The fourth passage of the Sefer Yeshua is based on Lk 11:27-28 and Th 79:1-3.
4. 1An excited voice called out, and a woman from the crowd said to Yeshua`, ‘How fortunate the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you!’
2But he said to her, ‘Rather, fortunate are those who hear the Message of God, and take care to carry it out! 3Because the terrible day will come when you’ll cry out, “How fortunate the womb that never conceived, and the breasts that never gave milk!”
When you compare the version of this passage in Luke with the version in Thomas, we can see that the Thomas version is more complete. The Luke version ends at verse 2, but the Thomas version also has verse 3.
This passage is an appropriate follow-on from the previous passage, in which Yeshua spoke about those who were fortunate or blessed.
Yeshua gave people hope for the future (as shown previously in the Beatitudes), but we would be negligent if we were then to ignore the counterbalance to that – his sayings about a coming tribulation. The urgency behind his message of repentance was precisely because God had revealed to him, as a prophet of God, that a tribulation was soon to come. His good news was that people would survive this time of trial, if they turned back to God’s ways.
Those commentators who do not believe that prophecy is real, dismiss sayings such as these, because such sayings assume a time of great trial in the future. Scholars such as Bart Ehrman hold the opinion that anything which foretells a coming time of trial, must be inauthentic (i.e. something that would not have been said by Yeshua), and must have been written well after the fact, simply because it is not scientifically possible to know the future. However, if you dismiss sayings such as these, you will fail to understand the great urgency behind Yeshua’s ministry: he did what he did, and said what he said, because he was intimately aware of the terrible things that were soon to befall the Jewish people – God had shown him these things as a prophet.
The woman’s cry of praise to Yeshua
The presence of a woman in the crowd should not be seen as anything unusual; there is nothing in ancient Jewish culture which prevents men and women being present together in a random crowd of people. However, given the nature of what the woman says, it is more acceptable coming from the mouth of a woman.
The vast majority of people who claim to be Yeshua’s followers, have raised him up and put him on a towering pedestal. However, there are several sayings which suggest that this is not a position that he himself wanted to have, this being one of them (another would be, ‘Why do you call my words good? There is One alone whose words are good – God’s”, SY 171:2, a Jewish reconstruction of what underlies Mk 10:18).
As Yeshua travelled the villages of the Galilee, his reputation would have preceded him. There would have been people ready and eager to hear him speak. They already had high expectations of him, and in their minds, he was the greatest man who ever lived. Some people even thought, as this woman did, that anyone connected to him must also be held blessed. His mother, who bore and nursed him, was a fortunate mother, because she gave birth to someone such as Yeshua. However, Yeshua’s reply tells us otherwise. His reply begins with menoun (‘but rather’) in the Greek text, possibly translating an underlying elā (rather, however) in Jewish Aramaic.
Carrying out the Message of God
Many English-language translations translate the Greek word logos in the Lucan text as ‘word’. The original Jewish Aramaic would have been pitgamā (because this is how it is rendered in Jewish Aramaic targums of the prophetic phrase, ‘The Word of YHVH came to xx’. In turn, in Jewish Aramaic translations of the biblical prophets, pitgamā translates the Hebrew word davar.
In the context of what a prophet speaks, ‘word’ does not mean the spoken or written word, or even the individual words the prophet speaks. Rather, it refers to the entire content of what a prophet speaks, and therefore a more exact translation of logos, pitgamā and davar would be, ‘message’.
As a prophet, Yeshua had been given an urgent message by God, to deliver to the people of the Galilee and Judea. The woman in the crowd believed that anyone who was connected with Yeshua were the most fortunate people on earth, but in Yeshua’s view, the most fortunate and luckiest people would be those who heard the Message of God which Yeshua had been given to deliver, and actually carried it out – that is, that they act on the Message and change the course of their lives as a result. Those who pay heed to God’s Message were the fortunate and lucky ones. In the verse that is missing from Luke, but is provided by Thomas, we get to find out why these people are fortunate – why paying heed to God’s Message justifies them being called ‘fortunate’ or ‘blessed’.
The fate of those who ignore Yeshua’s message
When disaster strikes, being childless means that there is one less matter to worry about as you flee. In Mk 13:17, Yeshua says of the time of tribulation, “Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!” Those who are pregnant will be slowed down as they flee the destruction, as will those who are carrying small children. In our current saying, Yeshua expresses very much the same sentiment – that the fortunate ones, the ones who will be able to escape, will be women who have never borne or nursed children.
There is a double cultural inference in this, in addition to Yeshua’s words being a direct counter to what the woman had said to him. In ancient times, a barren woman – a woman who couldn’t have children due to infertility – was considered by most people to be unfortunate. However, this will be turned around in the tribulation, because the barren woman will be fortunate for having no children to worry about.
The remedy
The best outcome to Yeshua’s ministry would have been for everyone to pay heed to his message of repentance, so that the tribulation would never come. However, it may have been that even Yeshua realised that the political and religious situation in the Holy Land had gone beyond the point of no return. I personally feel that therefore, Yeshua concentrated on saving the lives of as many people as possible, by ensuring that their repentance and return to God’s ways would mean that they would be spared the worst ravages of the coming war.
In Christian parlance, ‘saved’ means being saved from sin, but if you look at the plain circumstances of what Yeshua was doing, he was literally trying to save people’s lives from the impending war. If people turned away from seeking the messianic kingdom – the kingdom that the Zealots were fighting for – and instead, sought the Kingdom of God, then the very fact that they were not turning to the sword and the dagger would protect them from the coming wrath of the Romans. By returning to living God’s ways, they would be saved from the Roman war-machine.
Pastoral application
The core message of this saying is that, “fortunate are those who hear the Message of God, and take care to carry it out”. Because of the tribulation to come, the fortunate ones would not be those who merely praised Yeshua, or even those who had some kind of connection to him, but rather those who took care to pay heed to God’s Message – to repent and return to God’s ways. And in a society that claims to follow YHVH, God’s call to repentance applies to everyone, including the rich and powerful.
When we embrace YHVH’s values, ideals, ethics and principles, our lives and our societies function as they are meant to. We have stability, security and peace, and so anything unfortunate that does happen is not our fault, and will pass in time.
However, when we turn our backs on God’s ideals and values, and instead embrace division, selfishness, greed, hatred and ruthlessness, then we invite destruction, and make instability the volatile sand on which our unsteady foundations have to sit in. If we are willing to trample over others, throw people to the wayside and turn a blind eye to suffering, then we have only ourselves to blame when our society descends into chaos.
Those who think that Yeshua’s teaching was to concentrate only on our immediate needs, and just sit back and let society crumble around us, because what’s going on around us is not our concern – or that his focus was purely on protecting only those who believed in him, thus enabling only his own followers to survive, are grossly misrepresenting his words. Ultimately this is a profoundly selfish and uncaring way of approaching society’s problems.
You don’t protect or even save people by doing nothing, and thus allow the society in which you live to fall apart – those are not principles that the Torah or the Prophets are founded on. Seeing Yeshua’s teaching this way, is to ignore everything in the Jewish spiritual culture that he was born into; the rich and powerful are not exempt from calls to repentance, or from God’s ethical demands. The very fact that Yeshua called all his fellow Jews to repentance, regardless of the denomination they belonged to, meant that he was invested in helping all his people to survive what was soon to befall them all.
When we are content to see more and more people having to struggle to live, we invite social unrest, whether that is our intention or not. Those who oppress and exploit others, and cause the break-up of society, are not exempt from the ethical demands of Torah. The law of the jungle (‘kill or be killed, prey on others or get eaten’) does not work if we want a successful, peaceful and prosperous society. There are good reasons why YHVH encourages us to have care and concern even for the least of society, because then such people will be thoroughly invested in seeing that society prosper, instead of wishing it to fall – or worse still – actively seeking its downfall.