Matthew 11.7-15, Luke 7.24-30.
After
Various
First thing Jesus brought up is what people expected to see when they first heard about John and wanted to check him out. Starting with two things they clearly didn’t expect to see, because John’s reputation was that of an Elijah-style hairy thunderer.
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Certain commentators wanna claim these statements were kind of a knock on the Galilee’s governor, King Antipas Herod, who had imprisoned John at this time.
I don’t know that these statements were necessarily made about Herod. I suspect they’re more about wannabe prophets.
Because it’s precisely the sort of behavior we see in wannabe prophets nowadays. And human nature hasn’t changed any in the past 20 centuries: If somebody was a self-described prophet, they wanted acknowledgement. Respect. Maybe a little bit of fear. After all, they heard from God. They lacked the humility we oughta see in a real prophet, who recognizes they’re just the servant of the Almighty and nothing more; whom God doesn’t always grant the sort of messages that’d make ’em popular. Fake prophets, on the other hand, don’t have enough experience with God to realize their proper place way under him. And they’ve no trouble adjusting their messages to suck up to their audiences, because God didn’t really give them anyway. That whole wind-shaken reed thing? Applies to phony prophets just as much as it does to phony leaders.
Essentially Jesus’s message was, “When you went to check out John, did you expect to find a fake? And that’s not what you found at all.”
More than a prophet; a significant prophet.
Yep, these verses match word-for-word. Matthew and Luke were quoting the same source.
Matthew 11.9-10, Luke 7.26-27 KWL - 9=26 “What did you see instead? A prophet? Yes, I tell you.
- And greater than a prophet: 10=27 John was whom this was written about:
- ‘Look, I send my messenger before your face, who’ll prepare your road before you.’ ”
Ml 3.1
Yep, John the baptist is a prophet. Of course. He was full of the Holy Spirit, heard from God, shared what God told him, and most importantly acted on what God told him. He proclaimed God’s kingdom before Jesus did. Jesus did it better, ’cause Jesus knows better. But John did it first.
Various teachers claim John was significant because he was the last prophet, or at least the last prophet under the old covenant. In John’s day, the Spirit was only granted to prophets. In ours, in the last days, the Spirit is granted to every follower—so that we can all be prophets.
Various
Why Jesus called John “greater than a prophet” is the fact Malachi wrote about him. He didn’t just
Malachi 3.1-4 KWL - 1 “Look at me. I send out my angel. He’ll redirect the way before my face.
- Suddenly the Master whom you seek will come to his temple.
- The covenant angel, whom you delight in: Look, he comes!” says the L
ORD of War.- 2 “Who can hold back the day he comes? Who can stand before his appearance?
- For he’s like a refinery. Like being washed in lye. 3 He stays to refine and clean silver:
- He washes Levi’s descendants, purifying them like gold and silver.
- They’ll be offerings to the L
ORD , approaching him righteously.- 4 Judah and Jerusalem’s offering will be sweet to the L
ORD like the old days, like previous years.”
As I stated
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I have heard screwy interpreters get all confused by Jesus’s statement: If the lowest
And the public said amen. Well, most of the public.
In Luke, that was all Jesus had to say about John. In Matthew he said a few more things, and I’ll get to those things in a moment.
Luke 7.29-30 KWL - 29 All the people hearing this, including the taxmen, declared God in the right:
- They were baptizands of John’s baptism.
- 30 The Pharisees and lawyers themselves had put aside God’s counsel,
- and weren’t baptizands of John.
People inaccurately tend to describe
And same as Jesus, John objected to all these loopholes, and the Pharisee attitude that God would overlook all these violations because they were after all Abraham’s descendants.
Luke 3.7-9 KWL - 7 John said this to the crowds coming to be baptized by him:
- “You viper-spawn! Who warned you to escape the wrath of God?
- 8 Fine then: Produce worthy fruits, from repentant people.
- Don’t start to tell yourselves, ‘We have a father in Abraham’:
- From these rocks, I tell you, God can raise up children for Abraham.
- 9 Plus, the axe lays at the root of the tree right now.
- So every tree not producing good fruit is cut down and thrown into fire.”
The self-righteous didn’t figure they needed to repent of anything; they were fine. But everyone else realized they needed to do better, to be better, and only by
The violent take it by force?
That was Luke; now for Matthew. It’s a passage which has historically confused a lot of Christians, mostly because of the way verse 12 gets translated.
Matthew 11.12 Vulgate - A diebus autem Joannis baptistae usque nunc, regnum caelorum vim patitur, et violenti rapiunt illud.
For those of you whose Latin is a little shaky:
Matthew 11.12 KJV - And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
St. Jerome translated the original into Latin. And lest you think the Latin is irrelevant, bear in mind medievals, including Martin Luther and John Calvin, knew the Latin best. The earliest Protestant interpretations of this verse have largely informed Protestant interpretations since. Further, Luther’s translation and the Geneva Bible have largely influenced our translations, which is why the
Matthew 11.12 ESV - From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.
So, Christians wonder: What violence is Jesus speaking of? Which violent people? Is the kingdom still dealing with such people and such violence? Wait, are we to pursue it violently?
If a particular Christian is kinda fond of violence, like someone who’s into Ultimate Fighting or American football, they’ll try to argue yes: Jesus wants to fill his kingdom with badasses who will fight for him. They’ll try to claim Jesus wants us to fight evil—’cause he does. But in practice these guys have the bad habit of fighting everyone, Christians and pagans alike, whether it’s over the fine points of doctrine, or whether it condemns all the sins they personally hate. This sort of divisiveness
Others will say Jesus is only looking for vigorous followers. Not necessarily violent; they’re pretty sure that’s not what Jesus meant by
My translation goes a different direction; one which I think is more consistent with the Luke version of this story, and of course the Malachi prophecy about John. Judge for yourself, of course.
Matthew 11.12-15 KWL - 12 “From the days of John the baptist till now, heaven’s kingdom was violated.
- Its violators are snatching it away from you.
- 13 For all the prophets and the Law prophesied till John’s day.
- 14 If you want to receive this, John is ‘the Elijah to come.’ 15 Those with ears: Hear.”
First of all, viastaí doesn’t mean “the violent,” even though that’s kinda how it was translated into Latin. It means “rapists.” Yep, it meant that in first-century Greek, and it still means “rapists” in present-day Greek. And while Jesus can absolutely save rapists from their sins, I’m quite sure any interpretation which claims Jesus wants his followers to be rapists in order to inherit his kingdom, is entirely wrong.
Bluntly, Jesus is saying God’s kingdom was getting raped. Shocking language, and I toned it down slightly by saying it’s getting violated. “Take it by force,” as the
Rape is about control. Rapists wanna overpower their victims, take what they want, and discard their victims once they’re done. Plenty of people want the very same thing of God’s kingdom: They want all its benefits, all of the happy feelings which go along with it, but none of its obligations, none of its convictions, none of its attitudes. They don’t care to be compassionate and loving towards their neighbors, but judgmental and divisive. They want to keep others out more than invite ’em in.
The rapists wanna keep the kingdom all to themselves, as an exclusive club which only the elect are in. It’s not for sinners and the needy. It’s for them and them alone.
Which, y’know, reflected a lot of Pharisee and Sadducee thinking of the day. It’s why, as Luke has it, the general public was happy to receive John’s gospel, but the Pharisees and lawyers had rejected it, and John. They weren’t teaching what God and his prophets had proclaimed. They had their own ideas.
Into this environment, John came, as if another Elijah—the only prophet of the L
In the Pharisee version of the End Times timeline, Elijah was expected to come back and help set things up for Messiah. John was pretty sure he wasn’t this Elijah.
