First Reading · 2 Corinthians
Treasure in potsherds
Where we are
2 Corinthians is Paul's most personal and most bruised letter, written to a congregation that has been comparing him unfavourably with more impressive visiting preachers. Chapter 4 is his answer, and it does not argue that he is more impressive. It argues the opposite.
What happens
"We hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of Theos and not from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body... So death is at work in us, but life in you. Since, then, we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, 'I believed, therefore I spoke,' we too believe and therefore speak, knowing that the one who raised the master Jesus will raise us also with Jesus."
What to notice
The container is cheaper than the English suggests. En ostrakinois skeuesin — the adjective is from ostrakon, a potsherd. Not a well-made clay jar: the material of broken crockery, the stuff so worthless that people in the ancient world used the fragments as scrap paper for receipts and shopping lists and ballots. Paul is not saying the vessel is humble. He is saying it is rubbish, and the whole point of the sentence is the mismatch: hina hē hyperbolē tēs dynameōs ē tou Theou kai mē ex hēmōn, so that the excess of the power may be Theos's and not out of us.
Then four antitheses, and Paul builds each one out of a verb and its own intensified twin. Thlibomenoi all' ou stenochōroumenoi — squeezed, but not cornered; stenochōria is literally a narrow place, so the pun is spatial: pressed on all sides, and still not without room to move.
The second pair is the best joke Paul ever made with a prefix. Aporoumenoi all' ouk exaporoumenoi — at a loss, but not at a total loss. Aporeō is to have no way through, no poros, no ford; the second word is the same verb with ex- on the front, meaning utterly. He is admitting bewilderment and denying only its superlative. Any translation that makes this sound serene has lost the letter.
Then diōkomenoi all' ouk egkataleipomenoi — pursued but not left behind in it (the verb of Psalm 22, why have you forsaken me) — and kataballomenoi all' ouk apollymenoi, knocked down but not finished off, which is wrestling vocabulary.
And what is being carried is not a memory but a condition. Tēn nekrōsin tou Iēsou en tō sōmati peripherontes — carrying around in the body the nekrōsis of Jesus. Nekrōsis is a clinical word: the state of being deadened, what medicine still calls necrosis. Paul does not say he remembers the death; he says he is carrying the dying about with him, and the purpose clause says why: so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our body.
Then the distribution, stated without self-pity or heroism: ho thanatos en hēmin energeitai, hē de zōē en hymin — death is at work in us, and life in you. Energeitai is the word for something operating, being effective. Two processes running in two sets of people, and the apostle is on the receiving end of one of them.
And the ground of the speech is a psalm quotation: episteusa, dio elalēsa — I trusted, therefore I spoke — from the Greek of Psalm 116. What licenses Paul to keep talking is not confidence in his position but the same reflex the psalmist had.
Responsorial Psalm
Out with the bag, back with the sheaves
Where we are
Psalm 126 is a Song of Ascents, sung on the road up to Jerusalem. It has two halves and they do not match: the first is a memory of a restoration that felt like a dream, the second a petition asking for it again.
The selected verses
Psalm 126:1bc-2ab. "When Yahweh brought back the captives of Zion, we were like men dreaming. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with rejoicing."
Psalm 126:2cd-3. "Then they said among the nations, 'Yahweh has done great things for them.' Yahweh has done great things for us; we are glad indeed."
Psalm 126:4-5. "Restore our fortunes, Yahweh, like the torrents in the southern desert. Those that sow in tears shall reap rejoicing."
Psalm 126:6. "Although they go forth weeping, carrying the seed to be sown, they shall come back rejoicing, carrying their sheaves."
What to notice
The petition in verse 4 contains a piece of desert hydrology that most readers pass over. Shuvah Yahweh et-shevitenu ka-afiqim ba-negev — restore our fortunes like the channels in the Negev. An afiq is a wadi bed, and in the Negev those beds are bone-dry stone for most of the year. Then a storm falls somewhere over the hills and the channel runs bank-full within the hour, in country where nothing has been wet since spring. The prayer is not asking for a gradual improvement. It is asking for a flash flood in a dry riverbed — sudden, total, and out of all relation to local conditions.
And the last two verses hang on one repeated verb. Nasa — to carry, to lift. Halokh yelekh u-vakhoh nose meshekh ha-zara — he goes out, walking and weeping, carrying the trail of seed; and then bo yavo ve-rinnah, nose alummotav — he comes in, coming with a shout, carrying his sheaves. The carrying is the same in both halves. What changes is the direction, the sound, and what is in the arms. The psalm does not promise a lighter load; it promises a different cargo.
And the seed itself is being spent. Sowing in a bad year means putting into the ground the grain you could have eaten — which is why the going out is be-dim'ah, in tears. The weeping is not poetic melancholy. It is what it feels like to bury food.
Gospel · Matthew
The two seats
Where we are
Jesus has just given the third and most detailed prediction of the passion — handed over, condemned, mocked, flogged, crucified, and raised on the third day. The very next verse is this request. Matthew's placement is not accidental and is not kind.
What happens
The mother of the sons of Zebedee comes with them, does homage, and asks: "Command that these two sons of mine sit, one at your right and the other at your left, in your kingdom." Jesus answers, "You do not know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?" They say, "We can." He replies, "My cup you will indeed drink, but to sit at my right and at my left is not mine to give but is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father." The other ten are indignant. He calls them together: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you... whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."
What to notice
Matthew has moved the request into the mother's mouth. In Mark the two brothers ask for themselves. Matthew brings in hē mētēr tōn huiōn Zebedaiou — and then, having done so, undoes the protection immediately: ouk oidate ti aiteisthe, you (plural) do not know what you are asking. He answers past her, to them. The sons are not let off; they are simply given a spokesperson.
And the request itself is answered by the Gospel's own plot, in the most terrible way available. Heis ek dexiōn sou kai heis ex euōnymōn — one at your right and one at your left. Hold that phrase, and read Matthew 27:38: tote staurountai syn autō dyo lēstai, heis ek dexiōn kai heis ex euōnymōn — then two bandits were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left. Matthew uses the identical formula. The positions the brothers asked for are shown to the reader, occupied, seven chapters later. Nobody has to comment; the words do it.
The cup is not a metaphor for hardship in general. In the prophets it is a specific object: the cup of his wrath, which Isaiah 51 says Jerusalem has drained to the dregs, and which Jeremiah 25 has the nations made to drink. When Jesus asks whether they can drink his cup, he is using the vocabulary of judgement, and he will use it again in Gethsemane about the same object.
Their answer is one word: dynametha — we can. No hedging, no clarification. And the reply concedes it: to men potērion mou piesthe, my cup you will indeed drink. He does not tell them they are wrong about their capacity; he tells them they are wrong about what they have volunteered for. And on the feast of James the prediction has a date attached: Acts 12:2 records that Herod Agrippa I killed James the brother of John with the sword, around AD 44. He is the only one of the Twelve whose death is reported in the New Testament, and he was the first to go.
What Jesus declines is interesting. Not the seats' existence, not the brothers' capacity — but the authority to allocate: ouk estin emon touto dounai, this is not mine to give. The one refusal in the passage is a refusal of patronage, which is exactly what the mother had come to request.
And the correction that follows turns on two prefixes. Katakyriousin and katexousiazousin — the rulers of the nations lord it down over them, and the great ones exercise authority down upon them. Both verbs are ordinary words for ruling with kata-, down, welded on the front. Matthew does not say authority is bad. He says the Gentile version of it points downward.
Then: ouch houtōs estai en hymin — it will not be so among you. Not an imperative. A future indicative: a statement about how things are going to be, not an exhortation about how they ought to be. And the two terms offered instead escalate rather than soften: diakonos, the one who waits at table, and then doulos, slave — a legal status, not a disposition.
The last word is a price. Lytron anti pollōn — a ransom in exchange for many. Lytron is the manumission fee, the sum paid to free a slave, and anti means in the place of. The sentence that ends a dispute about seating arrangements is about buying somebody out of ownership — which is what the two brothers, asking to be seated on either side of a throne, had not thought to want.
| Reading |
What is carried, and what it costs |
| 2 Corinthians 4 |
Treasure in potsherds; the dying of Jesus carried about in a body |
| Psalm 126 |
Out with the seed-bag weeping, back with the sheaves — the same verb both ways |
| Matthew 20:20-28 |
Two seats requested; a cup granted, and a ransom named |
The Church gave James three readings about carrying something, and about the difference between the position you ask for and the load you are handed.
The request in the Gospel is not contemptible. It is made immediately after the third passion prediction, which means the brothers have heard handed over, mocked, flogged, crucified, and have concluded that a kingdom is coming and that it will have seating. They are not cynics; they are optimists with poor timing. And their dynametha — we can — is answered not with a correction but with a confirmation: you will drink it. Matthew then lets the Gospel supply the rest of the answer without a word of comment, by using the identical phrase seven chapters later for two men crucified on either side.
Paul, writing about the same vocation from inside it, describes what it is actually like to hold. The vessel is potsherd — the cheapest, most disposable ceramic in the ancient world — and the four antitheses are the most honest sentences in the New Testament about endurance: squeezed but not cornered; at a loss, but not at a total loss; hunted but not abandoned; floored but not finished. Nothing in that list denies the first term. Paul is not claiming to be untroubled; he is claiming, precisely and minimally, that none of it has gone all the way. And what he carries is nekrōsis, a dying, in the body, so that a life can become visible in it.
Psalm 126 supplies the shape of the whole thing in one image. The farmer goes out weeping because he is burying food he could have eaten, and comes back shouting with an armful of sheaves — and the verb for what he is doing is the same in both directions. Nose, carrying. He never puts anything down. The load changes and the direction changes and the noise changes; the carrying is constant.
Which is the correction the Gospel makes to the mother's request. She asked for a place to sit. What her sons were given was something to carry, and one of them carried it for about a dozen years before Herod's sword. The last line of the Gospel names the going rate: a ransom in exchange for many — the price of buying someone out of slavery, paid by the one who has just told his friends that greatness among them will look like being a slave.
A Question to Sit With
The brothers asked for the two best seats in a
kingdom, having just been told in detail how its
king was going to die, and the answer they
received was
yes to the cup, and the seats are not mine to give. One of them lived long enough to find out what that meant; the New
Testament gives him one verse —
he killed James the brother of John with the sword — and no last words. What have I been asking for a seat at, when the thing actually on offer was something to carry? And if the honest picture of my own vocation is a treasure in a piece of broken crockery — squeezed, bewildered, floored, and each time only
not quite finished — could I hear that as the argument Paul means it to be, rather than as evidence that I have got something wrong?