But why insist that this supposed ‘secondary level of meaning’ is relevant when contextually everything points to a limitation of the meaning of the story to Jesus’ disciples? I’m quite happy to agree that God is compassionate towards the poor, that he sides with the poor, that he is angry towards those who exploit the poor, that he is intimately involved in the circumstances of the poor, and that he calls his ‘new creation’ people to identify themselves practically and prophetically with the poor. But why do we have to import this into a passage that is actually speaking of something quite different? What if Jesus did not actually want to say that he is identifiable in the quasi-mystical way that Frost and Hirsch suggest with the poor outside his people? Should we really put words (and theology) into his mouth? It seems to me that this whole ‘secondary meaning’ theory is just a sneaky way to attach a popular and often sentimentally constructed piece of theology to the biblical text.