Jesus said to his apostles: “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me. Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward. And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple–amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.” (Matthew 10.37-39)
For several weeks, we have looked at the so-called “missionary discourse” that is found slightly less than mid-way through Matthew’s gospel. The heart of the discourse is Rabbi Jesus’ teaching to the disciples on their role and on their mission in the world. As we have seen at the start of the discourse, Rabbi Jesus “gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness.”
We also have seen how the Rabbi prepares his disciples for the rejection that is an inevitable part of the confrontation with a world hellbent on doing wrong. He arms them with the brutal truth, telling them to expect the same treatment that was dished out to him, including crucifixion. “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more those of his household,” he warns them, fortifying them for the fight that is sure and soon to come.
Today, the discourse continues with Rabbi Jesus making clear the priority that discipleship should have on their lives, insisting that “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” certainly an uncomfortable test of our allegiance to his ways and to his words as well as a summons to put first things first if we hope to follow in his footsteps.
And then he offers some thoughts on hospitality, specifically the hospitality shown to his disciples by others who welcome them, stating, “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me,” drawing a parallel between himself and his followers, the relationship much the same as an emissary in ancient times who represented and spoke for the king.
For our purposes, we may want to take a closer look at this section on hospitality, redirecting our attention away from the one who opens his or her door for the disciple, and putting our focus more on the disciple since, after all, that is the role we ostensibly want to take on in imitation of our mentor and teacher, Rabbi Jesus.
I make this suggestion because we find here Rabbi Jesus seemingly suggesting three critical aspects of our role as his disciple, a tripartite job description that may slip past us if we only are concerned with the reception that we will receive from others because we bring to them the message of the Galilean Teacher. As I see it, we can’t do much about the reception we get from others. That’s in their hands.
But we can do a lot about our role as disciples because that’s in our hands and in our hearts. We make ourselves worthy disciples or pale imitations. If we want to know which we are, then we want to spend some time looking at the three descriptions that Rabbi Jesus affixes here to his disciples. Each one is critically important to our self-identification as followers of the Galilean.
As we see, Rabbi Jesus presents the three functions in a movement from high to low, at least in the common understanding, but I tend to see the three as equally important, much like the legs on a stool. Take one away and the stool is useless. Just as no one can sit on a one-legged or two-legged stool, so a disciple is going to be missing a key component of discipleship if one or the other of these qualities goes missing.
So, we begin with the first identification. It is found in Rabbi Jesus’ words when he says, “Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” There is little question that the Rabbi is putting a prophetic role onto his followers with these words, seeing them as continuing his own work which, without question, was prophetic.
Ancient Israel had a history of prophets–good ones and bad ones. The best of them always called the people back to the ways of the Most High God, forewarning catastrophe if the people traded their souls for the things of this world, such as power, prestige, or position. The prophets stood a head taller than their peers, simply because they could see things that others could not. They knew trouble when they saw it brewing and they tried to steer people away from it.
Abraham Heschel, in his masterful book, The Prophets, reminds us that “one of the most striking and one of the most pervasive features of the prophetic polemic is the denunciation and distrust of power in all its forms and guises.” As he said, “The hunger of the powerful knows no satiety. The appetite grows on what it feeds.”
These prophets of old not only heard the heartbeat of the Most High God, they also read the heart of God. One might say they could penetrate the veil between heaven and earth and see what lay in the heart of the Lord God. And what did they see when they looked into the heart of God? They saw a heart overflowing with love for humankind–all of it, even in its wretched and wearied state. As Heschel said, “A prophet’s true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.”
There is something profound in that statement, something right. The prophet always sees the Divine and the human at one and the same time, the two belonging together because one is the Creator and the other is created. So, the prophet is quick to sound the alarm when the powerful try to exploit the powerless, attempts to steal the voice of the voiceless, or wants to pillage the poor for their own profit.
In a world writ large with wrongdoing, these incidents may seem ordinary, a part of everyday life. For the prophet, they are, as Heschel says, “a disaster . . . a deathblow to existence . . . a threat to the world.” The reason is easy to find. The Most High God did not create the world to be a playpen for those in power or a personal park for those in high positions.
Always and often, the prophet railed against the neglect of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner, a catchall phrase for people who have nothing and nobody, people who are the most vulnerable to exploitation, people who seemingly have nobody on their side except the Most High God. These are favored and blessed by God, as Rabbi Jesus himself made abundantly clear in his own teachings.
So, if our discipleship is worth a dime, then there has to be this prophetic element to it, a full throttle defense of those who cannot defend themselves against the constant threat of the diminishment of their dignity as sons and daughters of the Most High God, equal to those in positions of power, even if they don’t have a coat on their back or a penny in their pocket.
The second element follows when Rabbi Jesus says, “And whoever welcomes a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward.” So, here the Rabbi tells his disciples that they are expected to live righteous lives. At the sake of oversimplification, we could say the righteous person lives his or her life in the right way. And what is the right way? It is the way of God.
Someone who is righteous, then, follows the commands of God, not the dictates of the world. A righteous person chooses the good whenever the choice for the bad is easier and safer. A righteous person lives by a code of behavior that was etched in stone on Mount Sinai, not by a way of life defined by current fads or fans of the world. Their moral compass never wiggles or waits. It is always true north because it is directed by the ways of God.
Guided by the prophetic sensibility that sees wrong and sorts it out speedily, the righteous person walks on a lonely path in the world , few fellow travelers willing to traverse the trails where righteousness leads. Often they are rejected because they ruffle feathers, ostracized because they prick consciences, and ignored because they upset the status quo. But the righteous are at peace because they are at home with God.
Then there is the third element that Rabbi Jesus expects to be part and parcel of a life spent in imitation of his own way in the world. And that is found when he next says, “And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple–I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”
So, the third leg of the stool that we call discipleship is being a “little one.” There are several possible interpretations of the phrase, but they all revolve around the idea of being little, which surely is not all that difficult to understand. The Hebrew scriptures spoke of the “anawim,” often translated as “the little ones,” a reference to the disenfranchised, the deprived, and the destitute.
Surely, there is that same connotation implied in Rabbi Jesus’ use of the words. But we can probably contextualize it in terms of Rabbi Jesus’ instruction elsewhere that his followers should not vie for the seats at the head table, but should choose the back seats against the wall. As he often said, “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first,” a call for his disciples to be servants, not royalty; foot soldiers, not generals; water boys, not quarterbacks.
Our place as disciples is alongside the weak, the weary, and the worn out, not alongside those who have the clicks, the clout, and the cash. If there is any question of what Rabbi Jesus means when he speaks of his disciples being “little ones,” we have only to look at his own life, a life spent in giving, not in getting; in serving, not in being served; in dying to self, not in fulfilling oneself. He shows by the way he lived exactly what a “little one” looks like and how a “little one” lives in the world.
So, these three things, in my opinion, guide us on our way to becoming disciples of Rabbi Jesus. First, we take a prophetic stance; second, we live a righteous life; and third, we stand with “the little ones” of the world, becoming one with them. If we are earnest about discipleship–and surely we are–then there is no better place to do a progress report on ourselves than to use these three elements as a checklist.
In Heschel’s book on the prophets, he offers this sobering thought, one that deserves our consideration today as we ponder just what it means to know the heart of God and to live the ways of God. He wrote, “There is nothing we forget as eagerly, as quickly, as the wickedness of man. The earth holds such a terrifying secret. Ruins are removed, the dead are buried, and the crimes forgotten. Bland complacency, splendid mansions, fortresses of cruel oblivion, top the graves. The dead have no voice, but God will disclose the secret of the earth.”
As we can see, those are serious words and a stern rebuke to the ways of the world. As disciples of Rabbi Jesus, we are called to help the Most High God “disclose the secret of the earth,” bringing to light what is hidden in the darknes, as the Rabbi said, in this way reminding humankind of its higher calling and summoning the world to return to the Garden that God formed in the beginning.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 