Saturday in the Second Week of Advent, December 10, 2022

Matthew 17, 9; 10-13

As they were coming down from the mountain, the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” He said in reply, “Elijah will indeed come and restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him but did to him whatever they pleased. So also will the Son of Man suffer at their hands.” Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.

“Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?”  The Apostles Peter, James, and John ask this of the Lord Jesus as they make their way down the steep mountain of the Transfiguration.  They had just seen the Lord transfigured, that is, the glory of his divinity shone through his humanity the way the sun’s bright light shines through the leaves of a tree on a cloudless afternoon.  At that time they had also heard the voice of his heavenly Father called Jesus his “beloved Son”, to whom they were to listen.  The three Apostles now begin to understand that the longed-for Messiah will not lead Jerusalem to military victory over the Romans, but will in fact die.  They begin to see that the Messiah is also the suffering servant whom Isaiah the Prophet described.  The Lord Jesus had foretold this to them already, that he would suffer and die, but it had made no sense to them: his words did not live up with what the Pharisees had been teaching for centuries about the Messiah.  As their eyes begin to open they ask about something else the Pharisees had been teaching: “Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?”  Was this, then, also wrong?

No, it was not.  The last of the Prophets, Malachi, had promised, or, God had promised through him: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the Prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4, 5).  From this we can see that the Pharisees at least understood that “the day of the Lord” so often mentioned by the Prophets meant the coming of Christ — though they did not realize that this also meant a Second Coming that would result in the final judgment.  But according to the Pharisees, Elijah would come down from heaven much as he had gone up to heaven hundreds of years before, in fiery chariot.  They expected Elijah to perform miracles as he had before he was taken up and to “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers: lest I come, and strike the earth with a curse” (Malachi 4, 6).  He would do this by stirring up the people for revolution, they taught.  However, in this they failed to understand the meaning of Elijah’s work before he was taken up: he had spoken out fiercely against the idolatry into which the people had fallen at that time, culminating in his slaughter of a large number of the priests of Baal.  The one who came in the power and form of Elijah, John the Baptist, had done this through his preaching, treating the Pharisees as the new priests of Baal for their corruption of the Law of Moses by which they lead the people astray.  The Pharisees thus did not understand John to be Elijah, for that meant knowing themselves to be the new enemies of Israel.

“So also will the Son of Man suffer at their hands.”  Now the Lord’s teachings fall into place for them, now the mysterious and long set aside teachings of Isaiah on the suffering servant came into focus and made sense: the Lord Jesus, the Messiah, was this suffering servant on whom the sins of the world would be laid.