Bp Miller’s Musings: Third Sunday after Pentecost

Not long before the text for this Sunday’s gospel (Matthew 10:24-39), Jesus had exorcised a mute demoniac, enabling him to speak. As the crowds marveled at this act of healing, the Pharisees said, “He exorcizes demons through the Archon of the demons.” (The New Testament: A Translation, David Bentley Hart, 2017) Some knew this Archon (leader) by the name Beelzebul, one of the common names for Satan.

 

[As an aside, we should remember that Matthew uses a caricature of the Pharisees to represent those opposed to Jesus and the reign of God. We should exercise caution not to read this as an accurate description of the Pharisees, nor especially allow it to color our understanding of Jewish people today.]

 

Thus, when Jesus says to his disciples, “If they have arraigned the master of the household as ‘Beelzebul,’ how much more so those who belong to his household?” (v 25), he means to assure them that any persecution they might face for following his instructions simply means they are doing the right thing. Here and in the preceding verses we see the temporal promise that carrying out the mission of Jesus inevitably leads to rejection, abuse, betrayal, and other forms of persecution, and those who would follow Jesus should expect no better treatment than their master.

 

To further emphasize this, we need look no further than the prophet Jeremiah who laments his suffering for speaking the word of the Lord: “I have become a constant laughingstock, everyone jeers at me.” (20:7; The Jewish Publication Society, 2004) He speaks of the contempt of those around him for his honest prophecy of destruction, the betrayal of friends who seek to destroy him.

 

Measured against the eternal reward from God, however, these tribulations appear trivial. Jeremiah knows that God will vindicate him at the end for his faithfulness to the message he was given. Similarly, Jesus reminds us that our life in God far exceeds our brief time in our mortality. Life in God is its own reward because it is eternal: suffering now is but a blink of an eye.

 

These texts require us to believe that our lives are more than what we experience from birth to death. We must understand our existence within the eternity of God as something that extends infinitely beyond the grave. Our limited vision that holds us in fear of immediate suffering and death, must give way to the vision of abundant life in Christ Jesus, who died and was raised and has ascended into the Trinity. In this way, we might begin to experience the newness of life (Romans 6:4).