Matthew 7:24-29
“Notice what you notice.” After the challenge of yesterday’s reading, today we have one that is a Fred and Carol favorite. It is a section of Scripture that we chose for the Gospel reading at our wedding – the house built on a firm foundation. We chose this reading because we wanted our marriage to be built on a firm foundation, Jesus. We had met in a Bible Study and grown in the Lord together for the 3+ years that we had known each other, so we knew each other and each other’s faith pretty well when we finally got married. We’re so pleased to recall our wedding every time we read these verses.
It can be easily overlooked that Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel talks about the rain, the floods and the wind, in essence referring to the three main structures in a house – the roof, the foundation, and the walls. When all three structures are well built, the house is more solid. Luke is the only other Gospel writer to refer to this metaphor and he only mentions the foundation, not the roof or walls. In this sense Matthew is more comprehensive. Rain and wind can ruin a house as much as floodwaters.
It’s also intriguing to me that in another life I was a concrete contractor, building poured-wall (not block) basements. Although we seldom dealt with rock in digging out to set these foundations, we did make sure that we followed local building codes for setting our foundations (mostly on clay). We were very exacting in our measurements – if the diagonals were more than one-half inch “out of square”, we would reset the walls. Another contractor was going to come in on top of our work to set the walls and the roof. If the foundation was “square”, building the rest of the house was much easier and the house would be much more well-built.
Finally, I noticed Matthew’s closing comment, that Jesus was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes (v. 29). We have seen this before, in Mark 1:22 and Luke 4:32. It’s nice to bring these little pieces together.
Slava Bohu!