Matthew 19–20: Greatness in God’s Kingdom Looks Like Service

We are picking it up in Matthew 19, and we are picking it up literally exactly where the last chapter left off.

We are continuing in exactly the same theme, exactly the same broader story that Matthew has been telling over the past few chapters, and that is that Jesus is having to course-correct his disciples.

Jesus is having to course-correct some major misconceptions that his disciples have fallen into.

His disciples have now been following him for some time, and apparently it’s begun to go to their head.

They are starting to obsess over status.

They are starting to obsess over worldly greatness and worldly power.

In the previous chapters leading up to this, we see the disciples all arguing over who is the greatest and coming to Jesus and saying, “Hey, tell us which of us is going to be the greatest in the kingdom of God. Which of us is going to be sitting next to you? Which of us is going to be your second-in-command? Which of us is going to be your right-hand man?”

They’re trying to be above each other.

The disciples have gotten it into their head that because they are followers of Jesus, they are above everybody else who’s not a follower of Jesus, and they’ve gotten it into their head that they are better than each other.

Peter’s gotten it in his head that he’s better than Andrew.

Nathaniel’s gotten it in his head that he’s better than Philip.

Matthew has gotten it into his head that he is better than James or John, and so on and so forth.

The disciples are actively arguing over who is the greatest.

They’ve become obsessed with worldly status.

They’ve developed a superiority complex.

They’ve developed a desire to be greater and more exalted than each other and other people.

They’ve developed this chip on their shoulder, this obsession with worldly power and worldly status and worldly—I don’t even know what the word I’m looking for is—but they’ve gotten completely off track.

They’ve gone completely in the wrong direction.

“It Must Not Be Like That Among You”

We see that once again here in Matthew 19 and 20 as James and John come to Jesus and they say, “Promise us that we can sit at your left hand and your right hand when you come into your throne and your kingdom and your glory.”

They say that when you carry out your great messianic work, when you restore the world, when you come back with angel armies, when you come to destroy the devil and the forces of darkness, when you come to do your saving work and you finish the job, please let us sit at your left hand and your right hand.

We want to be exalted above all the other disciples.

But James and John don’t even have the gall to ask him that themselves.

They send their mom to do it.

I don’t know what the deal is.

I don’t know if they thought that Jesus would respond better if they sent an elder to him or something like that, but they send their mom to go ask him, “Promise us that we can sit at your left hand and your right hand.”

And Jesus says, “Oh my gosh, we just talked about this.”

He says, “I just dressed down Peter about this. I just laid into you just a little bit ago about this when you guys were arguing over who was the greatest. You have to get this obsession with power and status out of your minds and your hearts.”

He says, “You are thinking like the Gentiles.”

He says, “You are thinking like the world. You are thinking like the rulers of this fallen and broken world. You are not thinking according to the Spirit that drew you to me. You are thinking according to the spirit of this world and the ruler of this world.”

He says:

“You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever desires to be first among you shall be your bondservant, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
—Matthew 20:25–28, WEB

They lord it over them.

They’re abusive towards those under them.

They seek to dominate.

He says:

“It must not be like that among you.”

Instead, whoever wants to be great among you must be servant of all.

Whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of all.

He says:

“I came not to be served but to serve.”

And in the same way, you must see yourselves as servants, not as status seekers, not as power seekers.

You are not looking to be better than others, above others, exalted over others, dominating others.

You are looking to serve.

You have taken up a life as a servant.

The Landowner Who Chooses the Rejects

He says, “You need to see yourself like this. I’m going to tell you a story.”

He says God is like a landowner who goes out and hires a very specific group of people at the beginning of the morning.

He goes and he hires the best and the brightest and all that, like you would expect, but then he goes back later in the day and he finds all the laborers who couldn’t find anybody to hire them.

He goes and he finds all the laborers who couldn’t get anybody to take them on for the day.

He goes and he finds the reject laborers.

He goes and he finds the laborers that apparently the people looked at them, they sized them up, and they said, “I don’t think you’re going to be quite what I’m looking for. I don’t think you’re going to be strong enough to work on my farm. I don’t think that you’re going to be smart enough to do the work that I need. I don’t think that you’re going to be diligent enough to do what I need you to do. I don’t think that you’re a fit laborer. I don’t think that you are a worthwhile laborer. It is not worth my money to hire you as my laborer today.”

This landowner goes out and he finds those guys, and he says, “You come with me. I’ve got a job for you.”

The Lord is like a landowner who hires not just the best and the brightest, but the rejects, the outsiders, the failures, the marginalized.

The people who literally are not good enough to be picked by the world are chosen by God.

He says, one, you need to understand that is God’s heart.

God loves the lost and the broken and the hurting and the struggling.

God loves the failures and the screw-ups.

God loves the people who are not good enough, who cannot measure up, who do not have it together, who are not the best and the brightest.

God loves those people, and he seeks out those people, and he favors those people.

He actively seeks the good of those people.

And that’s good for you, Jesus says, because you are those people.

He says, “I gathered you, and you guys are—you need to get this through your head—you guys are not the best that were out there, okay? I went and I picked a hotheaded poor fisherman who never seems to get it right, Peter. I went and I picked a guy who used to be a gang member, who people would actively avoid, Simon the Zealot. I went and I picked a tax collector, one of the most despised people here in society, Matthew. I went out and I picked these people from all these different walks of life who were despised and rejected and not good enough and fell short and all of that.”

He is not picking the best out there.

He is picking people who are radically in need of grace and blessing and favor.

He says you need to see yourself as one of those reject laborers that nobody would hire, but that God came out and said, “You. I want you.”

And when we learn to see God as that landowner who seeks and saves the lost, and we begin to see ourselves as unworthy reject laborers that God came out and found and chose and poured out his unmerited grace on, that transforms absolutely everything else about the way that we see ourselves.

A Radically Different Set of Priorities

And that radically transforms our priorities.

When we become God’s kingdom people, when he comes out from his land and he chooses us and says, “I choose you as my laborer,” that radically reorients our hearts and our minds and our desires and our priorities.

That radically changes what we seek out and what we value.

We become kingdom people who no longer obsess over worldly power, worldly prestige, worldly status.

We no longer obsess over being better than other people.

We no longer obsess over being superior to those people over there or these people over here.

We stop pursuing wealth for its own sake.

We stop pursuing titles.

We stop pursuing worldly power.

He says we stop being like the Gentiles who are seeking power and domination over others, to lord it over others, to be superior to others, to look down on others.

Instead, we begin to see ourselves, just like we talked about yesterday, as helpless children who were adopted by a loving and protective Father.

He says:

“Allow the little children, and don’t forbid them to come to me; for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to ones like these.”
—Matthew 19:14, WEB

And you better come to me like little children.

Two, we begin to see ourselves as lost sheep that the Lord came and found as a Good Shepherd, and reject laborers that the landowner came and chose despite our unworthiness.

And three, debtors who were forgiven by the King, by the debt collector, whose debt was paid in full.

And when we do that, when we see ourselves like that, it sets us free from all those pursuits we used to be after.

And we get two examples of what this looks like.

The Rich Young Ruler: When Wealth Becomes Status

Number one, the rich young ruler.

The rich young ruler comes to Jesus and he says, “You know, Teacher, what good must I do to inherit eternal life?”

And Jesus decides to teach him with a kind of common rabbinical—right, this is a common first-century teaching method where you would ask rhetorical questions and other things like that.

Jesus says, “Well, you know, what are the commandments? You know the commandments.”

He talks about the second half of the Ten Commandments.

These are the ones that deal with how humans relate to each other.

They deal with our relationship with other humans.

“Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Ten Commandments can basically be summarized: you love God by honoring him and worshiping him, and you love God by honoring the people that God created.

So the first half of the Ten Commandments is vertical.

It’s about how we relate to God.

The second half of the Ten Commandments is horizontal.

It’s about how we relate to each other.

And he says, “So how have you been doing with these commands?”

In other words, he says, “Where’s your heart at? How are you relating to people around you? What do you value?”

The rich young ruler says, “I’ve done good on all of those. I’ve never broken any of these.”

And Jesus is like, “That seems like a likely story. Really?”

So he says, “Okay, well, let’s see how serious you really are.”

He goes beyond just the letter of these commands, beyond just the official wording and so forth.

He says:

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
—Matthew 19:21, WEB

Why does Jesus say that?

Is it because every single Christian literally needs to sell everything they have and give the money to the poor?

No.

It’s because the rich young ruler thought he was doing great in following God’s commands, God’s will, God’s ways, and yet this rich young ruler worships money.

Why does he worship money?

The same reason the disciples keep arguing over who’s the greatest and asking Jesus to let them sit at his left hand and his right hand.

Because money is power.

Money is status.

Money exalts you above everybody else.

The rich young ruler is obsessed with his ability to be over others, and that is an ability that money gives to him.

And if he loses that money, then what?

Then he’s equal with everybody else.

Then he’s just a beggar like everybody else.

Then he is just a helpless child like all the rest of us, a lost sheep like all the rest of us, a debtor like all the rest of us, an unworthy laborer that God came out and chose just like the rest of us.

The one thing the rich young ruler cannot bring himself to do is let go of his obsessive pursuit of worldly power and status, his superiority complex, his desire to be the greatest, to be above everyone else.

But that is the one thing we cannot be as followers of Jesus because we are just helpless children who were adopted by a loving Father, lost sheep who were sought out and rescued by a Good Shepherd, hopeless debtors who were forgiven and paid in full by the debt collector, unworthy laborers who were chosen despite our unworthiness by the landowner.

So number one, this sets us free from our obsession with power and status in the form of wealth.

Marriage Is Not an Instrument of Power

But number two, this sets us free from our obsession with power and status in the form of lording our authority over our spouse.

This one requires a little bit more explanation.

It’s important to remember that when this is happening, they lived in what was called a patriarchal society.

I know that today, like a lot of feminist authors and things like that, they say that we live in a patriarchal culture and world and stuff like that.

They’re talking about something else.

They’re using a metaphor.

This was literally a patriarchal culture.

Men had rights.

Women had nothing.

If you were a wife, your husband literally owned you.

You were your husband’s property, period.

So he could do basically whatever he wanted to you with absolutely no consequences.

That is what the ancient Near Eastern world was like.

When Jesus says this, he is speaking specifically to this patriarchal culture and these patriarchal norms where men literally owned their wives and could do anything they wanted to their wives with no consequences.

And that included abandoning them.

There was absolutely no sense in the mainstream culture in the first century that men had any obligations whatsoever to their wives.

Now, in God’s law that he gave through Moses in the Old Testament, he lays out a bunch of obligations that men have towards their wives.

He lays out a bunch of important restrictions about how you can treat your wife and other things like that.

But here’s the funny thing.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees, the scribes, the religious leaders, the entrenched religious elites in Israel ignore almost all of that.

They made up a million new rules that God didn’t give them, and they ignored the very real rules that God did give for a very good purpose.

One of those rules was the protections that were there for women.

But with all of that in the background, the religious leaders come and they try to test Jesus.

They say, “Hey, okay, so is it lawful to divorce your wife for any reason? Is it lawful to send your wife away, to abandon your wife for any reason?”

They’re testing Jesus.

They’re trying to get Jesus to say something that will piss off the crowds.

They’re trying to get Jesus to say something that contradicts Scripture.

On the one hand, Jesus cannot say, “No, you may never divorce your wife, ever,” because in the Old Testament law, you were allowed to divorce your wife.

You were allowed to get a divorce under quite a few circumstances.

So if he says, “No, you can never divorce your wife for any reason,” then he’ll be contradicting Moses, and they can call him a blasphemer and a heretic, and they can stone him to death right then and there.

But at the same time, if he says, “Yeah, absolutely, you can divorce your wife for whatever reason,” then he would also be contradicting the Old Testament law.

He would also be contradicting what God gave through Moses because there were all kinds of restrictions on what you could do, how you could treat your wife, so on and so forth.

So Jesus says:

“Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been so.”
—Matthew 19:8, WEB

What is he talking about?

He’s talking about the fact that during the days of Moses, culture was even more patriarchal than it was in the first century.

Every single person alive at that point in time would have spent their entire life indoctrinated into this extreme patriarchal mindset where men owned their wives, where women had no rights whatsoever.

So God couldn’t just come and say, “Okay, from today on, men and women are absolutely equal in society.”

If he had done that, it literally would not have computed to them.

It literally would not have made any sense to them.

They would not have been able to wrap their head around it.

So instead of just coming in and carte blanche saying, “Okay, from now on, we are fundamentally changing absolutely everything. Men and women are totally equal in society. They have totally equal rights,” and so on and so forth, what he does is he comes and, within that patriarchal mindset that they had lived their whole lives growing up in, just swimming in the waters of, indoctrinated into by their culture, he goes within that framework and he says, “Okay, you may own your wife, but you still can’t do this. You may own your wife, but you still can’t do that. You may own your wife, but you have these obligations toward her. You owe her these things,” and so on and so forth.

He’s saying that when God gave the law through Moses, he was giving us a law that, at that time, we could understand.

He was giving us a law that, at that time, we could work with.

But that law, it’s good, but it’s not a full, clear representation of God’s deep design and desire and will for us.

He says God’s will for us is that our marriages, our relationships, be driven by faithfulness and loyalty.

He says we are called by the Lord to be faithful to our wives, not to treat them like property that we can just send away at any time.

He says our wives are not meant to be treated as property that we can just abandon, just walk away from at any time when something better comes along, when it starts to get difficult.

So he says:

“Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts, but it was not like that from the beginning.”

God created us male and female so that we could become one flesh.

Total faithfulness.

Total loyalty.

Total safety.

Total mutuality.

Total equality between the two of us.

We may have different roles, but we are absolutely equal persons in the image of God.

Our marriage is meant to be a partnership of equals, a partnership of mutuality, not a buyer-seller arrangement where one person is disposable and the other has absolute power over the other one.

So he says:

“I tell you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries her when she is divorced commits adultery.”
—Matthew 19:9, WEB

That word porneia—we talked about this back in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, in the Sermon on the Mount—the word porneia means a pretty wide range of things, but at the very, very core, what it means is betrayal.

He says marriage is meant to be a lifelong, mutual partnership among absolute equals that is only broken if there is a betrayal so radical and unbearable that it makes the relationship totally irreparable.

Kingdom People Do Not Dominate. They Serve.

So that’s a long tangent because this is just such a confusing passage that needs a lot of explanation.

But the point here is this.

Jesus is doing the same thing here that he’s doing with the rich young ruler.

He’s doing the same thing here that he does when he rebukes James and John for demanding to sit at his left hand and his right hand.

He’s doing the same thing here that he is doing when he rebukes the disciples for arguing over who is the greatest and so on and so forth.

Jesus is teaching us, as kingdom people, we no longer relentlessly and obsessively seek power over others, to be exalted over others, to be above others, to be superior to others.

We kill our superiority complex.

We kill our desire to dominate and control others and push them around.

So we no longer seek wealth as a tool to make us above others, and we no longer treat our marriage and relationships as a way of having someone that we can bully and dominate and push around, chew up, and then just dispose of.

Instead, as kingdom people, our marriage and relationships are about serving one person faithfully for the rest of our life.

It is about loving one person loyally for the rest of our life.

It is about caring for one person for the rest of our life, embracing them, accepting their flaws, loving them as they are forever.

And when we do that, Paul says in Ephesians chapter 5, it’s a picture of the Gospel.

Jesus is radically redefining so many aspects of life, from wealth to marriage.

We redefine these things when we begin to see ourselves as helpless children adopted by a loving Father, lost sheep found and sought and rescued by a Good Shepherd, hopeless debtors whose debt was paid in full by the debt collector, unworthy laborers who were brought in and chosen by the merciful landowner, so that we no longer obsessively pursue status and power to be above others, to see ourselves as superior to others.

Instead, we serve.