July 2026
Matot / Massei
Brit Hadashah Reflections 38
Torah portion Numbers 30 : 2 – 36 : 13
Haftarah portion Jeremiah 2 : 4 – 28 and 3 : 4
Brit Hadashah John 17 : 1 - 26
Hebraic understanding of the Gospel of Yeshua
The Lord’s Prayer.
In Luke 11 we have an account of the disciples of Yeshua asking Him to teach them how to pray. What followed is the most memorised passage of Scripture in the whole Bible. It used to be compulsory learning in schools and churches in every Christian country. It is referred to as “The Lord’s Prayer”, but is in fact the prayer the Lord taught others to pray.
Our Scripture reading today contains the most intimate conversation of Yeshua with His Father. It is the prayer that He prayed in the hours before His crucifixion. “Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You.” How personal is that? Yeshua had been teaching His disciples about loving one another, staying close, supporting and caring for each other. In this opening greeting, so personal and so unifying, He clearly illustrates the love and ‘Oneness’ of His relationship with His Father. The relationship He desires that we too have with the Father, through Him.
“I have finished the work which You have given Me to do.” That speaks of a contentment that the task had been accomplished. It speaks of the willing and voluntary nature of the sacrificial death He was about to face. The Jews have been charged as “Christ killers” for centuries. But that charge cannot be supported in the light of the prayer we see in our passage today. God uses means to accomplish His purposes which often baffle us, and His purposes may be hindered, but are never thwarted, by man.
“For I have given to them the words which You have given Me; and they have received them … and they have believed that You sent Me”
John 1:1 tells us about ‘the beginning’. Yeshua was in ‘the beginning’. The Hebrew Scriptures record “the words” given from ‘the beginning’. At the time of this prayer there were NO other words of Scripture were there? Everything written in the Apostolic Scriptures came later, many years later. So Yeshua is confirming to His Father in heaven, that He has faithfully taught those whom the Father had given Him, the words from ‘the beginning’. (It is worth noting that Yeshua said on two occasions, recorded in Matthew 10 and 15 that His mission on earth was ‘to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’) So what I see here is that Yeshua is confirming to His Father that He had brought the pure truth of Torah, by His sinless life on earth, and His teaching, in place of the burdensome yoke of Pharasaic Judaism (the traditions of men He called them) which had blinded the people (causing them to become lost) to the truth of God’s incredible love for the people He has chosen as His special treasure! Salvation is not by works of conformity, but by the merciful grace of Almighty God in sending His only Son, as the teacher, which culminated in His selfless death on a Roman cross, to redeem sinful men.
“I pray for them. I do not pray for the world, but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours”. Then later, “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who WILL believe in Me through their word”. Isn’t that about the most amazing thing you could imagine? Before Yeshua was crucified on that Roman cross, He prayed for YOU and ME. He has brought our names before the Creator of the Universe, every last one of us who are believers in Him! But what was it that He prayed? That we ALL, believers in Him, should be ONE, so that “the world may believe that You sent Me.”
Dear friends, what a challenge that should be to us today. Through our unity in Yeshua, the world would recognize Him as the Son of God. When the Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 324 C.E. it had a goal of officially cutting off the gentile believers in Yeshua from their Hebrew roots. Or at least from Judaism, where those roots lie. The result has been a fragmentation of purpose and unity within the “church”. Firstly through errant teaching within the Roman Catholic Church, then subsequent to the days of Martin Luther in 1517, a proliferation of gentile denominational allegiances which are probably more divisive than unifying.
The prayer of Yeshua, the Lord’s Prayer, was that we be ONE, as He and the Father are One. It behoves us all to get on our knees in prayer, asking Almighty God to forgive us for our waywardness. To show us again the way of unity in Him. To discover again “the words” which Yeshua came to illuminate from ‘the beginning’. And to order our lives in accord with His commandments, which have never changed!
Shabbat Shalom
RS