Who’s the Greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?

Pentecost 14 – 9/2/2020 | A sermon on Matthew 18:1-20 | by Andrew Smith |

Matthew 18:1-20 (English Standard Version, Crossway Bibles, 2016.  Used with permission.)

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” ² And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them ³ and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. ⁴ Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

⁵ “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, ⁶ but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,¹ it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

⁷ “Woe to the world for temptations to sin!² For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes! ⁸ And 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. ⁹ 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 hell³ of fire.

¹⁰ “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.^{4 12} What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? ¹³ And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. ¹⁴ So it is not the will of my⁵ Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

¹⁵ “If 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. ¹⁶ But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. ¹⁷ If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. ¹⁸ Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed⁶ in heaven. ¹⁹ Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. ²⁰ For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ.  Amen.

The disciples had an important question for Jesus, “Who’s the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”  Now I know what we do.  We look at a passage like this completely isolated from its context and from our own perspective.  But that’s a little harder for us today.  Two weeks ago, Peter confessed Jesus as Christ and blessed is he!  Last week Jesus announced He would suffer and die in Jerusalem and Peter said, “Uh, Jesus, being Christ means you’re in charge not suffering and dying.  And then Jesus called Peter, “Satan.”  That was all in chapter 16.  What we didn’t hear between last week and this week’s reading is that Jesus was transfigured in glory in front of Peter, James, and John.  Afterwards they call came down the mountain and met a group of the rest of the disciples who’d been trying to cast a demon out of a boy and couldn’t.  They asked Jesus privately why they couldn’t cast out the demon, because remember they had been able to do that sort of thing before and Jesus said, “Because of your small faith.”  Ouch.

Obviously the disciples sensed a division.  Peter was blessed before he was Satan.  And the rest of the Twelve were not on the mountaintop with Jesus like Peter, James, and John had been.  The Nine has so little faith they couldn’t cast out a demon like they could before.  And then Jesus goes on to make the second of His three predictions of His suffering and death in Jerusalem.  And it looks like maybe there needs to be a plan for turnover if He’s serious about what’s coming.

Does it make sense to you that the disciples might ask a question like this?  I don’t think it’s one of those questions that comes out of the blue but it could sound that way to us if we’re reading these sections of the Gospel without any relation to one another.

So the disciples ask Jesus, “Who’s the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”  Now again, let’s make sure we know what the kingdom of heaven is.  The kingdom of heaven is not heaven in eternity.  It’s God’s active ruling here on earth, already now.  The kingdom of heaven is heaven come to earth already now in the coming of Jesus who brought with him healings and right teaching and the casting out demons and forgiveness and such.  The kingdom of heaven is the perfection of the last day sneaking into the here and now, even with all the limits that will have until the Last Day.  That kingdom has an address every Sunday as the Lord comes to His people again and again to forgive, renew, and strengthen so that they can delight in His will, walk in His way, to the glory of His holy name.  That’s the whole reason the church exits—to be an embassy of the kingdom Jesus came to bring.  Come back then to our text and the disciples are, in effect, asking who’s the greatest in the church, who’s the greatest among the believers?  And Jesus does something that’s actually rather shocking for the day.  It’s not shocking to us but it would not be to a first century listener of this story.

Jesus takes a little child, a toddler basically, and stands him or her (the Greek doesn’t tell us) in the midst of them and says, “See here.  This little kid is a good example of who’s the greatest in the kingdom I’ve come to bring.”  Now I have a pretty good idea what you’re thinking because you’re reading this passage like a twentieth / twenty-first century reader.  You think kids are precious.  They are.  There’s no doubt.  But that’s what you’ve been led to believe about children by our late modern culture in the West.  What do we believe about children?  “We believe that children are our future, Teach them well and let them lead the way.  Show them all the beauty they possess inside…”  Right?  Well, it shouldn’t really surprise you that neither the disciples nor the rest of the first century Greco-Roman world were influenced much by the theology of Whitney Houston.  I know we look at children as not yet corrupted by the world and not as cynical as we can be sometimes.  But when Jesus says “Behold the toddler, the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus was not lifting up children as examples of innocence.  He was showing children as an example of neediness.  Neediness?  You say?  That’s a good thing?  Yes, says Jesus, it shows who’s greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

I want to reiterate this point.  Jesus is not using this child as an example of innocence and trusting faith because that idea doesn’t come about until the late 1800s in England and America.  In the Greco-Roman world, childhood was something you grew out of and the sooner the better.  Paul says, “When I was a child, I spoke, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”  (1 Cor 13:11)  And he meant that as a good thing, by the way.

To make my point further, I want to remind you of the first thing Jesus taught in Matthew’s Gospel.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit.  For to them belongs the kingdom of heaven.”  (Matthew 5:3)  Ah.  Right?  That’s Matthew 5.  See all this fits together.  Fast forward then to Matthew18 and Jesus is still talking about the kingdom of heaven and the disciples don’t really understand it.  They think Peter might be in charge after Jesus leaves, or maybe James or John.  And Jesus is saying to them, in the kingdom of heaven it’s not about who’s in charge.  It’s about who is the neediest.  And if we stop for a minute, that should start to make sense.

Let’s put this into a real world hypothetical discussion. Who has the greater need, all other things being equal, the person having their gallbladder removed or the person having open-heart surgery?  On the face of it we’d say, what?  Right, it’s the open-heart surgery patient.  That was easy.  We’re having fun.  Let’s do one more.  Who has the greater need, the person who is lying in a hospital bed for any reason or the person who wants to lodge a complaint about how the pastor has grown a beard?  True story, in the church I grew up in I heard a family left the church because both pastors had beards.  So we’re really in a real world discussion of the hypothetical.  But all other things being equal, who has the greater need, the hospital patient or the complainer?  Sure, that’s an easy one, too.  But guess what?  All other things are never equal.  What we might not know is the person having open-heart surgery feels like they’re right with God and the person having their gallbladder out doesn’t.  Could someone decide to leave a church because both pastors have beards?  Hypothetically, yes.  But I’ve also learned over the years that the reasons why people say they leave churches are rarely, if ever, the real reasons why they’ve left.  It could be the complainer is not right with God and the hospital patient is.  The Christian care and love we show to people in need is the art of knowing the difference.  And it’s an art to be sure, not a science.

Our life together in the church is often messy.  We are definitely never as calm, cool, and collected as we show ourselves to be on Facebook. The church is not a club or even a social group.  We’re a church.  The local, physical manifestation of the body of Christ.  The people who serve in our church need your prayers and your cooperation like you promised when they were installed as officers.  Too often our rough edges clash with one another and we sin against one another.  I’ve done it.  Chances are some of you have too.  What we could all stand to do is bear with one another a little bit more instead of trying to hold a brother or sister to a standard we’ve set for them, one, which, if we were honest, we couldn’t meet ourselves.  Forbearance is an old word.  It desperately needs to make a comeback among us.

And Jesus shows us exactly the content of this word when He bore His cross for us.  He bears with us, as He carried our cross for us and pays the price for our not loving our neighbors as ourselves.  That’s the very different message of greatness in the kingdom of heaven.  The greatest is the one who has the greatest need.  First, we know we each have the greatest need.  Compared to the perfect holiness God expects of us, we who know our own sins better than anyone else, we know the great depth of our need for the forgiveness Christ won for us.  It’s why we so desperately need to hear week after week Christ has died for all our sins.  And if we would start at the point where we are forgiven, it should be clear to us how much our neighbor needs us to just cut him a break.  If the cross is what Jesus bears for us, then we who have been born up bear up one another.

So Jesus says the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is the neediest one like this toddler here and to make sure the disciples understand, He goes on to explain to them the process by which the church should engage the neediest folks.

“If 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. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  (Mt 18:15–17)

Now this may be too much to tackle in one message but given what we’ve already learned this morning, do you think Jesus is outlining the process by which we kick someone out of the church OR is He outlining the lengths the church should go to try to win someone back into the fold?  Yeah, probably not the first one, right?

So then, the follow on passage to ours shows that my reading is right.  You know the passage.  Peter understands what Jesus is saying and so he asks Jesus, “Well then, how much should I forgive my brother, seven times?”  And Jesus responds, “Uh, how about seventy times” or maybe if you go with the textual variant, “seventy-times seven,” which would be what, 490, right?  Again, Jesus isn’t saying here, “Keep count and if they reach 71 or even 491, that’s it, cut ‘em off.”  The greatest in the kingdom is the one that needs the most, in this case the most forgiveness.

The greatest in the kingdom of heaven is the new member, (welcome!) the outsider, the first-time guest, the little child, the shut-in, the sick, the grieving.  The greatest in the kingdom of heaven isn’t the pastor or the charter member or the council member or the elder, or even you, except when it is.  And when it is, we rejoice that the opposite day logic of the kingdom of heaven is in full effect for us.  And we recognize we are not the be all and end all we seem to be to others and we are nothing but forgiven and given the grace to show others the kind of patient loving-kindness that comes not from ourselves but from Christ who bore all for us.  Amen.

The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus.  Amen.

The Rev. Andrew Smith

Heavenly Host Lutheran Church

Cookeville, Tennessee, USA

E-Mail: smithad19+prediger@gmail.com