From the humility toward each other we are to have as Christians and Church members Matthew turns to the responsibility for each other we are to have.
The child is the link between this passage and the last. In our Lord's mind the child, with his openness to correction and his trustful spirit of dependence, is the model of the Christian.
Now Christians are a community, not a loose aggregation of individuals. I have an intriguing computer programme called 'Life' devised by a Cambridge chemistry professor, John Horton Conway, which simulates the way cells behave in a living organism. It illustrates how they live or die by the way they relate. We all know that cells multiply by dividing; what is not so well known is that no cell can survive by itself. Cells have to relate to one another in groups or they die. The programme demonstrates the ways in which cells group up. Some ways are sterile, and cells which group together in those ways die. Other ways are fertile, and cells which group together in these ways generate life and growth. What is fascinating is that there are some patterns which are neither sterile nor fertile: they are stagnant. They just blink away, like a winker on your car that will not cancel, neither growing nor dying. They can be the beginnings of a cancer.
Jesus is telling us how the cells in His body, the Church, must relate if the church is to live and grow. He is telling us how we are to live together.
This brief paragraph presents us with an 'either/or':
either we receive the 'children,' i.e. our
fellow-believers,
or we offend them.
And to each of these alternatives there is a corresponding reward.
Those who receive one another ... receive
Christ!
Those who offend one another ... incur judgment - severe
judgment.
Recall what Jesus said to the disciples when He sent them out on mission, "He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives Him Who sent me." (10:40) There is no escaping the clear implication that the way things are between me and the Lord is determined by the way things are between me and my fellow Christians. No way can things be right between ourselves and Him while they are not right between ourselves and them. It may be represented as a triangle of relationships, with God at the apex, and myself and my neighbour at the two ends of the base line.
The relationship traffic flows round the triangle; you cannot have movement on any one line without initiating movement on the other two lines of the triangle, much as you cannot have one man move forward from one base to another in a baseball diamond without moving all the others forward.
So what does it mean to 'receive' our brother as a child? Our clue has to be the way Matthew has already used the word.
(1) He has used it at 10:14 & 40 (the Mission chapter). There, to 'receive a disciple' is to give him hospitality and welcome his teaching: to feed him and listen to him. That means to have a care for him, a real, practical, brotherly care. And it means to attend to him, to be open to him. What Paul wrote in Gal. 4:14 is an illustration of it: "Though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God ... as Christ Jesus!" Whom have we ever made as welcome as Jesus? That is how we are to be with one another ... even though our brother is a child! ... "One such child," Jesus said. Do we have regard for 'the little people'? Or do we prefer to cultivate the 'significant people'? When we ignore or despise anyone among our brothers and sisters, when we give them the brush-off, or look down our noses at them, when we do not accept them, and cannot be bothered to listen to them, we disobey, and expose ourselves to judgment.
Acceptance is the key to all wholesome relationships. If I am with someone who truly accepts ('receives') me, I feel at ease; I am not self-conscious; I expand, I can be myself, all sorts of capacities in me are encouraged to find expression. I blossom. It is great! But if I am with someone who does not accept me, I feel ill at ease. I become self-conscious, I shrivel up, I cannot be myself. Nothing in me finds easy expression. I whither. It is dreadful! We are to accept - 'receive' - each other. We are under an obligation to bless each other with acceptance. And the reason is supplied by the other use of the word 'receive.'
(2) It is the word that is used of Jesus Himself: "this man receiveth sinners." What that meant in 9:10 was that He enjoyed table fellowship with them, enjoyed open friendship with them.
How is it that we can rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory to discover that Christ receives us just as we are, and revel in that discovery as the key to our salvation - our whole well-being now and for eternity - and then cannot bring ourselves to receive each other just as we are? It is humbug. It makes a nonsense of the salvation we say we enjoy. We are, as Paul said, to "welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us." (Rom. 15:7) That is what it means in v. 5 that we are to receive "one such child in My Name." If the love of Christ does not constrain us (to quote Paul again), it has not really reached us; we have not been affected by it.
I am to receive you as Christ has received me; you are to receive me as Christ has received you. If the Gospel does not have that effect on us, what difference can it ever to make to the way we live together?
Now we turn to the other side of the coin. Either we 'receive one' another, or we shall 'offend' one another.
The Offence
The word Jesus used is skandalizw, literally to 'scandalise.' It means "To present an obstacle to a fellow-believer's obedience to God, so he stumbles." The twelve illustrated this wrong attitude when they "rebuked the people" for bothering the Master with children. (19:13) "Don't bother me" is an attitude that 'offends.'
It is on attitudes that Jesus is homing in.
We must learn to love each other, because when attitudes that whither warm fellowship just go on and on, the whole church becomes 'an offence.' That is why Jesus will go on to say that we must live together by the rule of grace and forgiveness, for if we do not learn to do that, we turn the church sour. It happens. Sometimes it happens in churches to such a degree that there seems to be no remedy this side of the Last Judgment. I have seen churches "removed from their place in the Lampstand," to use the solemn words of the risen Lord to the Church in Ephesus (Rev. 2:5), because they "lost the love they had at first."
William Barclay's comment here is telling: "The Jews took the view that the most unforgivable of all sins is to teach another to sin, and for this reason: a man's own sins can be forgiven, they said, for in a sense they are limited in their consequences; but if we teach another to sin, he in his turn may teach still another to sin, and so a train of sin is set in motion which has no foreseeable end." Then he quotes the story of an old man who knew he was dying, and was obviously deeply troubled. At last he admitted why. "When we were boys at play," he said, "one day at a cross- roads we turned a sign-post round so its arms pointed the wrong way. I am haunted by the thought of how many people I sent in the wrong direction." (William Barclay, 'Gospel of Matthew Vol. 2' [St Andrew Press] p. 197)
The judgment
The judgment of which the Lord warned us if we do not repent is among the severest things that ever passed His lips: "It were better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and he be drowned in the depths of the sea."
The word He used for 'millstone' was not the word for the light-weight stone women used for grinding flour in their bowls; it was the word for the sort of millstone that weighed half a ton at least, and had to be turned by animals. And when He said "in the depths of the sea" He used a word that means, "Far out to sea." It is the sort of death that gangster mobs deal each other. If that "were better" than what awaits us ... what awaits us? Jesus says a violent and shocking death is to be preferred to what will happen to us when we appear before His judgment seat.
It should makes us tremble. What price shall we pay if we hang on to our stupid pride? For it is pride that stops us saying, "I am sorry; I wronged you."
Two lovely black eyes, O what a
surprise!
Only for telling a man he was wrong, two lovely black eyes! (Charles
Coburn}
Humility - the willingness to be called in question - is the foundation on which the Christian character required in a disciple is raised. Here it is underlined ... for the first time; it will be underlined again. The wretched habit of putting our brother down at every opportunity is in the Lord's mind a habit so vicious it calls for a vicious punishment. It destroys what He is building - His church.
Wrote Oliver Cromwell in a letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."
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