This third section of the Church's 'Briefing for Mission' by her Lord, 10:24-42, has been called a "Manual for Martyrs," for it is assumed that as often as not the pulpits the disciples are given will be defendants' boxes in courtrooms and gallows-platforms.
There is a heavy emphasis here on the cost of mission. Disciples must understand and accept that they will be greeted with hostility as often as with hospitality.
We are now into the third section of this chapter which has in view the period of the Church's Mission from Pentecost to the Second Coming, so everything now applies directly to us without the need of qualifications. Again Matthew has supplied three sections:
1. vs. 24 - 33 - The place to be taken
2. vs. 34 - 39 - The price to be paid
3. vs. 40 - 42 - The prize to be won
There is one over-riding truth that binds these three paragraphs together (indeed, it binds together the three main sections of the entire chapter) and it is a really quite staggering concept. It is the statement in v. 40, "He who receives you receives me."
In His messengers Christ Himself goes into the world.
This says a thing we are used to hearing the other way round. We are used to being urged to see Christ in our needy brother: "Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it to Me" means we are to see Christ in those to whom we go. Here Jesus says it the other way round: Those to whom we go are to see Christ in us! The needy brother meets Christ in the messenger who brings him the Gospel; so by the way he responds to the messenger he responds to Christ Himself: "Whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water, because he is a disciple, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward." (v. 42) Mark's Gospel says it even more directly: "Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the Name of Christ, will by no means lose his reward." (Mark 9:41)
It is in the person of His disciple that Jesus goes now, today, into the world as He went in His Galilee days: it is in the witness of His disciples that He preaches the Gospel of the Kingdom to the world now, today, as He preached it then in His Galilee days; it is in the bearing of His disciple that He appears now, today, before the eyes of the world, as in the flesh He appeared before men's eyes in His Galilee days. John summed it up when in I John 4:17b he wrote, "As He is, so are we in this world." We are all to be 'Christophers' - Christ-bearers. It is by our service that men are gathered in to salvation or delivered up to judgment. That is the ruling concept that gathers everything in this passage under its umbrella.
vs. 24, 25: "The disciple is as his teacher; the slave as his master."
'Slave' was the word Paul favoured to describe his relation to the Lord. A slave in those days had no life of his own; that is the point. He was given up wholly to his master and his master's service.
I am not sure we understand this the way Jesus meant it. We are serious about our discipleship, we make strenuous efforts to pursue it; but are there still areas of life we regard as our own ... Friday night for shopping, Saturday for gardening, days off for sailing, TV programmes. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with any of those things; what is wrong is when they take such precedence over other things that we are unwilling, ever, to surrender them up to give Christ a service we can only give by doing so. The Lord Himself is not honoured, of course, if our garden is neglected. And He Himself more than once took the disciples away from the pressure of relentless demand that was made upon them. Recreation is a real part of discipleship - but not when we make a fetish of it. When all these things support the overall spirit of devotion to Christ in which we live, they are right; it is when they compete with it that they are wrong. Balance there needs to be; but all the balancing has to be of services to Christ one with another, not a balancing of the bits of our life we give to Him, and the bits we keep to ourselves.
The reason it has to be that way is the reason we have already noted: that it is in His disciples that Jesus lives still in the world, and pursues His task. We are no use to Him if He has us on Sundays but not on Saturdays, if He has us in church but not on the sports field, if we are available to Him on Wednesday nights but not on Friday nights. Christ and we are wrapped up in the same bundle of life - all of it - together. Where we go, Christ goes in us. He needs us whole and entire, therefore.
We really must not expect to have it any easier than He did. They will do to us what they did to Him. v. 25: "If they have called the Master of the House Beelzebub, how much more will they malign those of His household." Our fellowship with those who receive us will be deeper, because in their response to us they are responding to Him; but equally, our alienation from those who reject us because it is Him they are rejecting will be the more intense and implacable.
But what Jesus goes on then to say really is quite astonishing. "So," He says, vs. 26-31, "have no fear of them ..." Three times over He says it:
v. 26: "Have no fear of them"
v. 28: "Fear not those who can kill the body ...!"
v. 31: "Fear not ... you are worth more than the birds."
This is quite extraordinary. They will do to us what they did to Him, He has told us. They hauled Him into the courts; they will haul us into the courts. They delivered Him over to the authorities; they will deliver us over to the authorities. In the end they killed Him; and we are not likely to fare any better. "So," He says, "don't run scared!" How do you square those things up?
The reason immediately given is, "For nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known." (v. 26) What does that mean? That the secret evil in men's hearts will be revealed, so their opposition to us will be exposed at the end of the day as hostility to God, and we will thereby be vindicated? It does not mean that, true though it is. What Jesus clearly says here is: "The hidden things I tell you will be revealed." As the Servant of the Lord said in Isa. 50:4: "The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught."
Jesus is saying, "The truth I give you to publish - truth to which men are blind - that truth 'will out.' The truth I teach you for whose telling you will both rejoice and suffer will triumph."
How much better, in the light of the resurrection, ought we to understand this than the disciples did then. We can read between the lines of what Jesus says here: "Yes, I shall be killed for this truth, and in my resurrection vindicate it. So, you too must die and rise with me in the defence and confirmation of the truth."
In July 1979, Jim Johnston, an Missionary Aviation Fellowship pilot in Papua New Guinea, died when the Cessna aircraft he was flying crashed. His wife afterwards asked that a poem written by one of the team, Raelene Hawke, as she agonised during the first few days of the search for him, should be published in the Australian Christian newspaper 'New Life.'
A sacrifice? - O Father, NO.
A life laid down - for whom?
The living God? ... but my heart bleeds.
He answered, "So did Mine."A sacrifice - "but Lord!
a husband, father, son ...!
It is too much to ask."
He answered, "I gave mine."A sacrifice. It's wasted, Lord,
poured out on dead ground.
They do not care, nor understand.
He answered, "They rejected Mine.""A sacrifice" "Yes," God answered,
"But presented unto Me,
mingled with my Son's,
it will share the victory of His."
"Do not fear those who can kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do." (Matt. 10:28) No way in the world can we make any sense of that unless we see and understand that in literal truth and fact, "our lives are hid with Christ in God." (Col. 3:3) He whom we are to fear - who can cast body and soul into hell - is not Satan, but God. Satan cannot cast into hell, he can only be cast. Satan is not, by the Christian, to be feared, but fought.
The story is told of Hugh Latimer that once when he was preaching he had King Henry VIII present in his congregation. A voice in his mind kept saying, "Latimer, be careful what you say, Henry the King is here." Then, after a little, he rebutted the voice and in his mind repeatedly said to himself, "Latimer, be careful what you say, the King of Kings is here."
To fear God rightly is to be freed from fear, for God is to be trusted - right down to the least little thing.
Fear God you saints, and you will then have nothing else to fear;
Make but His service your delight; your wants shall be His care.
(Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady (The hymn 'Through all the changing scenes of life' ) )
That is what verses 29-31 mean about sparrows and the hairs of our head. No sparrow even alights on the ground (that is what the Greek means) without our Father's knowledge. We do not even nick a finger or lose a hair but He knows. The point made is the absolute intimacy and completeness of God's knowledge of us; He knows every last little thing about us; He cares that much.
"So," v. 32, "whoever confesses ..." and the Greek here really says "in me," I also will confess in him." In other words, "in every least little thing, you stand in my Father's care and esteem as I myself do - I Who am His well-beloved Son."
Whenever we go forth and confess the truth of Christ, we are standing in Him, hidden and secure. While we are doing it, He is standing in us, and in us confessing before His Father's Throne. So while men see Him in us, God sees us in Him.
The identification of Christ with the confessing believer is as deep and close and real as we can possibly conceive it to be. He and we are one.
There is a price to be paid of course. I cannot imagine that Jesus said what is recorded in vs. 34-36 without a catch in His voice. It is not His intention to bring a sword; it is the tragically inevitable consequence of His efforts to save. *
Jesus here puts His finger on the terrible dilemma He faced all through His ministry, and faces still. If He does nothing for men's salvation, they will perish; but if He does anything, there will always be some who so resist what He does as to perish. What is He to do? He must strive with men, even though His striving will sometimes serve only to harden their hearts against Him.
So must we, therefore. It means we must give Him top priority in our lives. If not, we - and those, like our families sometimes, for whose sake we resist Him - will all perish. Jesus will not soften the harshness of the demand: the stakes are too high. He really is serious in what He goes on to say about taking up our cross to follow Him. He meant (as we have seen elsewhere), "You're to have nothing in the world but the life you have with me." We may not weaken the uncompromising demand that makes on us. We really do have to 'sell out' to Jesus Christ.
Finally we are to see in the final verses 40-42 the prize to be won.
But let us not dodge the column as we do. Verses 40-42 mean, "Christ Himself meets men in their meeting with His messengers," as we emphasised above. Understand what this means. When we go to church and hear a preacher, whoever the preacher may be, Christ is meeting us in that encounter. We may not like the preacher. Indeed there may be things in him and in his life we disapprove - even rightly disapprove. But that does not let us off the hook. Christ makes men His messengers who are not yet perfected. He has, indeed, no other men to choose. Their imperfection takes nothing away from the truth He gives them to say. We will not be able to say to Him at the last day, "Lord, I didn't like the guy you sent to me with the message. He put me off."
To receive a prophet as a prophet, not as a likeable guy; to receive a righteous man as such, acknowledging his life however irritating his personality might be; to receive with kindness, warmly and thoughtfully even one of Christ's 'little ones' ** ('the least of these my brethren' He will say later, not the most personable of them, 25: 45), because he is a disciple - these are the conditions to be fulfilled if we are to be rewarded.
And what is the reward?
A prophet's reward; a righteous man's reward; a disciple's reward. With what are prophets and righteous men and disciples rewarded?
• With the nourishment of the Word God gave them to proclaim, sweet as honey;
• With the wholeness which fits them to enjoy the company of the righteous Father;
• With the joy of the disciple in his teacher's achievement, so he "enters into his Lord's joy."
What happens as we worship Sunday by Sunday is for real; and we cannot stop it happening. We are confronted every Sunday by the Word of God. And we cannot do that for as long as some have been doing it and it make no difference in the long run. The Word we hear every Lord's Day is proving a savour of life unto growing life, or of death unto deepening death.
* Luke, when he records this saying of Jesus
in Luke 12:51, has 'division' instead of 'sword.' Matthew wrote for
the Jew, who talked that way, where Luke, who wrote for the Gentile,
removes a possible misunderstand-ing - an example of the principle of
dynamic equivalence in modern Bible translation work
** "A cup of cold water," Jesus said, so you had taken the
trouble in a hot climate to ensure that you did not fob the preacher
off with a cup of tepid, luke-warm stuff that had been standing in a
skin by the tent door through the heat of the day, doing what you had
to do for courtesy's sake, but wanting to be rid of the man as soon
as was decently possible
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