Thursday 14 June

1 Kings 18: 41-46. Psalm 65, Matthew 5: 20-26

Important words

Jesus is giving teachings about loving kindness, and yet his statements seem unusually harsh. Why? To understand this, we need to know something about the Aramaic way of giving emphasis to a message. Exaggeration has a specific function. The greater the exaggeration, the more important the statement. So when Jesus puts anger with a brother or sister in the same category as murder, he is asking us to take this seriously. So many of his teachings are about the damage caused by judgemental attitudes.