Last Fall, we offered a Bible Study on the Book of
Matthew. What a luxury to be able to go
through chapter by chapter, line by line.
Those who attended remember that the structure of the Gospel of Matthew
is very pronounced. Matthew can be
divided into five smaller units, each containing narrative and discourse
sections. In the narrative sections
throughout the Gospel, Jesus travels to towns, he performs healings, he
manifests the power of the kingdom, he confronts Pharisees. And then the
narrative, the action, is followed by a teaching, a discourse—for example, the
Sermon on the Mount follows Jesus’ calling of his first disciples.
Today’s Gospel passage is taken from the third narrative
section of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus has just sent the twelve apostles on their
first missionary journey. He had given
them instructions to preach the Gospel and to perform healing miracles, just
like he had been doing in the previous part of the Gospel; what the master
does, so must the disciples do. While
they are gone, Jesus begins to preach again to crowds of people, people who he
had met before. Jesus preaches here with great intensity and seriousness about
the consequences for failing to repent.
He calls those who fail to head his words, “a wicked
generation”. He compares the hard-hearted
Pharisees to a bunch of children playing games in the marketplace. In today’s
Gospel he reproaches the towns which failed to repent. Woe to you, Chorazin!
Woe, to you Capernaum! Woe, to you Bethsaida! These three towns, Capernaum,
Chorazin, and Bethsaida were places Jesus had spent the majority of his time in
his ministry so far. They had witnessed
the majority of his miracles, he had opened the scriptures to them, they heard
of God’s love and the need to repent. Jesus
says that if Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom, some of the most wicked cities in history,
had witnessed his ministry, they would have repented on the spot.
Jesus speaks with great seriousness, because the something
of the greatest importance is at stake: our eternal souls. The second person of the Holy Trinity didn’t incarnate and undergo the Passion because He was bored. Repentance and living a life of faith is of
the highest importance. Everything else pales in comparison.
I don’t think we are necessarily called to go out into the
shopping malls and sporting arenas and preach: “woe to you Mayfield Heights,
Woe to you Cleveland. Repent, for judgment is coming!” But I do think passages
like todays should certainly challenge us to ensure that our priorities are in
order, that we are living firstly for God, that we have repented of our sins,
and that we do take seriously our call to spread the Gospel with conviction and
patience for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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