skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Matthew 19:20-22 (cf. 16-22)
The young man said to him, “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect [‘If you want to complete the set’], go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)There is something ironic about the way [Jesus] says it here: “If you want to complete the set . . . .” It’s a way of saying, “God wants his people to be complete, totally dedicated to his service, not half-and-half people, with one foot in the kingdom and the other in the world.” . . . All right, says Jesus, this is the one that will complete your collection: give everything away! In order to be complete, you must be empty. In order to have everything, you must have nothing. In order to be fully signed up to God’s service, you must be signed off from everything else (50).
A. Orendorff
Jesus goes right for the heart, right for the idol this rich, young ruler has allowed himself to become captivated by. In answer to his questions, Jesus responds: “Despite your scrupulous obedience, there is one thing you lack, one thing that is keeping you from being complete, from being perfect, from being fit for the kingdom. And that one thing is what you love the most: your wealth. What you need isn’t addition; it’s subtraction. You don’t need to add one more work, one more ‘good deed,’ to ‘inherit eternal life’ (v. 16). What you need, quite simply, is to lose.”
Matthew 19:10-12The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)The rampant individualism of the last few hundred years in the West has left families, and children, in bad shape, as people act on the belief that they have, as individuals, a “right to happiness” which overrides all considerations of loyalty, keeping vows, and the duty to bring up lovingly the children one has brought into the world.
Nobody—certainly not Jesus—ever said that following him and finding God’s kingdom-way in these matters would be easy. But nobody should imagine that it’s just an optional extra. As Jesus comes closer to Jerusalem, and to his own astonishing act of self-denial and self-sacrifice, we should take note that the call to follow him extends to the most personal and intimate details of our lives (47).
A. Orendorff
In light of what Jesus has said just a few verses earlier about chopping off your hands and gouging out your eyes, it is tempting to paraphrase Matthew 19:20, “If getting married causes you to sin, cut off your you-know-what.” Jesus’ point, of course, is that we must allow nothing to trump our kingdom loyalty. He is not denigrating marriage; if anything he is elevating it. The fidelity demanded by marriage is the closest thing to kingdom-fidelity this world has to offer. This means, however, that just as we must be willing to lose our hands and eyes if they become sources for sin, so too Jesus’ radical demand to “take up your cross” extends to the intimate space create by marriage itself.
Matthew 19:3-6And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)The renewal of life [Jesus] offers, in the sphere of marriage as everywhere else, will come through the willing, intelligent obedience of wholehearted women and man who think out what it means to be loyal to God and to other people, especially to their marriage partner, and who take steps to put it into practice (43).
No wonder it’s a hard, costly and wonderful to work at a marriage and truly to become “one flesh.” Jesus’ whole aim was to bring about that renewal of the world in which the intention of the creator God would at last be fulfilled. No wonder he didn’t want us to settle for anything less than the best (44).
A. Orendorff
As usual, Jesus’ response to the religious leaders exposes the shallowness of their thinking. A question about divorce becomes a lesson in creation. Jesus begins by redirecting their approach. “You’re asking the wrong question,” he seems to say, “You want to talk about escape clauses, loop holes and legal technicalities when really what you should be attending to is the reason God made us in the first place.” In the beginning (the very beginning), marriage was written into the fabric of creation as an expression of what it means to be made in the image of God. In marriage, plurality flowers into oneness not so as to denigrate the plurality but rather to complete it. Jesus’ work of restoration therefore does not transcend marriage but enfolds it into the pattern of redemption itself. This doesn’t mean easy sailing. What it means is that marriage—in the kingdom—becomes another signpost of where the gospel is taking creation itself: resurrection by way of the cross.
Matthew 18:21-22, 27 & 33-35 (cf. 21-35)
Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven. . . . And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. . . . Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)The key thing is that one should never, ever give up making forgiveness and reconciliation one’s goal. If confrontation has to happen, as it often does, it must always be with forgiveness in mind, never revenge.
Why does Jesus solemnly say, in the last verse, that those who refuse to forgive will themselves be refused forgiveness? Isn’t that, to put it bluntly, so harsh as to be out of keeping with the rest of the gospel? Can’t God override our failing at exactly that point?
Apparently not. At least, I don’t know about “can’t,” but it seems he won’t. The New Testament speaks with one voice on this subject (39).
Matthew 18:15If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)Many of us prefer to pretend there isn’t a problem. We can refuse to face the facts, swallow our anger or resentment, paper over the cracks, and carry on as it everything is normal while seething with rage inside. Or we can simply avoid and ignore the other person or group, and pretend they don’t exist (34).
Many Christians have taken the paper-over-the-cracks option, believing that this is what “forgiveness” means—pretending that everything is all right, that the other person hasn’t really done anything wrong. That simply won’t do. If someone else—another Christians in particular!—has been offensive, aggressive, bullying, dishonest, or immoral, nothing whatever is gained by trying to create “reconciliation” without confronting the real evil that’s been done. Forgiveness doesn’t mean saying “it didn’t really happen” or “it didn’t really matter.” . . . Forgiveness is when it did happen, and it did matter, and you’re going to deal with it and end up loving and accepting one another again anyway (35).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of DiscipleshipMy brother's burden which I must bear is not only his outward lot . . . but quite literally his sin. And the only way to bear that sin is by forgiving it in the power of the cross in which I now share. Thus the call to Christ always means a call to share the work of forgiving men their sins. Forgiveness is the Christlike suffering which is the Christian's duty to bear (90).
A. Orendorff
All sin (i.e., wrongdoing) creates a debt. This can be seen easily in sins of a financial or physical nature, but it is just as true in relational sins as well. Forgiveness, therefore, means absorbing the debt created by another person’s wrongs, whatever the nature of those wrongs might have been. Justice means taking payments on that debt; forgiveness mean making the payments ourselves.
Matthew 18:8-10And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)So who are these “little ones”? They include weak, vulnerable children, of course, as we were thinking in the previous passage. But they also include those who are weak and vulnerable at other times of life, too: the cripples, the chronically sick, the elderly and infirm, refugees, women (in many cultures), any who find themselves on the human scrap-heap that our world throws people on to when it can’t think what else to do with them (31).
Anyone who has ever tried to break a bad moral habit will know that it sometimes feels like cutting off a hand or foot. Anyone who tries to stop a bad attitude towards others will know that it’s almost as hard as plucking out an eye. And the habits and attitudes that Jesus has in his sights in this passage are as had as any. Cutting off the “hand” that refuses to give to the poor; cutting off the “foot” that refuses to walk to the soup kitchen to help out; and, in particular, plucking out the “eye” that refuses to notice the weak, the vulnerable, the helpless all around us, in our cities, on our streets, in our wider world: all these pose a challenge every bit as severe as the day Jesus first issued it (32-2).
A. Orendorff
Like most people, I’ve always read vv. 8-9 extracted from the context of chapter eighteen, in particular from what Jesus says about the “little ones” and their “angles.” Vv. 8-9 have essentially served as a “take sin seriously” passage. In other words, this is how severe our war with sin needs to be: get ready to amputate, get ready to gouge. Such a reading works especially well with sins of a sexual nature (being that it’s our hands, feet and especially our eyes that most often get us in trouble).
Reflecting on the context, however, these verses seem to point in a slightly different direction. Still taking them as a warning against to consequences of sinful habits, the stress is not upon the damage our sinful members do to us but the damage they do to others—especially those, as Wright says, “who find themselves on the human scrap-heap that our world throws people on to when it can’t think what else to do with them.” The real horror of sexual sin, something like pornography for example, isn’t so much the pain it causes us or even those who love us, but the pain it inflicts upon the “little ones” it involves—the vulnerable, the helpless, the exploited, the powerless, the used. Compassion then, humanizing compassion, and not self-centered, personal interest, leads us to consider stumps a far better alternative to such dehumanizing violence.
Matthew 18:3-4“I’m telling you the truth,” he said, “Unless you turn inside out and become like children, you will never, ever, get into the kingdom of heaven. So if any of you make yourselves humble like this child, you will be great in the kingdom of heaven.”
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)[T]he weakest, most vulnerable, least significant human being you can think of is the clearest possible signpost to what the kingdom of God will be like. . . . [H]umility is what counts in god’s kingdom, because pride and arrogance are the things which, more than anything else in God’s world, distort and ultimately destroy human lives—their own, and those of people they affect (27-8).
Matthew 17:24-27When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax went up to Peter and said, “Does your teacher not pay the tax?” He said, “Yes.” And when he came into the house, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tax? From their sons or from others?” And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.”
Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)[T]he tone of the whole story implies that for Jesus this was a way of making light of the whole system, maybe even making fun of it. “Oh, they want Temple money, do they? Well, why don’t you go fishing . . . I’m sure you’ll find something good enough for them.” It was a way of not saying, on the one hand, “Oh, yes, of course, we’ll certainly pay—here, take a coin from my purse!”, or, on the other hand, “No, certainly not, the whole system is corrupt—go and give him a punch in the nose!” It was a way of biding time.
The point of the story, then, isn’t that Jesus had the power to make a coin appear in the mouth of a fish—though that is certainly implied. Nor is it that Jesus is simply a good citizen, finding ways of paying the necessary taxes. The point is that he was a master strategist. He was himself, as he told his disciples to be, as wise as a serpent while remaining as innocent as a dove (10.16). There is perhaps a model there for all his followers as they pray and wait and plan how to confront the powers of this world with the subversive message of the kingdom of God (25-6).
A. Orendorff
Two opposing principles seem to be at work in this odd and perplexing story. First, there is justice—“Then the sons are free” Jesus tells Peter, implying that the temple tax is unjust. Second, there is prudence—“However, not to give offense.” As with so much in Scripture, it is by keeping these two principles—justice and prudence—in their proper tension that the way of wisdom emerges. Jesus will, of course, eventually go full-tilt the way of justice when he descends upon the Temple in Jerusalem with a whip in his hand and fire on his tongue. But for now, as Wright points out, it is time to “pray and wait and plan.” Much pointless (and bloody) conflict would be avoided if we, like Jesus, sough to be both serpents and doves.
Posts
