Chapter 5 – Jesus Is Greater
When I was a student at Moody Bible Institute, I worked on
the window-washing crew. We hung out of windows on straps and climbed tall
ladders, and our “hazard pay” was twenty-five cents an hour more than the rest
of the student janitors received.
One of our ladders was a fifty-foot wooden monstrosity that
we used to clean the high, arched windows of Torrey Gray Auditorium. Even that
was not quite tall enough to reach the peak of the windows unless a fellow was
foolish enough to stand on the top rung. We had a couple of guys who would do
it. I wasn’t one of them.
One day the other guys insisted that I go up the ladder. As
I nervously neared the top, one of my co-workers jumped as high as he could and
grabbed a rung from the inside. The weight of his body caused the ladder to
slide down a foot or so. Then he let go and the ladder bounced against the
wall. I scuttled down, shaken and angry, and I never went up that ladder again.
The top rung of a tall ladder is a precarious place reserved
only for the supremely (or foolishly) confident.
In a series of striking claims, Jesus mounted the ladder stretching
from earth to heaven until there were no more rungs to climb. Then He stood
there, supremely confident in His position and His authority. He calmly claimed
to be greater than the great, and more holy than Israel’s most sacred
institutions.
More than once the scribes and Pharisees demanded that Jesus
show them a sign to support His outrageous claims of authority. What did they
want more than feeding five thousand men with a little boy’s lunch, or healing the
blind, the lame and the lepers! In the face of such willful blindness, Jesus
simply refused.
But He answered and said to them, “An evil
and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the
prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the
belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights
in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up with
this generation at the judgment, and will condemn it because they repented at
the preaching of Jonah; and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matthew
12:39-41).
Think for a moment about this claim. We probably count
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel as the greatest of the Old Testament prophets,
and in terms of the wonderful revelations God gave them, that is certainly
true. However, none of them had the kind of response Jonah did. Most of the
prophets preached to deaf Israelite ears. Jonah went (under compulsion) to the
pagan city, Nineveh. In Jonah’s day Nineveh was one of the royal cities of the
Assyrian empire. Later on, it became the capitol. Assyria has a well-deserved
reputation as one of the most a ruthless, violent, nations of the ancient world.
One of the Assyrian kings boasts,
“The monuments which I erect are made of
human corpses from which I have cut the head and limbs. I cut off the hands of
all those whom I capture alive.” Reliefs at Nineveh show men being impaled or
flayed, or having their tongues torn out; one shows a king gouging out the eyes
of prisoners with a lance while he holds their heads conveniently in place with
a cord passed through their lips.
After regaling his readers with these
atrocities, Will Durant wryly adds, “As we read such pages we become reconciled
to our own mediocrity.”[1]
No wonder Jonah didn’t want to preach to them! Nevertheless,
he did, and this great city with more than 120,000 morally deficient
inhabitants repented. No other Hebrew prophet had such an amazing response to
his message—and in this case it was gentiles who believed.
So, in what way was Jesus claiming to be greater than Jonah?
First of all, His resurrection from the dead would be a greater miracle than
Jonah’s preservation in the sea monster. Second, a great pagan city repented at
the preaching of Jonah, but an innumerable multitude of gentiles would be
attracted to the message of Jesus. (Matthew 8:11 and 24:31 indicate that Jesus
looked forward to gathering many gentiles into His kingdom.) The Ninevites
repented with far less evidence that Jesus provided His contemporaries. He was
a far greater prophet than Jonah.
That is the first rung of the ladder. Jesus stands higher
than the prophets. The next rung of the ladder places Jesus above the wisest
man who ever lived.
The Queen of the South
will rise up with this generation at the judgment and will condemn it, because
she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold,
something greater than Solomon is here (Matthew 12:42).
When Solomon asked God for “an understanding
heart to judge Your people to discern between good and evil,” God replied,
... behold, I have done according to your
words. Behold, I have given you a wise and discerning heart, so that there has
been no one like you before you, nor shall one like you arise after you (1 Kings
3:9, 12).
Yes, I know that Solomon forsook his great
wisdom in his old age, but the fact remains that God said no one else would
ever have such wisdom as he. Who, then, has the right to claim that he is wiser
than the wisest man?
Greater than the most successful prophet, wiser than King
Solomon—the next rungs up the ladder leave even these far behind.
At that time Jesus went through the
grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick
the heads of grain and
eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not
lawful to do on a Sabbath” (Matthew 12:1-2).
Before we move on through the text, it is important to note
the basis for the Pharisees’ complaint. According to Deuteronomy 23:25, it was
perfectly all right to pluck the heads of standing grain in a neighbor’s field.
Using a sickle to cut the stalks was stealing. Eating a few grains out of one’s
hand was not. The Pharisees charged the disciples of Jesus not with stealing,
but with working on the Sabbath. How serious was that accusation? The Old
Testament Law was clear.
Therefore you are to observe the sabbath,
for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death;
for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his
people. For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there
is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord;
whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely be put to death (Exodus
31:14-15).
The Jews of Jesus day, living under Roman rule, did not have
the freedom to carry out the letter of the Old Testament law, but shortly after
Moses announced the penalty an Israelite man decided to put it to the test.
Isn’t there always someone like that, pushing the boundaries just to see if
they will hold?
Now while the sons of Israel were in the
wilderness, they found a man gathering wood on the sabbath day. Those
who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and to all the
congregation; and they put him in custody because it had not been
declared what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall
surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones
outside the camp.” So all the congregation brought him outside the
camp and stoned him to death with stones, just as the Lord had commanded Moses (Numbers 15:32-36).
Working on the Sabbath was a serious charge! How did Jesus
defend His disciples? His answer is two-fold. First, He argued that human need
and necessary work take precedence over God-ordained ceremonial regulations.
David, in a time of need, ate the “consecrated bread, which was not lawful for
him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone.” Even the priests
had to do work in the temple on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:3-5). To reinforce His
point, Jesus quoted from Hosea 6: “But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire
compassion and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent
(Matthew 12:7).
Jesus used this kind of argument on other occasions to
defend healing the sick on the Sabbath.
And He said to them, “What man is
there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath,
will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable
then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath”
(Matthew 12:11-12).
If Jesus had stopped at this point, He would have appeared
to be just another rabbi making an argument on the basis of Old Testament texts.
However, He didn’t stop. He took a giant step up, passing over several rungs on
our metaphorical ladder when He said, “For the Son of Man is Lord of the
Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8).
“The Son of Man” was Jesus normal way of referring to
Himself. At the very least, He was claiming to have the authority to rule on
acceptable Sabbath behavior. More than that, if He was the Lord of the Sabbath,
His authority exceeded the authority of Moses who had to go ask Yahweh what to
do with the man gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Finally, by implication, Jesus
had the authority to set aside the Sabbath altogether, which His apostles later
did (Colossians 2:16-17).
Wow! And if that didn’t light a fire under the Pharisees’
fringed robes, Jesus had one more incendiary bomb to drop. It comes before His
claim to be Lord of the Sabbath. Just after referring to the priests working in
the temple on the Sabbath, He added, “But I say to you that something greater
than the temple is here” (v. 6).
Something greater than
the temple? I can imagine the Pharisees looking all around for something or
other greater than the temple—It’s not
over there on the left. It’s not over there on the right. It’s not behind us. Jesus
must be talking about Himself!
What could be greater than the temple? The temple was the
dwelling place of God on earth among His people, Israel. The Psalms are filled
with longing for God’s house because godly Israelites were deeply conscious of
God’s presence in the dark, inner
recesses of the temple. Psalm 26:8 is typical: “O Lord, I love the habitation of Your
house and the place where Your glory dwells.”
Jesus is greater
than the temple made of stone because He is the living temple, the ultimate dwelling
place of Yahweh. Early in His ministry, Jesus proclaimed, “Destroy this temple,
and in three days I will raise it up.” That was sufficiently cryptic to confuse
everybody who heard Him, but the apostle John writing after the resurrection of
Jesus explained, “But He was speaking of the temple of His body” (John 2:19,
21).
When Jesus told the Pharisees that He was greater than the
temple, they would not have been able to understand the full implication of His
statement. They certainly understood, however, that He was claiming to be
higher and greater than the holiest spot on earth. Perhaps it was not a direct
claim to deity, but Jesus was standing confidently on the highest rung of the
ladder with one end touching the earth and the other in heaven. The only way He
could have been more clear would have been to shout, “Hey, you guys! I’m God.”
There is one more thing to note, something that throws these
“greater than” claims into sharp relief. Jesus is not only greater than Jonah,
greater than Solomon, greater than the temple and Lord of the Sabbath. He also
said, “I am gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29).
Egomaniacs might tout their pretended humility in order to
further their evil plans. Uriah Heep in Dickinson’s David Copperfield comes to mind. But what shall we say about Jesus? Either Jesus was fooling Himself, or He
was fooling His disciples, or He was supremely conscious of His own voluntary
lowering of Himself.
His disciples called Him “Teacher and Lord” and He said,
“you are right, for so I am” (John 13:13), but He lowered Himself to wash His
disciples’ feet. Perhaps a couple of weeks before that, as He was preparing His
disciples for the cross that lay in his future, He called His disciples to
Himself and said,
You know that those who are recognized as
rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise
authority over them. But it is not this way among you, but whoever
wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever
wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all. For even the Son
of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom
for many (Mark 10:42-45).
From this perspective, Jesus is the greatest
and the first because He willingly gave His life a ransom for many.
[1] Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, The Story of Civilization, vol. 1, (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 276.
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