This brings us back to Matthew sixteen and Jesus’ statement to Peter. With our having established that the Temple was the point of reference with talk of earth and heaven (throughout the New Testament and demonstrably so in Matthew and all of the Gospels), while also establishing that Jesus sees Himself as the new Temple, we have done ourselves a great hermeneutical service. By extension then, continuing with said hermeneutic, in line with the earliest interpreters of the Jesus’ tradition, the church, as it carries out the mission of Jesus, infused with the same Spirit by which Jesus was raised up from the dead, is to be conceived of as the Temple in so far as it represents Jesus.
Therefore, talk of earth and heaven, within an appropriate context, becomes talk of the church. We can use this knowledge as we hear Jesus speak to Peter. Peter has just insisted that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16b). Part of Jesus’ response to this declaration is to tell Peter that “flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father in heaven!” (16:17b) The use of flesh and blood presents us with an unspoken contrast of revelation by a means other than flesh and blood. When Jesus says “My Father in heaven” revealed this to Peter, having set “flesh and blood” in juxtaposition, He is making an obvious reference to the activity of God, by means of His Spirit. This sets the stage for what is to come, especially as we consider that it was understood by the followers of Christ that it was the Spirit of God at work to animate Jesus following His Resurrection, with that Spirit then animating His church. If this is the case, when Jesus goes on to say “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (16:19a), the kingdom of heaven being the hoped-for and expected reality of God’s rule on earth through His Messiah, which was foundational to Jesus’ message as well as that which His ministry embodies the hoped-for reality to which it pointed, then Jesus, when speaking of the “keys,” speaks of the church.
We must always be careful to not confuse the church with the kingdom of heaven. Those who compose the church are the representatives of the kingdom of heaven, but the church is never to be thought of as the kingdom of heaven itself. The church is to be the herald of God’s kingdom come to earth, and is to be the place of the overlap of heaven and earth. It is to be the locus of binding and loosing. That binding is the binding of the operative powers of death and the many forms that it takes in this world, whereas that loosing is the loosing of people and the creation from those same destructive powers. Can such an assertion be made?
What do we see from Jesus from the very beginning of His ministry? We see that He “went throughout all of Galilee… preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people” (4:23). Here we see Jesus performing operations of binding and loosing. We could take a look at all of Jesus’ pronouncements concerning the kingdom of heaven to be found in Matthew, drawing out the analogies of binding and loosing, but rather than do that, it would be more worthwhile to point out that such binding and loosing, though we tend to see it only as acts of healing from physical sickness, were actually social healings as well, allowing for the recipients of the merciful compassion of God, through Jesus, to be re-admitted as full participants in the community.
Everywhere that Jesus enacts the kingdom of heaven, creating the overlap of the two realms of existence, there is binding and loosing occurring. As we hear Jesus say “Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven” (16:19b), we need to understand Him to be saying, “Whenever you act on earth in a way that defeat the powers that attempt to continue to mar God’s good creation, you have introduced the power of God’s realm of existence (heaven), into the world.” Likewise, when we hear Jesus say “and whatever you release on earth will have been released in heaven” (16:19c), rather than hear this with some sense of a vast gulf between heaven and earth, we need to hear Him saying, “Whenever you act on earth in a way in a way that liberates your fellow man, affirming their humanity and bringing them closer to rightly bearing the divine image in which they were created, you enact the power of heaven in the world.”
Though we have been trained, perhaps unfortunately, to hear or to speak these words of binding and loosing in a spiritual sense, doing so in some sort of reference to the realm of the operation of supernatural powers that we somehow command by the name of Jesus, it is not at all clear that the disciples would have been so restricted in their hearing. There would most certainly have been a general awareness of cosmic powers at work and evidenced by various forms of sickness, disease, handicaps, and the like, but it was not these powers that were to be bound or loosed. Rather, it was the people that were subject to such powers that were said to be bound, and it was these same people that were loosed from these powers by the word and touch of Jesus. Concurrently, these powers that kept people physically bound were the same powers that kept them socially bound, ostracized from the community, so their unbinding would also serve to loose them from their social chains as well.
So, do we go too far if we insist that talk of binding and loosing is to be interpreted within the framework of the church, as the church serves out its mission to represent the kingdom of heaven, mimicking the message and ministry of Jesus? It is possible. However, if we turn to the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, we once again hear Jesus speaking and saying “I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you release on earth will have been released in heaven” (18:18). What precedes this statement? Jesus is presented as dealing with the restoration of relationships (part and parcel of binding and loosing, as we have seen). In the course of talking about faults and forgiveness and dealing with our kingdom brethren, Jesus says “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. If he refuses to listen to the church, treat him like a Gentile or a tax collector” (18:17). As yet another aside, based upon the Gospel witness of Jesus’ ministerial efforts, this means to redouble your efforts towards him and treat him the way you see I treat Gentiles and tax collectors.
Here, Jesus speaks about the church before speaking about binding and loosing, along with talk of heaven and earth, linking the power to bind and loose with the church. One might attempt to argue that this talk of the church did not spring from the lips of Jesus Himself, but that it is an interpolation into the Jesus tradition by the composer of the Gospel of Matthew, as he (or she) attempts to deal with issues in the church community by placing words on Jesus’ mouth. If this were the case, it merely serves to underscore the fact that Jesus’ disciples well understood that His talk of binding and loosing, being linked with talk of earth and heaven, was Temple language, and therefore applied to them as the living Temple of the body of Christ. In closing, we can see that Jesus punctuates His statement here in Matthew’s eighteenth chapter with “Again, I tell you the truth, if two of you on earth agree about whatever you ask, My Father in heaven will do it for you” (18:19). We see this as yet another overlapping of heaven and earth, which leads to an even greater example of the way that the church is to be the place of the coming together of heaven and earth, when Peter learns that he is to offer essentially unlimited forgiveness to his fellow kingdom denizens. We find herein great power to bind or to loose.
No comments:
Post a Comment