Oct 07 2008
Matthew 11
John the Baptist from prison sends his disciples to ask Jesus whether he is the one expected, or whether they are to wait for another. Green (p137) pictures John sitting in prison and not seeing the revolutionary behaviour from Jesus that he had expected. Chrysostom, in contrast, considers that for John to have such serious doubts now would bring into question all the confidence he had displayed in Jesus before (XXXVI:1) and therefore he is sending his disciples for their own benefit, rather than for his (XXXVI:2). The text does not give an indication of John’s motive, which must therefore remain a matter of conjecture, but a straight reading of the text would indicate that the question was a genuine question of John’s.
Green goes further than to suggest John’s doubts, however. Even after commenting on Jesus’s strong commendation of John that he was “a prophet… and much more than a prophet… there has never been anyone greater than John the Baptist” (11:9-11) Green interprets “the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he” (11:11) to indicate that because of John’s doubts, he does not know the King and is not in the Kingdom (p138), and later (p144) he suggests that John even “rejected him” because of his doubts. This seems to be going a good deal further than the text.
There is another question, here, however. Most (if not all) English translations interpret the word ‘μικροτερος’ here as a superlative (‘least’) though technically it is in the form of a comparative (‘less’). Chrysostom takes it literally as a comparative, and suggests that the one who is ‘less’ in the Kingdom of Heaven than John is now Jesus: less in age, less in repute among the people, thus maintaining John’s standing from the previous verses without dropping it to exclusion from the Kingdom of Heaven as Green does.
In fact, even interpreting μικροτερος as ‘less’ still leaves open Green’s interpretation of John’s doubts (though not his rejection of Jesus!), but perhaps it could be modified by comparison with Jesus’s saying in Lk 11:27. In response to a woman’s crying out ‘blessed is the womb that bore you’, Jesus said ‘blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it’. This response clearly does not indicate that the keeper of God’s word should be blessed instead of his mother (see Lk 1:48: “all generations will call me blessed”), instead it means that (1) more important than biological affinity to him is obedience to God’s word and (2) the reason his mother is blessed is not primarily from carrying him in her womb, but because it was out of a life of obedience to God’s word that she received him into her womb. If this is a valid parallel, then, here Jesus would be indicating that (1) John’s great works as a prophet are not as important as the works of one who lives the life of righteousness he has been teaching as descriptive of life in the Kingdom of Heaven and (2) the reason that John will in the end be considered great is for living out the life of repentance and righteousness, not just for proclaiming the message. Thus John’s reputation established by Jesus in the preceding verses still stands – but in the context of Jesus’s teaching on life in the Kingdom of Heaven.
