the earth sees and trembles."
Psalm 97:5-6. "The mountains melt like wax before Yahweh, before the Master of all the earth. The heavens proclaim his justice, and all peoples see his glory."
Psalm 97:7. "All who worship graven things are put to shame, who glory in the things of nought; all gods are prostrate before him."
What to notice
The two nouns in Psalm 97:2 are a legal pair, and they are load-bearing. Tsedeq u-mishpat mekhon kis'o — right-dealing and judgment are the mekhon of his throne. Mekhon is an architectural term: the fixed base, the foundation on which something is set. The psalm surrounds Theos with cloud and darkness — deliberate obscurity — and then specifies exactly what the throne is resting on. You cannot see him; you can know what holds him up.
The imagery from Psalm 97:3 onward is standard storm-god material and is being used competitively. Fire going before, lightning illuminating the world, mountains melting like wax — every element belongs to the vocabulary of Baal in the Ugaritic texts, and the psalm applies it wholesale to Yahweh and then says, in Psalm 97:7, that all gods bow down to him. It is the same argument Carmel made with a bull and an altar, made here in poetry.
And Psalm 97:5's simile is unusual. Harim ka-donag namassu — mountains melted like wax. Wax is a domestic material; the psalm reaches for the least imposing substance it can find and applies it to the most imposing object in the landscape. The point is not that the mountains are destroyed but that they turn out to be soft.
Gospel · Matthew
Sixty words
Where we are
The middle of yesterday's three paragraphs, opened up. Having said that prayer belongs in a locked storeroom, the Sermon now says what to do once the door is shut, and gives the only text in the Gospels that Jesus is recorded as telling his disciples to say.
What happens
"In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your reign come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Give us today our daily bread; and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one. If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions."
What to notice
The verb in the warning is almost certainly invented for the sound of it. Mē battalogēsēte — do not batta-speak. Nobody knows the etymology; it may imitate stammering, or derive from a proverbially long-winded person, or be a Semitic loan. What is clear is the gloss the sentence supplies: en tē polylogia autōn, in their many-wordedness. The objection is not to length as such but to a theory of prayer in which volume is the mechanism — the idea, entirely reasonable if the god is remote or reluctant, that persistence and vocabulary will make the difference.
And the reason given removes prayer's usual purpose. Oiden gar ho patēr hymōn hōn chreian echete pro tou hymas aitēsai auton — your Father knows what you need before you ask. Which raises the obvious question the passage does not answer, and then hands over a text anyway. Whatever asking is for, on this account, it is not for conveying information.
The first three petitions are all in the passive voice. Hagiasthētō, elthetō, genēthētō — let it be hallowed, let it come, let it be done. The grammar is what commentators call the divine passive: a construction that keeps the agent unnamed, and the unnamed agent is Theos. The prayer opens by asking Theos to do three things that only he can do, and only then turns to bread.
One word in it is essentially unattested elsewhere. Epiousios, the adjective on bread, appears here, in Luke's parallel, and — as far as we can tell — almost nowhere else in surviving Greek; Origen said in the third century that he could not find it in ordinary use. The candidate meanings are three: for the coming day (from epi + iousa, the day approaching), necessary for existence (from epi + ousia, substance), or super-substantial, which is how Jerome rendered it in the Vulgate at Matthew and daily at Luke. Every English translation of the most-recited sentence in Christianity is a guess about one adjective.
And the debts are debts. Ta opheilēmata hēmōn is the financial word — what is owed — and the second half uses its cognate: tois opheiletais hēmōn, our debtors. Luke's version softens the first to sins and keeps the second as debtors. Matthew keeps the ledger metaphor on both sides, which is why the Aramaic behind it, choba, meaning both a debt and a fault, is usually invoked to explain the shift.
The tense of the human clause is a small shock. Hōs kai hēmeis aphēkamen — as we also have forgiven — an aorist, a completed act, in the best manuscripts. Luke has a present. Matthew's version asks Theos to match something already done, which is a considerably more exposed thing to say than as we are willing to forgive.
And only one petition gets a footnote. Seven petitions, and the Gospel goes back to comment on exactly one of them — the fifth, twice, once positively and once negatively. Nothing is added about bread, or the name, or the test.
| Reading |
The register |
What is asked for |
| Sirach 48 |
A prophet like fire; a whirlwind of fire |
To turn the hearts of fathers to their sons |
| Psalm 97 |
Cloud, lightning, mountains like wax |
Nothing — the psalm only looks |
| Matthew 6:7-15 |
A closed door, few words |
Name, reign, will, bread, debts, the test |
The day puts the loudest possible theology next to the quietest possible prayer, and lets them explain each other.
Ben Sira's Elijah is entirely fire: he arises like a fire, his word burns like a torch, he calls fire down three times, and he leaves in a whirlwind of it. Psalm 97 supplies the same vocabulary for Theos himself — fire going ahead, lightning, mountains softening like wax — and both readings are doing something more pointed than description. They are asserting that the powers attributed to the storm god belong to somebody else, which is the argument the last fortnight of readings has been conducting since a drought was announced in Ahab's court.
And then Matthew, in the same liturgy, says: do not do it that way. Not because the fire is untrue, but because the theory of prayer that goes with it is. Polylogia — many-wordedness — is what you produce when you think the deity has to be reached, roused, persuaded or worn down; it is what four hundred and fifty prophets did on Carmel from morning until the time of the evening offering, and it is what Elijah conspicuously did not do. The prayer he prayed there was about sixty words long, and so is this one.
The two halves of the day meet most exactly in a phrase. Sirach 48:10 says that when the fire prophet returns, the work assigned to him is to turn the hearts of fathers toward their sons — Malachi's last sentence, quoted as scripture. And the prayer Matthew supplies begins Our Father. The reconciliation that is Elijah's eschatological assignment is the relationship the prayer simply assumes at its first word, and the one petition the Gospel goes back and comments on is the one about forgiveness — twice, in both directions, as though nothing else in the list needed the explanation.
A Question to Sit With
Ben Sira remembered Elijah as fire, and the man himself was told on the mountain that the fire was not where
Theos was. Both are in the book. I suspect I do the same thing — remember the loud episodes as the real ones, and file the silence as an interlude — and the prayer given today is built to correct exactly that instinct: few words, a closed door, and a
Father who already knows. What would it mean to pray as though the information had already arrived? And then the fifth petition, in the tense Matthew actually wrote it in: not
as I intend to forgive, but
as I already have. If I said the prayer honestly this morning, whose
name would make the sentence false?