Greetings Friends,
It’s that time again - time for another top secret excerpt of my next book. The book walks the reader through various stories from the Gospel of Matthew (one story from each chapter, but two stories from Matthew 1 because it’s my book and I can do what I want - HA!) and looks at those stories through the lens of Matthew’s original readers (or, more likely, listeners).
The context of the Gospel?
Scholars believe the Gospel was written shortly after the Romans ransacked Jerusalem and leveled the Temple, leaving nothing more than puddles of blood and a pile of smoking rubble. Many who survived the assault relocated to a place called Antioch where a sect of Jews (the Messianic Jews or the Jewish Christians who believed that Jesus was the Messiah) separated from their Mother tradition and set out on their own.
It’s to these people (to these early Christians) that Matthew wrote his Gospel - to encourage them in the Way of Jesus The Christ as they navigated through unimaginable loss.
And so that makes me wonder all sorts things, right?
Like, why Matthew included some stories and left some out?
Or why Matthew told some stories differently than Mark, Luke, or John told them?
Or why Matthew positioned certain stories the way that he did in his telling of the Jesus story?
… So many questions.
And so in the book I pull one story from each chapter of Matthew’s Gospel and look at it through the lens of those questions and explore and wonder why on earth these stories have passed the test of time to endure 2000+ years and make it into our hands all these centuries later.
Why were these stories so important?
Why were they important to Matthew?
Why were they important to his readers?
The idea is to read one chapter a day and then there are some reflections questions at the end of each chapter with plenty of white space to write whatever is on your heart after reflecting on that day’s story. The book encourages you to get in touch with the “collapsed temples” of your own life (the disappointments, the unmet expectations, the broken dreams, the dead ends, the disasters, the losses, the grief) and leads you along a path to find some hope in the stories that Matthew includes in his retelling of the Jesus story.
And so here’s chapter 21 (raw and unedited, by the way!), I hope it encourages you. Thanks for supporting my work and my family - we are forever grateful.
Chapter 21: Going Away Sad
Matthew 19:16-30
16 Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?” 17 “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.” 18 “Which ones?” he inquired. Jesus replied, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, 19 honor your father and mother,' and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’” 20 “All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?” 21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. 23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” 25 When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” 26 Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” 27 Peter answered him, “We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?” 28 Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29 And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. 30 But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.
—
Don't Be Like Him
I've heard this story a thousand times and have taught about it a handful of times, but the application has almost always been the same:
Don't be like this wealthy man.
Why?
Like many people, he was curious - curious about what action he needed to take in this life in order to ensure that he would be taken care of in the next.
"What must I do to inherit eternal life?", he asked. In other words, "what must I do NOW to ensure that I'm taken care of LATER?"
And so he came to Jesus to ask his question and when Jesus challenged him to sell all of his stuff and give the profits to the poor in order to ready himself for life in the Kingdom of God, he went away sad.
Why did he go away sad? Who knows. We aren’t really told what he was thinking as he walked away pondering his mountain of cash, but we tend to assume that he went away sad because he chose NOT to sell his stuff and (therefore) realized he would be unable to inherit the eternal life he so desperately wanted.
We imagine him drooping his head down low and walking away muttering to himself ...
"I can't possibly do that."
"What a bummer."
"That's a shame."
"I guess I'll never receive eternal life."
BUT.
Does the text say that? Although we can certainly read it INTO the story, I'm not so sure it's actually IN the story and so that frees us up to imagine and wonder, "what if there's another way to look at this story?" and "What if Matthew intended his readers to see something different?"
This is one of the things I LOVE about the Bible and this journey we've been on together trying to re-imagine the meaning of some of these stories. I think it was Richard Rohr who once said that the Bible is like a diamond in that every time you turn a story so that the light hits it in a slightly different way, you see something you never quite saw before.
I think this is one of those stories.