Easter Eggs Part I

If you've ever watched a director's commentary of a Pixar movie, they will point out to you the places where the filmmakers referenced other Pixar movies by sticking in objects in the backgrounds of scenes called "Easter Eggs." There are some fans who go through and play the movie in slow motion so that they can catch every one of these, even though the reward is nothing more than the satisfaction of collecting a relatively meaningless piece of trivia, because these allusions to other movies do nothing to further the plot of the one you are actually watching. A speaker named Rick James came to the Campus Crusade meeting at Cal the other day, and he illuminated for us some of the Easter Eggs hidden in the Gospels. Except these Easter Eggs, references either to the Old Testament or to a previous passage in the Gospel, are much more satisfying to discover, because, unlike the Pixar references, the claims the Gospel writers make through these allusions is the claim that is central to the entire Bible: Jesus is not just another man, but He is the Son of God.

I was so proud of myself this week reading Matthew, because I found one on my own! As soon as I heard Rick James's message, I started looking up words in my Bible's concordance at the back to see if I would be led to an Old Testament description of the Messiah. And one phrase that struck me as a potential Easter Egg was this description of Jesus right before he begins giving the Sermon on the Mount: "When Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain; and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him. He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying..." (Matthew 5:1-2). In this description, it is totally unnecessary to say that Jesus opened His mouth; if He says anything, of course his mouth would be open. That led me to believe that the phrase "opened His mouth" has some kind of other significance. I looked up the word "mouth" in the concordance, but I did not find anything helpful (my Bible's concordance is very incomplete). However, then my eyes glanced back only one chapter and I found the treasure. When Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness by telling him to turn stones into bread, Jesus replies, "Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God." (Matthew 4:4). Man lives on the words that come out of God's mouth. In chapter 5, by highlighting Jesus' mouth, Matthew is trying to say, "Look! Here are words coming out of God's mouth right now! Listen to them, because they are what will give you life."