Setting the scene: where have the Twelve disappeared to? It appears that they’re off on the mission that Jesus instructed and commissioned them for. And Matthew, unlike Mark (6:30), never tells us specifically when they return. Instead, he has Jesus turn to a different audience.
And what audience is that?
He was teaching and proclaiming “in their cities.”
Okay. Who are “they”?
At first it sounds as if Matthew is talking about the cities where the Twelve are also working, but, since they never show up in what follows, it’s more helpful if we go back to the last similarly vague reference to “them”—”their synagogues.” (10:17) That seemed to refer to synagogues in which the scribes and the Pharisees were the principal authorities, as was probably the general picture throughout the larger towns in Galilee. Not everyone in these towns was opposed to Jesus; but the authorities, increasingly, were. “Their cities,” in other words, are the places where this conflict will develop further.
But the first person who turns up (indirectly, through his own disciples) is John the Baptist—who’s now in prison (when and how did that happen?) and whom we haven’t heard a thing about since he baptized Jesus back in chapter 3!
For some reason, Matthew delays the story about John’s arrest till chapter 14. At this point, it’s enough for him to remind us that being an independent preacher like John or Jesus could be dangerous work. There were many ways to run afoul of the authorities.
By the way, if you’re thinking “Herod was the secular authority, not the religious,” think again. In the first century everything was religious. There was no neat dividing line between “church” and “state.” It was all mixed up together.
You may remember that John was expecting someone “more powerful than” he to succeed him (3:11-12). Being in prison has made him all the more anxious as to whether Jesus was really living up to that prediction.
And Jesus doesn’t really give him a “yes” or a “no.”
Right. He just says, “Well, your disciples can tell you what they see. You decide.” And that makes sense because, for Jesus, everything in his ministry is an expression of the love of God. Words can easily be distorted, but what he does is clear. It’s the same principle he applied earlier to the identification of true prophets: “By their fruits you will know them” (7:20).
It’s interesting, too, that some of the language in his response to John is lifted right out of Isaiah: “the blind receive their sight,” “the deaf hear,” “the dead are raised up” (e.g., Isa. 26:19; 29:18-19; 35:5; 42:7 & 18). Matthew doesn’t remind us this time that this is all fulfillment of prophecy. But he probably didn’t need to for his ancient audience. They would recognize it.
Most of these “proofs” seem pretty clear, but the last one there in vs. 6 seems oddly flat: “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” Is this such a big deal?
I’m not so sure myself. At least “anyone who takes no offense” at Jesus would stand in contrast to the devout folk who are turning against him. Still, “blessed” is a pretty strong word, as we saw back in chapter 5 at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. It speaks of a full, rich, deeply flourishing human existence. Perhaps it’s a bit like what we saw in 10:40-42, where all you have to do to participate in the rewards of the righteous is to show a bit of kindness to a righteous person. You don’t have to be one of Jesus’ ardent followers; you need only acknowledge the life-giving quality of his teaching. If that sounds too easy to us, it might be a sign that we’re edging in the direction of the devout who want everything in its place and get upset at those who are less devout than they!
In any case, John’s disciples go off to relay Jesus’ message to their teacher, and Jesus turns to the other people around him and starts to joke with them.
Is that what this is? It does seem a bit pointless otherwise.
It starts with a little friendly joking, but then turns serious. Asking them if they went out to the wilderness along the Jordan River to watch the wind blow the reeds can only have elicited a laugh. The second question, whether they went there to see someone dressed in the height of fashion, is equally absurd. The third question—did they go out to see a prophet—touches on the real point. They may not have been certain that John was a prophet, but they suspected he was.
Then Jesus springs his punch line. Not a comic punch line, but one that pushes their understanding of John and his importance a step further: he wasn’t just a prophet, but the harbinger of a new age.
Is that what the quotation in vs. 10 is about? Where does it come from?
The quotation is from Malachi 3:1, but with an alteration: the original speaks of “my way” rather than “your way.” Jesus says that John has been sent by God to prepare someone else’s way. (The “your” here is specifically singular in Greek, not plural.) John is a transitional figure. Verse 11 makes the same point in another way: John is the greatest of human beings up to this point in time, but in the new age, the kingdom of the heavens, even the least person will be greater than John.
Yet another way of talking about this is found in vs. 13: “All the prophets and the law prophesied until John came.” The implication is that he represents the climax and conclusion of that process.
Wait up. What is this about “the law” prophesying? I thought the law was the law and the prophets were the prophets.
People did draw a distinction between different kinds of literature in the scriptures. But early Christians believed that prophecy might be found anywhere in them. To them, all the scriptures were full of mysteries—mysteries that would only come clear at the appropriate time or to the appropriate reader. Later on, for example, we’ll find Matthew treating a Psalm text as a prophecy.
But that’s not the whole story here. What about verse 14?
It’s another way of making the distinction between one age and the other. Elijah was generally thought of as the greatest of all prophets—a great miracle-worker and intransigent opponent of wrong-doing. And there was a possibility that Elijah might return. After all, according to 2 Kings 2, God took Elijah up into heaven in a fiery chariot. Since he never died, he could conceivably return if the need for him was great enough.
There’s a prediction of exactly that in the last two verses of Malachi: “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.” Jesus admits that identifying John with “Elijah to come” will be controversial—”if you’re willing to accept it,” he says. But he does seem to affirm it. And that, in turn, implies that the Day of the Lord, the great turning point is about to occur. After that the era of prophecy will be over.
You skipped something! What does vs. 12 have to do with all this?
Yes, I did. And since we’re trying to read carefully here, I’d better have a good explanation! In fact, I’ve kept it for separate discussion because it’s obscure and, lately, controversial among interpreters. What’s clear is that it’s part of Jesus’ interpretation of John as the transitional figure, the turning point. Some great change began to happen in “the time of John”—the time when he was actively preaching, before he was imprisoned. Since then, “the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” What could Jesus possibly mean?
John, of course, is suffering violence himself at the hands of Herod. But Jesus has already said that the kingdom of heaven is greater than John. So that isn’t the point. Some recent interpreters take the reference to violence literally and refer it to the increasing number of Jewish guerrillas who were resisting the Roman Empire in Judea and Galilee. They argue that Jesus intended to encourage armed rebellion; and they note that he was, after all, executed by the Romans in precisely the way they reserved for such rebels.
There are major problems with such an interpretation of Jesus. One is the assumption that the indictment, trial, and execution of Jesus were accurate responses to the specific realities of his ministry. We have no evidence that that was the case; in fact, the gospels all insist it wasn’t. And a broad knowledge of Roman courts suggests that one could not count on strict attention to justice, particularly in remote provinces. Roman legal theories were good. But the courts themselves were heavily influenced by social status, political connections, and the rhetorical skill of prosecutors or defenders. Most important, there was no real separation between the courts and the rest of government. A courtroom trial before Pontius Pilate was inevitably just as much a matter of public policy and governance as it was a matter of justice.
Furthermore, the notion that Jesus was a kind of first-century Che Guevara inevitably runs up against the fact that the vast majority of his teachings never suggest anything remotely resembling political revolution. Some have dismissed this vast array of teachings as having been created by later disciples to cover up their revolutionary past. If it was the case, we would have to believe that those disciples were much real religious geniuses, not Jesus. And, frankly, none of them cuts the kind of figure that would encourage any such idea.
So, if the violence here isn’t literal, what is it about?
I see two possibilities, which actually work together here. The first is that Jesus is simply making an observation about the degree of turmoil within Jewish life and faith in his time. There were several prominent, organized groups of devout people with quite different understandings of their common religion: Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots, Essenes, the followers of John, Jesus’ own followers. In addition, practical religious authority was divided between the priestly families who controlled the Temple and the Scribes who served as local authorities on religion in most other places. The members of the Pharisee party also had a popular reputation for religious expertise and were often consulted. In other words, Jesus is saying that kingdom of heaven is a subject of serious contention—something every one could see.
The other possibility is that Jesus is noting a tendency in John’s and his own ministry to open up Jewish religion more fully to people without a high level of expertise or who were unable to embrace the strictness of the other parties. They placed other concerns ahead of some of the details of the Law. We have seen this, for example, in Jesus’ sabbath healings, and in his relative lack of concern about purity. John, for his part, clashed with the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to him for baptism (3:7-10). From the perspective of the more established devout, they must have seemed like brash revolutionaries who were “breaking into” the religious sphere.
Then who are “the violent” who are actually taking the kingdom by force?
If I’m right in what I’ve just said, these “violent” people are the folk who came to John for baptism in order to get a new start with God and the folk who come to Jesus and feel themselves closer to God through his words and actions than through the specifics of their religion as defined by the religious authorities and the particularly pious. They form a kind of mob of irregulars doing the shared Jewish faith their own way—barging their way in, as it were..

Next up: JESUS DEFINES HIS TRUE AUDIENCE (11:16-30)