Nielsen’s Nook

In preparing for a sermon on the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18:21-35, I enjoyed some of the connections that came from the broader section of the gospel of Matthew that this pericope seems to punctuate.  Chapters 14 - 18 apparently form a unit¹ in which loads of things are happening.  The section begins and ends with consideration of kings and servants and through out considers two very different kinds of banquets.

Two Kings

Matthew 14 begins rehashing the death of John the Baptist at the hands of the wicked king Herod the tetrarch.  Matthew reminds us that Herod was a king that had unlawfully married his brother Philip’s wife (Matthew 14:3-4).  This Herod was the son of Herod the Great, who had ordered the murder of infants when Jesus had been born.²  In other words, the wickedness of Herod the tetrarch is nothing new; rather, it is iconic of the wickedness that beset this family dynasty.

Matthew 18 concludes with a very different king.  Where Herod had murdered and oppressed and thrived in the context of injustice, this king was one who was exceedingly merciful.  In fact, as the parable of the unforgiving servant goes, we find that this king (Gk. ο κυρίος) was one who found forgiving those who asked for pardon as something more valuable than the immeasurable sum of 10,000 talents.  For in the Greek world this was the highest sum for which the Greek language had a unique word (i.e., μύριοι). 

Two Servants

As mentioned Matthew 14, begins with the account of John the Baptist’s death.  John was the faithful servant, faithfully representing his good King.  He was imprisoned for being faithful to the call upon his life - calling sinners to repentance.  In any age, in any culture the call for repentance is always dangerous business.  At the hands of the unjust king Herod the tetrarch, John was handed over to the jailers and eventually his disembodied head was handed over to Herodias on a platter.

The section ends with the merciful and good king, who would forgive immeasurable debts, and a servant who is quite different than John the Baptist.  Where John had faithfully represented the king he served, the wicked unforgiving servant, who had deserved wrath and received mercy, represented wrath and not mercy to his fellow servants.  It is for this misrepresentation of the king by the wicked unmerciful servant to his fellow servants that this just king handed the unmerciful servant over to the jailers.

Two Banquets

Matthew 14 also begins with a banquet, Herod the tetrarch’s birthday party.  This king of death and sin had celebrated by severing the head of a faithful servant from his body.  The king who had presumably unassailable power as a Roman tetrarch, who commanded enormous taxes from the populous, that king had a banquet that ended in the death and sin to which he had paid tribute.

In the course of Matthew 14-18, the King of Glory, the Lord Jesus begins his feasts that will never end.  The bread of life, as the Gospel writer John would write, feeds the multitudes because he has compassion on them.  This is the same word that we find used by the king in the parable of the unmerciful servant (σπλαγχνίζομαι).  Admittance to this feast is only through the forgiveness and pardon of the king, who works in his servants to will and to act as agents of forgiveness upon this earth until he returns.

Conclusion

So it is that there were two kings.  The one was swallowed up by sin and death.  The other swallowed whole, not only sin and death, but also the grave and hell itself.  And the servants of these kings, while their fates may have seemed for a time to be quite unjust have been vindicated.  The dusty decaying bones of the wicked servant of the wicked king lie dislocated, strewn across a deserted banquet hall full of rotten food and repugnant vermin.  Meanwhile, the servants of the good King, feed upon not bread and wine that perish and rot but on the very body and blood of the King himself, who sustains them as they await the final banquet when injustice and wickedness are finally displaced forever.

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¹ Blomberg, Craig. Matthew. The New American Commentary ; V. 22. (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman Press, 1992), 281.

² Craig S. Keener and InterVarsity Press, The IVP Bible Background Commentary : New Testament (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), Lk 9:5.

Goto Part I

It is no coincidence that John informs us that Philip, whom Jesus had found, was from “Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.” Bethsaida was a fishing town just down the western shore of the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum, where Peter had built his home. “It is not unlikely that as fishermen in a fishing cooperative with James and John (Mk 1:19) they took their boats back and forth between Capernaum and Bethsaida.” ¹ The connection of Andrew and the unnamed disciple (John 1:35-39) was the means that Jesus seems to have used to find Philip.

Philip in turn went and found Nathanael. When Nathanael questioned the worthiness of Philip’s claim that he had found the fulfillment of the entire Old Testament (c.f., Deuteronomy 18:15-22), Philip replies simply, “Come and see.” It is quite a claim that Philip has made; however, what we find is that even that claim is an understatement. Our expectations of what we will see when we come to Jesus continue to be shaped and challenged.

When Nathanael comes to Jesus, he thinks he is amazed. Jesus saw him under the fig tree. This evokes from Nathanael, “Son of God! … King of Israel!”. However, what we find in this passage is that Jesus, the Incarnate Word, brings an amazement that is more than the maximum. Jesus responds with his first testimony of himself recorded in John’s Gospel, “You will see greater things that these. Truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (John 1:50-51).

This is an allusion to Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:10-22), in which he saw a ladder or stairway leading to heaven. In Jacob’s dream, God stood distant at the top of the stairs, mediating his affairs on earth through angels and dreams. In John 1:51 we find that God has come down the ladder, descended the stairs himself and brought heaven with him in the person of Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. As such Jesus is presenting himself as the only way by which anyone may come to God. He is the mediation also. In the incarnation then, we find that Jesus reveals himself to us as God himself and the way to God. To deny Christ’s mediatorial role is to deny God himself. To insert anything between God and humanity in addition to Jesus alone is to deny both the mediation and God who mediates.

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¹ Craig S. Keener and InterVarsity Press, The IVP Bible Background Commentary : New Testament (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), Jn 1:44.