The Gospel of Matthew 19:16-26

At that time, a young man came up to Jesus, kneeling and saying, “Good Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you call me good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which?” And Jesus said, “You shall not kill, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to him, “All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, 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.

And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

This story is one of the best-known and best-loved stories in the Gospels. One of the most interesting things about it is the way in which most is us unite different details from various gospels to complete the picture. It is usually called the story of the “Rich Young Ruler,” but that is not necessarily the case. All of the gospels tell that the man was rich, for their in is the point of the story. But only in the gospel of Matthew, that we read today, says he was young (Matthew 18:18). It is interesting to see how a composite picture has been created with elements taken from all three gospels (Matthew 19:16-22); Mark 10:17-22; Luke 18:18-23).

There is another interesting point about this story, Matthew alters the question put to Jesus by the man. Both Mark and Luke say that the issues were, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19). Matthew says the question was, “Why do you call me good? One there is who is good” (Matthew 19:17). Matthew’s is the latest of the three synoptic gospels and his reverence for Jesus is such that he cannot bear to show Jesus asking the question, “Why do you call me good?” That almost sounds to him as if Jesus was refusing to be called good, so he alters the intro to the question, “Why do you ask me about wat is good?” in order to avoid the seeming irreverence.

The story touches on the deepest of all lessons for it has within in the whole basis of the difference between the right and the wrong idea of what religion is.

The man who came to Jesus was seeking for what he called eternal life. He was seeking for happiness for satisfaction, for peace with God. But his very way of phrasing his questions betrays him. He asks, “What must I do?” He is thinking in terms of actions. He is like the Pharisees; thinking in terms of keeping rules and regulations. He is thinking of piling up a credit balance-sheet with God by keeping the works of the law. He apparently knows nothing of a religion of grace. So Jesus tries to lead him on to a correct view.

Jesus answers him in his terms. He tells him to keep the commandments. The young man asks what kind of commandments Jesus means. Jesus then cites five of the Ten Commandments. Now there are two important things about the commandments that Jesus chooses to cite.

First, they are all commandments from the second half of the Decalogue, the half that deals, not with our duty to God, but with our responsibility toward others. They are the commandments that govern our personal relationships, and our attitude to others.

Second, Jesus cites one of the commandments out of order. He quotes the command to honor parents last when it should have come first. It is clear that Jesus wishes to lay particular stress on that one commandment. Why?  We have to speculate on this one. Maybe the young man had grown rich and successful in his career and then forgotten his parents, who may have been very poor. He may well have risen in the world, and have been ashamed of the folks in the old home; and then he may have justified himself perfectly legally by the law that Jesus has so unsparingly condemned (Matthew 15:1-6; Mark 7:9-13).What these passages show is that the young man could have done all of that, and still have legally claimed to have obeyed the commandments. In the very commandments that he cites Jesus is asking this young man, and us, what his attitude is to his fellow man and his parent, asking him what his personal relationships were like.

The young man’s answer is that he has kept the commandments; and yet there was still something that he knew he ought to have and which he had not got. So Jesus told him to sell all that he had and give it to the poor and follow him.

The young man claimed to have kept the law. In the legal sense, this may be true; but in the spiritual sense it was not true because his attitude toward others was wrong. In the last analysis, his attitude was utterly selfish. That is why Jesus confronted him with the challenge to sell all that he had and to give to the poor. His possessions are so shackled this man that nothing less than surgical excision of them would suffice. If a person looks on their possessions as given to them for nothing but their comfort and convenience, they are a chain that must be broken; if he looks on his possessions as a means for helping others, they are his crown.

The great truth of this story lies in the way it illumines the meaning of eternal life. Eternal life is life such as God himself lives. The word used for eternal does not mean lasting forever; it means as befits God, or such as belongs to God, or such as is characteristic of God. The great characteristic of God is that he so loved, and he gave. Therefore, the essence of eternal life is not a carefully calculated keeping of the commandments and the rules and regulations; eternal life is based on an attitude of loving and sacrificial generosity to others.

If we are to find eternal life, if we would find happiness, joy, satisfaction, peace of mind and serenity of heart, it will not be by piling up a credit balance with God through keeping commandments and observing rules and regulations; it shall be through reproducing God’s attitude of love and care for others. To follow Christ and in grace and generosity to serve others for whom Christ died are one in the same thing.

In the end, the young man turned away in great distress. He refused the challenge because he had great possessions. His tragedy was that he loved things more than he loved people, and he loved himself more than he loved others. Anyone who puts things before people and self before others must turn their back on Jesus.

Just like last week we need to back up a few verses to put this passage in the proper context.  Starting with verse 21 Peter asks Jesus how many times we are to forgive a person who has wronged us.  Peter then goes on to answer his question when he says, “Up to seven times?”  I love Peter, in fact, our daily Bible study email has been focusing on the Letters of Peter.  Peter is a great example of what God can do with someone for he took Peter and made him great.  But I digress.  Peter thought he was very generous when he suggested that we are to forgive up to seven times because the rabbinic teaching was to forgive only three times.

The Rabbinic teaching of the time was that is someone sinned against you, you were to forgive them no more than three times.  If a person commits and offense, you forgive them; if they commit an offense a second time, you forgive them; if they commit an offense a third time, you forgive them for the third time, if they commit and offense a fourth time, you do not forgive them.  This was the teaching that those listening to the exchange between Peter and Jesus would have been familiar with.

The Biblical proof of this teaching is taken from the opening chapters of the Prophet Amos, which contain a series of condemnations on the various nations for three transgressions and four. From this, we can deduce that God’s forgiveness extends to three offenses and that his punishment comes upon the sinner with the fourth.  Sort of a Divine three strikes and you’re out rule.  The teaching began along the lines that a person could not be more generous than God, so forgiveness was limited to three times.

Peter thought he was very generous, he takes the rabbinic three times, multiplies it by two for good measure adds one, and suggests, with eager satisfaction as Peter usually does when he answers his questions, that it will be enough if he forgives seven times.  I can picture Peter standing there, the look of satisfaction on his face with his well thought out the answer and then Jesus gives him his answer.  The Christian must forgive seventy times seven, in other words, there is no unreckonable limit to forgiveness!

I today’s Gospel Jesus tells the story of the servant forgiven great debt that then when out and dealt harshly, some would even say he dealt with him without mercy, a fellow servant who owed him a debt that was a fraction of he had owed.  We see that the mercilessness of the servant was utterly condemned.  From this parable come two central teachings.

The first is one that runs all through the New Testament, a person must forgive in order to be forgiven, it is just that simple. Those who do not forgive those who have wronged them has no hope that God will forgive them.  “Blessed are merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). No sooner had Jesus taught his disciples his prayer, that he went on to expand upon one of the points of that prayer: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15). As James has it in his letter, “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy” (James 2:13). Divine and human forgiveness go hand in hand.

Second, why should it be that these go hand in hand, human forgiveness, and Divine forgiveness?  One of the great points of this parable is the contrast between the two debts.

The first servant owed his master 10,000 talents; a talent was the equivalent of roughly $240; therefore 10,000 talents was equal to about $2.4 million. This was, and is an incredible debt!  It was more than the total budget of the ordinary Roman Province of the day. This debt was greater than a king’s ransom, and it was forgiven.  The servant was not put on a payment plan, he was not given a reduced amount, it was completely forgiven.

The other servant was owed a much smaller amount; it was, according to the parable, 100 denarii; a denarius is worth about 4 cents, and so the total debt owed was about $5. It was approximately one five-hundred-thousandths of his debt.

Look at it this way, the 100 denarii could be carried in one pocket. The 10,000 talent debt would have to be transported by an army of about 8,600 soldiers, each carrying a sack of coins weighing about 60 lbs, and they would form, at a distance of a yard apart, line 5 miles long! The contrast between the two debts in this story is staggering. The point is that nothing another person can do to us can in any way compare with what we have done to God; and if God has forgiven us the debt we owe to him, we must forgive our fellow human the debts they owe to us. Nothing that we have to forgive can even faintly or remotely compare with what we have been forgiven.

We have been forgiven a debt that is beyond all paying – for the sin of humanity brought about the death of God’s own Son – and, if that is so, we must forgive others as God has forgiven us, or we can hope to find no mercy!

The Gospel of Matthew 17:14-23

At that time, a man came up to Him and kneeling before Him said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not heal him.” And Jesus answered, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move hence to yonder place,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. But this kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.” As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, “The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and He will be raised on the third day.”

In the previous pericope, Jesus was up on the mountain praying, and now we see him descend back into the world of reality and he comes face to face with an earthly problem and a practical demand. A man had brought his epileptic son to his disciples while Jesus was on the mountain praying, and they were unable to heal him.  So serious was his condition that he had become a danger to himself and others.  If you listen closely to the story, you can almost hear the sigh of relief when Jesus appears on the scene.  He took control of the situation that had become entirely out of hand.  With one strong word, he drove the demon out of the boy, and he was cured.

This story has many significant things in it that it bears some looking at further.

We cannot help but be moved by the faith of the father.  Although the disciples’ of Jesus had been given the power to cast out demons such as these, they were unable to do so.  They had publically failed in their mission, and things were turning bad. But, in spite of the lack of healing from the disciples, the father never doubted the power of Jesus. It is as if he said, “Only let me get at Jesus, and my problems will be solved, and my need will be met.”

There is something striking about this, and there is something that is very universal and modern. There are many who feel that the church has failed and is powerless to deal with the ills of the human situation; and yet in the back of their minds there is the feeling: “If we could only get beyond the human followers of Jesus, if we could only get past the façade of ecclesiasticism and the failure of the Church, if we could only get at Jesus himself, we would receive the things we need.”

I have said before that the numbers of people who do not align themselves with a church, any church, are staggering.  The numbers of believers are still high, perhaps higher than it has even been, but people have lost faith in the institution of the church.  This place that is supposed to be about comfort and healing is perceived to be about judgment and condemnation.  There are more people that know what we are against than what we are for!  We as a church have abused power and abused the sacred trust that has been given to us by God. Some well-meaning church people are spending so much time fighting for the so-called “soul of America” that I fear we have lost the soul of the church and maybe even turned an entire generation of people away. We are perceived as hypocritical, judgmental, inauthentic people who only want to point at people and point out their sins all the while we go about our day so mired in sin ourselves that we cannot see the damage we are doing. It is both our condemnation and our challenge that, even yet, though people have lost faith in the church, they have never lost faith in Jesus Christ.  We have to reverse this collision course that we are on; we have to turn away from this nonsense and turn back towards people, created in the image and likeness of God. I always like to remind myself that the only people Jesus ever had harsh words for were the church, leaders.  Kind of keeps things in perspective for me.  He came down harder on the leaders of the church than he did the prostitute and the tax collector.

We also see in this passage the constant demands made upon Jesus. He comes straight down off the mountain of glory, and he comes face to face with human suffering.  He comes straight from hearing God’s voice hear the pleading of a father for his sick child. The most Christ-like person in the world is the one who never finds his fellow human a nuisance. It is so easy to feel close to God in the moment of prayer and meditation; it is easy to feel close to God when the world is shut out. But that is not religion – that is escapism. Real religion, true religion, is to rise from our knees before God to meet people and the problems of the human situation. Real religion, true religion, is to draw strength from God to give it to others. Real religion, true religion involves both meetings God in the secret places and people in the marketplace. Real religion, true religion means taking our own needs to God, not that we may have peace and quiet and undisturbed comfort, but that we may be enabled graciously, efficiently and powerfully to  meet the needs of others. It is not enough for us to pray for people and then go about our day never giving them another thought. Jesus went away for a time of prayer and refreshment, and he came back with the power of God and used that power to people, all people.  He did not judge them, he did not require them to do this or that, he did not even require them to change their lifestyle, he accepted them all and helped them, just as he helped this child in the story today.  He knew nothing about this man or his son, all he knew was that he had faith, and that was enough for Jesus.

At the center of all of this is the idea that we need faith. It was this man’s faith that pushed him to seek out Jesus even after his disciples had let him down. It is faith that allows the person, abused or shunned by the church and church people, to continue to believe in Jesus and the power of his grace. When Jesus spoke about removing mountains, he was using a phrase that would have been familiar to the ears of those listing to him. Someone who was considered a great teacher was called and uprooter or a pulverizer, of mountains. To tear up, to pulverize, to uproot mountains is a phrase the was used for removing problems and difficulties. Jesus never meant that this phrase was to be taken literally, I believe there are a lot of phrases Jesus never meant to be taken literally, I don’t know about you but I have never found a need to remove a mountain. I believe what he meant was, “If you have faith enough, even a small amount of faith like this mustard seed, all difficulties can be solved, and even the hardest task can be accomplished.” Faith in God is what enables believers to remove the hills of difficulty that blocks our path, all we need is a little of this faith, and the help and support of others in the community, and we can solve any problem.

The Gospel of Matthew 14:14-22

At that time, Jesus saw a great throng; and he had compassion on them, and healed their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a lonely place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass; and taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. Then he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.

This Gospel passage is a beautiful story, not that all biblical stories are not fantastic, but his one is especially enjoyable.  In this passage, we read the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with just a few loaves of bread and some fish.  I have used this passage before to talk about feeding the hungry and the Icon for this particular passage is used for our Church Community Meal, but there is another meaning as well that of miracles.

Just sticking with the food theme for a minute I offer this illustration. About five years ago a few people here at the Church decided we needed to help the local community by providing a meal for those in need, in need not just physically but emotionally and spiritually.  We planned it all out, picked the date, cooked the food and opened the door.  A few people came, 35 I believed for that first meal, it and was great.  We decided that we would cook a full on Thanksgiving meal that year and so the week before Thanksgiving we cooked turkeys and all the fixins.  We opened the doors, and the people came and came, and came.  So many folks came that we had to ask people to leave so we could seat more!  We were picking the bones of the turkeys to make sure we had enough food, but no one went without that night, and it has been the same ever since.

I read a sermon recently by Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, if you have not read her stuff I suggest you do she is one of the brightest voices in Christianity today, anyway, in the sermon she mentions that this story appears six times in the Gospels.  She reminds us that there are only four Gospels so this story appears twice in some of them, so it is important.  Pastor Nadia asks the question about the miracle itself, was it that Jesus took the bread and the fish and multiplied it or was it that the people were so moved that they, reached into the own stores of food, and shared with their neighbors?  I like to think a little of both but will focus on the second part, the sharing part.

Sharing, as Pastor Nadia points out, is not new to many folks, after all we learned to share in kindergarten or at least we should have.  The people had come from far and wide to hear Jesus and I find it impossible to believe they did not plan ahead and bring some food, heck I don’t drive more than an hour away without a granola bar or something with me just in case.  These folks were used to traveling, and so I am sure there was food hanging around.  Sure maybe some did not come prepared, but I think most did.

Jesus taught them, Scripture tells us that the number was around 5,000 men and that number did not include the women and children so we can be safe to say that this figure was probably two or three times the reported number.  Apparently journalistic accuracy was lacking in the first century as well. (that was a joke my friends) The Apostles come to Jesus asking what they are supposed to do; Jesus looks at them in what I can only imagine is a look of exasperation, and tells them to feed them.  They look back with a look of total amazement, I can just see Judas clutching the money bag thinking that this is going to bankrupt them, and they say with what?  All we have is this bread and some fish; Jesus tells them to bring them to him, he blesses them and tells them to distribute them. They do, and the rest is history.

What we see here is the miracle of sharing full on.  Jesus, once again, gives us the example to live by, we take the extra of what we have and share it with others.  If they kept those loaves of bread and fish, they would spoil in the Palestinian heat.  Jesus blessed them and gave them away and encourage the others to do the same.  So they dug into their picnic baskets and found extra and gave it to the guy next to them who may be shared something with them, this is what we are supposed to do, share with those in need from the gifts that we have been given.

Several years ago I was on a train in Romania.  If you ever want an experience go on a cross-country train trip in Romania, it is amazing.  The train is made up of compartments of six people, you may or may not know all of them, but you travel together.  As the journey continued it turned to meal time.  Each person took some food from their bag and all six of us shared what we had, a loaf of bread, some cheese, a bottle of wine, some salami, whatever we had we shared, and each of us ate and were filled.

The miracle is not the multiplication of the loaves the miracle is getting people to think of another and help them when they need it and ask for nothing in return.  The miracle is the person next to you sharing what they have with you and you sharing with them not storing things up while others are in need.  Scripture tells us that if we have two cloaks we should give one to someone who has none, how many of us have more than one jacket while our neighbor goes without?

The miracle is a change in our hearts that makes us less selfish and more willing to help and love our neighbor that is the miracle of the story, that everyone helped everyone else and no one was turned away hungry.