Not all the Scribes in Jesus’ time were His opponents. Jesus made disciples to function as Scribes, preserving and explaining His teaching. He has been making Scribes for a long time. He makes them still.

The difference between the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46) is not the sheep were virtuous, and the goats were villains, but that the sheep paid attention to where Jesus was, and the goats didn’t. The difference between the wise and foolish maidens was not that the foolish maidens didn’t know about the bridegroom, but that they came prepared only for the short game, not the long game.

The Pharisees were awfully close to faith in Jesus. It was just one more step from where they were to where Jesus was. Even famous teachers like Gamaliel recognized how close they were – he later advised the Sanhedrin that opposing the Christians could be opposing God.

There is no verse in Matthew that shows Jesus actually teaching a crowd. All of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew was done in smaller venues, with small groups. The same was true for St. Paul. There are no texts showing Paul teaching crowds either. He preferred smaller, more intimate settings for his teaching, too.

The trick, very often, is just to get started. Jesus and Holy Scripture have provided the words, and praying them, we find our own. And finding our own, we discover, by one of the joyous paradoxes of Providence, that they were His all along, and so we are His, and our whole lives becoming prayers.

Let the weeds and wheat grow up together is the counsel of poverty and hunger. It is terrible advice. So, the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat can be read as Jesus advice to the faithful – learn to discern the difference between temptation and the divine Word.

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But the reality is that there are not enough priests to do the explaining that needs to be done, and even if there were enough, priests don’t have access to all the places where the explaining needs to happen. It isn’t just in Sunday School, but even more importantly at dinner tables, schools, and workplaces – all the places where people don’t understand what Jesus has said, or think they understand, but are dead wrong.

But if a disciple like Mary Magdalene, who was deeply tormented by a squadron of demons and was healed of that, who was a witness to the most important event in the Bible at a time when the testimony of women was routinely ignored, if even she is mentioned twelve times by name in the New Testament and was obviously a leader of significance in the earliest Church, then who is it safe to ignore?

The sign of Jonah proclaimed by Jesus was saying to the Scribes and Pharisees, shouting to them as it shouts to the Church: “There are lost people out there whom you’re supposed to go see. God made them all, God loves them all, just the same as He loves you. So go!

We may be witnessing the emergence of a new set of God Fearers in our time, people driven to reconsider religion because of the moral absurdity that has taken over large parts of the West.

Jesus probably felt that the Scribes and Pharisees would have been the first on His side. They were already so close, so very close. His harsh words for them may have been an expression of frustration, like He was saying to them, “Come ON! One more step! Can’t you take just one more step?! Something greater than the temple, greater than the Sabbath, is here now!”

Burdens become lighter in one of two ways – either you reduce the size of the burden, or you increase the strength of the person carrying it.

There are those who believe that Jesus never claimed to be God. While it is true that Jesus never in the gospels used the formula, “I am God,” there are dozens of other texts that establish Jesus’ claims to divinity.

The Christian culture of medieval Europe created the university system, which in turn gave rise to modern science and modern medicine, which in turn, by our time, has given rise to astonishing acts of healing every day in far greater numbers than Chorazin, Bethsaida or Capernaum ever saw. You could say that in hospitals all over the world millions of mighty acts of God are hiding in plain sight.

Having heaven as our aim means submitting everything to it now. It means digging deep into scripture daily to learn more about God’s presence, power and will. It means the steady labor of turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand, which is what the Bible means by “pray without ceasing”.

Jesus had no patience with rules that interfered with divine mercy, nor with preferring the maintenance of feuds to reconciliation. The nature of divine mercy is so radical, however, that your neighbor is precisely the person who is in need of mercy, even if that person is your sworn enemy.

We were never meant to keep the words and insights of the Bible to ourselves. In fact, Jesus said that keeping those insights to ourselves amounts to denying Him, and denying Him is a ticket to hell.

If we want to be the kind of people who are prepared to create the next institutions that will lift, advance, and bless the culture we need to do what St. Benedict did, and cultivate an orderly life that makes time daily not just for work, but also for study and prayer, who have a rational relationship with information technology, who find in the Bible an answer for the dull ennui and psychic despair that is the daily bread of so many young people.