The narrative part of Book III, chs. 11-12, is in three sections: 11: 1-24, 11:25-30, 12:1-50. The paragraphs in Section 1 may be headed:
1. Perplexity
John's Question
1-6 The Kingdom is gentleness and love
2. Priority
John's Status
7 -15 The Kingdom is 'out of this world'
3. Perversity
People Contrary
16-19 The Kingdom 'blows your mind'
4. Passivity
People Apathetic
20-24 The Kingdom 'sets you up' or 'brings you down'
From Perplexity we move on in this chapter to the Priority of the Kingdom.
Jesus says three surprising things.
1. John the Baptist was the greatest man who had ever lived till then
Would we have rated him above Abraham, David, Elijah, Isaiah or Jeremiah? Two things, in our Lord's estimation, made John so great: his character and his calling.
a. His character.
"What did you go out to see," Jesus asked the people; "a reed shaken by the wind?" A reed shaken by the wind is something that bends before every pressure. John was no weakling who could no more stand upright in the teeth of a gale than a reed can before the wind. He withstood the pressures on him like a great tree. He fronted the leaders of his day, the king (Herod) included, and nothing deterred or silenced him. He was a man of courage, with the courage of his convictions, not brow-beaten by any.
"What did you go out to see," asked Jesus again, "a man clothed in soft raiment?" A 'softie'? A fop? "Those who wear soft raiment are in King's houses." Courtiers, He meant - men who flatter kings to feather their own nests. John was no toady who bent his message to ease his own path. What God gave him to say he said, regardless of the consequences to himself.
Courage and faithfulness; those, according to Jesus, make for greatness in us.
b. His calling
His was a prophet's task; but it was more than just that. "This is he of whom it is written, 'Behold I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee'." He was the man whom God sent ahead of Him to announce His own arrival in the Person of His Son. The Biblical prophecies said that God would send Elijah to do that. Said Jesus, "God has kept His promise: John is he." * There had never been a greater task given to any child of man than that. John was chosen for it, and it made him great.
But then Jesus said the second surprising thing.
2. "Yet he who is least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he."
You or I may be greater than John! Not because we are more courageous or more faithful than he. We may be neither and still be greater than he simply because we inhabit a realm far higher than his - as angels, for the same reason, are greater than humans. It is the difference between being a big fish in a little pond and being a little fish in a big pond. The Kingdom pond is so much more prestigious a pond to swim in, that the littlest fish in it lives above the level even of a John the Baptist. God arrived on the scene in Jesus; eternity, with Him, invaded time; heaven came down to earth. To be in that heaven with Jesus is to be in a realm far above the life of time or this earth.
Do we rate the Kingdom and the place we have been given in it that highly? Do we see it to be so shining a reality that we marvel to be in it? Or has our sight grown dim?
3. Violence and the Kingdom.
Then Jesus said this puzzling thing about the Kingdom: "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force."
Did He mean that to get into the Kingdom we have to do violence to our natural inclinations? ... to our pride, for example, and our worldly ambitions? It is true of course that we do; we have to repent to get into the Kingdom, and repentance is death to our pride and worldly ambition.
Or did Jesus mean that His announcement of the Kingdom awakened hostility so that it suffers violence at men's hands? That too is true. The very next chapter will show how the arrival of Jesus the King provoked some men like Herod and the Pharisees to such a pitch of hatred that they began plotting to destroy Him (12:14). They had already laid rough hands on John. They wanted the Kingdom to be theirs, not His. They wanted the kind of supremacy a place in the Kingdom confers to be their own achievement, not God's gift; they wanted it to be in their power, not His.
Broadly speaking, those are the two ways open to us to understand what Jesus meant. Either He meant there must be a furious eagerness in us to get into the Kingdom, or there is a furious enmity in us that makes us attack it. It is a choice between eagerness or enmity.
I should like to believe that the first is right: "It has to be the most important thing in your life." But we must take full account of the fact that Jesus here referred to a definite and brief period of time: "from the days of John the Baptist till now." That was not long. Whatever Jesus meant, it has to apply in the first place, and in some obvious way, to that time, even if it applies by extension to other times as well. For another thing, it is not like Jesus to suggest that we have to muscle our way into the Kingdom; He said rather that we must enter it like a little child. The phrase He used, 'suffereth violence,' is the same He used in two other places: Matt. 12:29 where He spoke of the strong man who 'plunders' another's house, and Matt. 13:18 where He spoke of the evil one 'snatching away' the seed of the Word planted in the soil of men's hearts. The word has overtones of nastiness.
Most important of all, as always when we are faced with a difficulty of interpretation, we must compare Scripture with Scripture. Scripture is always its own best interpreter. Now it happens that Luke in his Gospel quotes this paragraph from Matthew almost word for word except for the words we are faced with here; and what Luke puts in their place is: "When they heard this, all the people and the tax collectors justified God, having been baptised with the baptism of John; but the Pharisees and the Lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves, not having been baptised by him." (Luke 7:29-30)
Luke, who wrote for a Gentile readership where Matthew wrote for a Jewish one, was inclined to change the language of Jesus on the principle of 'dynamic equivalence,' the way Wycliffe translators do today, so as to convey a better sense of His meaning. He has done it here, I am sure. The rejection of the King and His Kingdom is the point. There is in fact an old Talmudic tradition to the effect that Elijah when he came would separate out from Israel those who had been wrongfully received into it (the word they used is the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek biazetai, 'suffered violence' or 'been violated'), and receive into it those who had been wrongfully excluded from it. That fits with what Jesus went on at once to say about John being the fulfilment of the Elijah prophecy. For me, that settles it. I believe that Jesus meant: "The Kingdom of Heaven is violated and violent men snatch at it."
This understanding is further supported by the chiasmic structure of this narrative section, already noted. If that perception is right then the theme of the corresponding component (12:43-45) is that of alien occupation.
Jesus has just said that a place in the Kingdom is more to be desired than a place anywhere in this world: there will always be those who want to seize that greatness out of God's hands into their own. The Pharisees did. Jesus said here the same sort of thing He later said to the Pharisees to their faces: "Woe to you, Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for you neither enter it yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in." (Matt. 23:13) That urge - ourselves to control what is God's alone to control - is still a temptation. Whenever a religion claims to do for us by the hands of man what only Christ by the power of God can do, it falls under the condemnation of this verse. I cannot, for example, endorse a religion which claims to vest the power to forgive sins in the hands of its priests. And if those who followed Jim Jones had heeded this warning they would not have perished with him in Guiana.
Beware of men! Jesus said it. (10:17)
Verses 16-19 present something of a contrast to the paragraph we have just considered. That emphasised a particular response by particular men to the Gospel of the Kingdom; this emphasises the general response of men in general. What Jesus says in effect is that it does not matter how you present the Gospel of the Kingdom, there will be people who do not want to buy it.
"To what shall I compare this generation?" He asked.
By the word 'generation' I am sure He did not mean the literal generation of men and women then living. He meant something more like 'this breed.' Among the Hebrew people the phrase 'the son of' did not only imply physical generation; it often meant character likeness. To be 'a son of Belial' was to be, not literally begotten of the devil (like Rosemarie's baby in a notorious film), but a devilish sort of person; to be 'a son of Abraham' was to have a faith like his (certainly that is the meaning of the phrase as Jesus used it of Zacchæus. Luke 19:9). I believe it to be the same here: the phrase 'this generation' means, not the literal generation living between the years 25 and 50 AD, but that generation as being typical of the whole human breed. **
Our Lord's language here is plain enough. We all know how exasperating children can be when they are restless, so that nothing we suggest to them to do is any good. No, they do not want to play Cowboys and Indians; no, they do not want to play Superman, etc. In those days children played 'Weddings' or 'Funerals' where ours today play Cowboys and Indians, or Superman. Jesus had heard them in the market place just the way we hear them in the playground.
People are like that with Gospel preaching. It is never to their liking. It was not to their liking in our Lord's day. They complained equally when John refused to play 'Weddings' and when Jesus declined to play 'Funerals.' John was too gloomy and Jesus too breezy. When John was the preacher they wanted to 'pipe': they wanted preaching that was uplifting and cheerful: they wanted someone who would 'think positive'; but John insisted on talking about their sins and calling on them to fast and repent. He was too solemn. When Jesus was the preacher they wanted to 'mourn': they expected a solemn discussion of morals and religion from Him. But He went to parties and talked cheerfully about the excitement of discovering buried treasure. It was too emotional; they wanted something more proper.
The point Jesus is making is that the Gospel is dynamite; it always disturbs our complacency. There is a vitality in it that challenges us, and if we are not willing to meet the continuing challenge we shall grow 'dull of hearing.'
The Gospel will not fit in with our preconceived ideas or pander to our prejudices. It digs deeper than our shallow notions of evil as being always 'the work of the devil,' and our equally shallow notions of good as being merely 'the inspiration of the Spirit.' I remember trying to evangelise my boss, years ago when I was a young man at work in Brisbane. He listened politely a few times, and then one day he said a thing that defeated me for a long time, and set me asking a whole stack of questions: "You know what you make it sound like to me, Paul? There's God up in Heaven and the Devil down in Hell, and they've picked this world as the arena to have an almighty dust-up, and we're just the bunch of poor bunnies who cop the flak." Our understanding of the Gospel and the Christian life has to make better sense than that.
"John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He is demon-possessed.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'He is a frivolous fraud who makes common cause with the riffraff.'" John was too unsociable to be sane, and Jesus too sociable to be moral.
What is the answer? As Cassius said in Shakespeare's 'Julius Cæsar', "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." "Wisdom is justified of her children" was the way Jesus put it. If there is any wisdom in us we will have ears for whatever Jesus says and eyes for whatever He does.
All too often, however, when we do not respond with hostility the way the Pharisees did or with perversity the way the masses did, we respond with passivity as the cities of the lakeside did. And that is fatal.
It is an unalterable principle in the spiritual realm that if you do not move forward you go backward; if you do not go up you go down; if you do not reach out, your hand withers. Jesus once put it in a way that stabs us broad awake out of our complacency (13:12): "To him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." We want to protest, "That's not fair." Whether it is fair or unfair is not the point; it is the truth.
Since Jesus spoke these words over the little cities of Capernaum, Chorazin and Bethsaida (in sadness, not in pique) they have never been inhabited. I have visited them in Israel. So far as I know, there is no good reason why they should not be inhabited, especially today in modern, expanding Israel. But they are not.
That is solemnising. When we will not listen to Jesus, that is what happens to us. How much does He have to say to us more than He has already said - how much does He have to do more than He has already done - before we will repent and believe?
He says here that He has said and done enough.
* Jesus knew they would find that hard to
swallow ("If you can receive it" 11:14), because they ex-pected a
literal fulfilment of the prophecy. They expected Elijah himself, in
person, to come. "No," said Jesus; "it is enough that a man of
Elijah's strength of character and high calling should burst on the
scene as Elijah did." The clear implication of what He said is that
we should not expect every prophecy to have a literal fulfilment;
this one He understood metaphorically. (If He meant it literally, He
gave His endorsement to reincarnation.) He here gave His authority to
a metaphor-ical fulfilment of some prophecies. It needs men of
spiritual discernment, not dogmatists, to know the difference.
** That may equally solve a real problem later in Matthew's Gospel,
ch. 24:34, where Jesus said that "this generation should not pass
away until all these things [connected with the Second
Coming] take place." Critics pounce on that and say, "Jesus was
wrong. That generation has long since died and Jesus still hasn't
come." But it depends on what He meant by 'this generation'. Not
always, but quite often the Jews used it in the idiomatic sense I
have defined.
This material is copyright; it may not be quoted, published or reproduced without the author's permission, nor preached without acknowledgment!