But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.” – Matthew 17:12

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 17, 2017): Matthew 17

“Beware the Ides of March.” William Shakespeare wrote the words in his play “Julius Caesar.” The message is spoken by a soothsayer to the great King of Rome. There is nothing special about the day. Ides is just another way of saying the 15^th. Thus, the Ides of March is March 15, just another day in a month that has thirty-one of them. But, in the case of Julius Caesar, the Ides of March was the day that death would come looking for him. The soothsayer’s words foreshadow the death by assassination of the King.

I am not sure that a soothsayer ever spoke those words, but I know that there were warnings that Julius Caesar may not have heeded. The surprise in the death of Julius Caesar was not that death came to Caesar, but that it came at the hands of Caesar’s friend, Marcus Junius Brutus, on March 15, 44 B.C.E. Ever since the writing of “Julius Caesar” by Shakespeare, the Ides of March has filled us with a sort of dread and the sure knowledge that death is looking for even us.

In fiction, foreshadowing is one way that the plot moves along. The words of the soothsayer early in Julius Caesar alerts the audience that something terrible is coming on the Ides of March. It is easy in fiction, and maybe primarily historical fiction, to foreshadow the events that have not yet happened and, therefore, to prepare the audience for the climax of the plot for which we are all waiting. Rarely do we see the same plot device used in historical events.

That is precisely what Jesus is doing here. The well-worn understanding was that the people of Israel were actually waiting for the arrival of two people. They want the Messiah to come and to restore Israel to all of her brilliance. But before the Messiah would come, the people believed that Elijah would arrive. So as the disciples begin to understand that Jesus was the Messiah, they also began to wonder about the coming of Elijah.

Jesus responded that Elijah had come, but the people had missed his coming. Instead of honoring Elijah, they had made him suffer, doing to him all of the evil that they had desired with the core of their beings. And as Jesus talked of Elijah, as he told the story of the second coming of the great prophet, the disciples began to understand that he was talking about John the Baptist. Some had been disciples of John, and they all knew that the Prophet from the wilderness had suffered much before Herod had stolen his life from him.

But Jesus took it one step farther. The way that the people had treated Elijah was foreshadowing of how they would treat the Messiah. Essentially, what Jesus is telling his disciples is very similar to the message that the Julius Caesar’s received from the soothsayer,  beware of the Ides of March. Something bad, and unexpected, was now coming their way.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Mark 9