The story of the calling of the first disciples is so well known that we don't always see how remarkable it is. Jesus is walking along the lake shore and sees Peter and Andrew fishing; 'Come with me,' he says, 'and I will teach yo...

The Sermon on the Mount covers Matthew 5–7. It's the longest block of teaching in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), and contains some of Jesus' most challenging teaching – and his most comforting.

In the first part of Matthew 6, Jesus tells his hearers that they shouldn't make a show of their religious duties in public, but keep them between themselves and God.

For those of us who grew up going to Sunday school, it’s hard to read these verses without thinking of the teaching song, ‘The wise man built his house upon the rock’. It’s catchy – but it misses the point, which is that while both the men ...

Matthew 8 contains a series of miracles and encounters with Jesus, each of which illustrates something of his power and his character. This little story is multi-layered. In demonstrating his power over the tempest, it refers back to Old Testament im...

While Jesus’ calling of his first fisherman disciples looks almost random, his calling of Matthew is quite deliberate – but again, it’s not because he was particularly qualified. He is a tax collector, or employed by one. As such, he’s aligne...

Matthew 10 contains Jesus’ operational instructions for his disciples in their mission to their fellow-Jews. Their message is to be that ‘The Kingdom of heaven is near!’ (verse 7).

There’s something quite wistful or plaintive about John the Baptist’s message to Jesus. He is in gaol, having offended the powerful Herod Antipas. John the Baptist is an authoritative, charismatic figure, like Elijah, but Elijah, plunging into de...

There are indications in the Gospels that Jesus’ family were worried about and even hostile towards his ministry. Perhaps they have come to him on this occasion to try to talk him out of his mission. His words about family are quite startling even ...

This is another parable about the Kingdom of Heaven. The world is a very mixed bag: there’s good and evil, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Good people don’t get what they deserve, and neither do bad people – it all sometimes seems a bit random.

Everyone knows about the five loaves and two fish that miraculously became enough to feed a whole crowd. With slight variations, the story appears in all four Gospels. Like many others, it has Old Testament roots: Elisha does the same sort of thing i...

The Pharisees were devoted to serving God through keeping his law. We should be careful about saying they believed they could ‘earn their way to heaven’ – it wasn’t really like that – but keeping the rules could become a mark of someone’s...

Until now in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has been doing well against the opposition he faced. Now, the forces of darkness are beginning to gather against him, and he starts to prepare his disciples for what lies ahead. They don’t like it; they have s...

After having spent some time with Jesus, the disciples must have thought they had a pretty good idea of what he was about, until at the drop of a hat he began to talk about suffering and dying. Peter voiced what everyone else was thinking: the Messia...

Matthew 18 contains some hard Jesus sayings: on pride, temptation and the wages of sin. And yet, read these passages closely and there’s always an underlying vision of deliverance.

In today’s passage Matthew places a brief, seemingly innocuous, scene between the weighty topics of marriage and money. The peaceful image of Jesus’ hands resting on the heads of children seems strangely out of place. Yet, all three passages hang...

Three successive passages in Matthew 20, expose the human desire to be important and respected. Hard-working people moan about the boss’s favouritism towards part-timers. Angry young men’s daydreams of booting out the Roman overlords unravel as t...

The Old Testament prophet Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Messiah would arrive, not on a warhorse but a donkey. The people who cheered for Jesus as he entered Jerusalem had spent their entire lives under Roman rule. They couldn’t wait for th...

Two medieval monks agreed that whoever died and went to heaven first would tell the other if it was how they’d imagined it, by uttering one word: either ‘taliter’ (it’s as we thought) or ‘aliter’ (it’s different from what we thought). A...

In Jesus’ day, different groups of people responded to Roman occupation in different ways. The upper class clergy, the Sadducees, sought appeasement and the Essenes withdrew into monastic life, whereas the Zealots plotted political revolt.