Untitled Sermon (33)

Matthew 21:20 KJV 1900

20 And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away!

Micah 7 KJV 1900

1 Woe is me! for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits, As the grapegleanings of the vintage: There is no cluster to eat: My soul desired the firstripe fruit. 2 The good man is perished out of the earth: And there is none upright among men: They all lie in wait for blood; They hunt every man his brother with a net. 3 That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, The prince asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward; And the great man, he uttereth his mischievous desire: So they wrap it up. 4 The best of them is as a brier: The most upright is sharper than a thorn hedge: The day of thy watchmen and thy visitation cometh; Now shall be their perplexity. 5 Trust ye not in a friend, Put ye not confidence in a guide: Keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom. 6 For the son dishonoureth the father, The daughter riseth up against her mother, The daughter in law against her mother in law; A man’s enemies are the men of his own house. 7 Therefore I will look unto the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation: My God will hear me. 8 Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: When I fall, I shall arise; When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me. 9 I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him, Until he plead my cause, and execute judgment for me: He will bring me forth to the light, and I shall behold his righteousness. 10 Then she that is mine enemy shall see it, and shame shall cover her Which said unto me, Where is the Lord thy God? Mine eyes shall behold her: Now shall she be trodden down as the mire of the streets. 11 In the day that thy walls are to be built, In that day shall the decree be far removed. 12 In that day also he shall come even to thee From Assyria, and from the fortified cities, And from the fortress even to the river, And from sea to sea, and from mountain to mountain. 13 Notwithstanding the land shall be desolate because of them that dwell therein, For the fruit of their doings. 14 Feed thy people with thy rod, the flock of thine heritage, Which dwell solitarily in the wood, in the midst of Carmel: Let them feed in Bashan and Gilead, as in the days of old. 15 According to the days of thy coming out of the land of Egypt Will I shew unto him marvellous things. 16 The nations shall see and be confounded at all their might: They shall lay their hand upon their mouth, their ears shall be deaf. 17 They shall lick the dust like a serpent, They shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth: They shall be afraid of the Lord our God, And shall fear because of thee. 18 Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, And passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not his anger for ever, Because he delighteth in mercy. 19 He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; He will subdue our iniquities; And thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. 20 Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, Which thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old.

Malachi KJV 1900

1 The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. 2 I have loved you, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord: Yet I loved Jacob, 3 And I hated Esau, And laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness. 4 Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, But we will return and build the desolate places; Thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; And they shall call them, The border of wickedness, And, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever. 5 And your eyes shall see, and ye shall say, The Lord will be magnified from the border of Israel. 6 A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: If then I be a father, where is mine honour? And if I be a master, where is my fear? Saith the Lord of hosts unto you, O priests, that despise my name. And ye say, Wherein have we despised thy name? 7 Ye offer polluted bread upon mine altar; And ye say, Wherein have we polluted thee? In that ye say, The table of the Lord is contemptible. 8 And if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? And if ye offer the lame and sick, is it not evil? Offer it now unto thy governor; Will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy person? saith the Lord of hosts. 9 And now, I pray you, beseech God that he will be gracious unto us: This hath been by your means: Will he regard your persons? saith the Lord of hosts. 10 Who is there even among you that would shut the doors for nought? Neither do ye kindle fire on mine altar for nought. I have no pleasure in you, saith the Lord of hosts, Neither will I accept an offering at your hand. 11 For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same My name shall be great among the Gentiles; And in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: For my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts. 12 But ye have profaned it, in that ye say, The table of the Lord is polluted; And the fruit thereof, even his meat, is contemptible. 13 Ye said also, Behold, what a weariness is it! And ye have snuffed at it, saith the Lord of hosts; And ye brought that which was torn, and the lame, and the sick; Thus ye brought an offering: Should I accept this of your hand? saith the Lord. 14 But cursed be the deceiver, which hath in his flock a male, And voweth, and sacrificeth unto the Lord a corrupt thing: For I am a great King, saith the Lord of hosts, And my name is dreadful among the heathen. 1 And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you. 2 If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, To give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: Yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart. 3 Behold, I will corrupt your seed, And spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; And one shall take you away with it. 4 And ye shall know that I have sent this commandment unto you, That my covenant might be with Levi, saith the Lord of hosts. 5 My covenant was with him of life and peace; And I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared me, And was afraid before my name. 6 The law of truth was in his mouth, And iniquity was not found in his lips: He walked with me in peace and equity, And did turn many away from iniquity. 7 For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge, And they should seek the law at his mouth: For he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. 8 But ye are departed out of the way; Ye have caused many to stumble at the law; Ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the Lord of hosts. 9 Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people, According as ye have not kept my ways, But have been partial in the law. 10 Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, By profaning the covenant of our fathers? 11 Judah hath dealt treacherously, And an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; For Judah hath profaned the holiness of the Lord which he loved, And hath married the daughter of a strange god. 12 The Lord will cut off the man that doeth this, the master and the scholar, Out of the tabernacles of Jacob, And him that offereth an offering unto the Lord of hosts. 13 And this have ye done again, Covering the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping, and with crying out, Insomuch that he regardeth not the offering any more, Or receiveth it with good will at your hand. 14 Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, Against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: Yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant. 15 And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, And let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth. 16 For the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away: For one covereth violence with his garment, saith the Lord of hosts: Therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously. 17 Ye have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, And he delighteth in them; Or, Where is the God of judgment? 1 Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: And the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, Even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: Behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts. 2 But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap: 3 And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: And he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, That they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. 4 Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the Lord, As in the days of old, and as in former years. 5 And I will come near to you to judgment; And I will be a swift witness Against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, And against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, The widow, and the fatherless, And that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, Saith the Lord of hosts. 6 For I am the Lord, I change not; Therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. 7 Even from the days of your fathers ye are gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them. Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts. But ye said, Wherein shall we return? 8 Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. 9 Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, Even this whole nation. 10 Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, That there may be meat in mine house, And prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, If I will not open you the windows of heaven, And pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. 11 And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, And he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; Neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the Lord of hosts. 12 And all nations shall call you blessed: For ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the Lord of hosts. 13 Your words have been stout against me, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, What have we spoken so much against thee? 14 Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: And what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, And that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts? 15 And now we call the proud happy; Yea, they that work wickedness are set up; Yea, they that tempt God are even delivered. 16 Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: And the Lord hearkened, and heard it, And a book of remembrance was written before him For them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name. 17 And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, In that day when I make up my jewels; And I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. 18 Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, Between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not. 1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; And all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: And the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, That it shall leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise With healing in his wings; And ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. 3 And ye shall tread down the wicked; For they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet In the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts. 4 Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, Which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, With the statutes and judgments. 5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: 6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, And the heart of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

Zechariah 14:4 KJV 1900

4 And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, Which is before Jerusalem on the east, And the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, And there shall be a very great valley; And half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, And half of it toward the south.

  what is imaged can hardly be anything else than the prospect of judgment on unfruitful Israel. In Mic. 7:1, when God says ‘there is no first-ripe fig for which I hunger’, the imagery is, as v. 2 makes clear, of a failure of righteousness among the people of God. Similarly, in Je. 8:13 God’s complaint is that ‘when I wanted to gather them … there are no … figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered’ (the context is still the same as that for 7:11, used in Mt. 21:13). In Ho. 9:16 the judgment on Ephraim is that ‘their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit’. Here is the raw material for understanding the symbolism. A crucial moment has come in the divine timetable when the fig tree will be seen to have or not to have produced the fruit to which it was obligated.

But from Jesus’ answer to follow it is not with the symbolism that he takes the disciples’ question to be primarily concerned. Rather, by means of the answer the question is glossed with something more like ‘What is it that you want us to learn from having enacted in our sight (and ours only?) this symbolic judgment on Israel?’1

1 Nolland, J. (2005). The Gospel of Matthew: a commentary on the Greek text (pp. 852–853). Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press.

‘What is it that you want us to learn from having enacted in our sight (and ours only?) this symbolic judgment on Israel?’1

1 Nolland, J. (2005). The Gospel of Matthew: a commentary on the Greek text (p. 853). Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press.

  In Mt. 17:20 the moving of the mountain was nothing more than an image for doing something humanly impossible in the normal course of events. But there may be more here. Here disposing of the mountain—that is what throwing it into the sea achieves—replaces moving the mountain, and the activity is linked in a not-only-but-even package with the withering of the fig tree. In coming from Bethany Jesus will have needed to come across the Mount of Olives from the eastern slopes. So here the natural referent for ‘this mountain’ is the Mount of Olives. And the removal of the Mount of Olives from in front of Jerusalem is anticipated in the only OT reference to it. It is true that in Zc. 14:4 the mountain is removed not to the sea, but by having one half slide north and the other half south, it may be possible to read the text in a manner that brings it much closer to the scenario here. In any case, the result in both cases is the levelling of the area in front of Jerusalem.32 In Zc. 14:4–5 the reason for the removal of the mountain is to open up an escape route from Jerusalem under attack, and the levelling heralds the saving intervention of God. So, if the withering of the fig tree presages judgment, it may well be that the removal of the mountain in Matthew presages restoration or salvation, as it does in Zechariah. Mt. 24 anticipates Jerusalem under attack and the need to flee from Jerusalem, and the coming of the Son of Man which is identified as the culmination is thematically similar to the coming of God and his holy ones in Zc. 14:5.

If this attempt to identify what is going on in the imagery of disposing of the Mount of Olives is at all along the right lines, there still remains the question of what this might mean for the disciples. Do they ‘remove the mountain’ by praying for the end-time coming of the Son of Man? Do they metaphorically ‘remove the mountain’ by proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and thus opening up for people the place of escape and achieving what God intends before the end will come (Mt. 24:14)? We cannot be sure. Perhaps nothing quite so precise is intended: in one way or another, through the exercise of faith the disciples contribute miraculously not only to the proclamation of judgment but also to the restoration that represents the culmination of God’s purposes. However the disciples are to contribute, the importance of the coming of the kingdom of heaven/God throughout Matthew links nicely with Zc. 14:9, ‘The Lord will become king over the whole earth’, and that is ultimately what removing the mountain is about.

21:22 As had Mark, Matthew ends with a broadening generalisation that takes the focus to prayer. Matthew substitutes a simple ‘and’ for Mark’s ‘because of this I say to you’. Mark’s ‘pray and ask’ is improved to ‘ask in prayer’. The rather difficult and perhaps slightly obscure concept in Mark’s ‘believe that you received (ἐλάβετε) and’ is simplified to ‘believing’. λήμψεσθε (‘you will receive’) replaces Mark’s ἔσται ὑμῖν (lit. ‘it will be to you’—cf. at the end of v. 21). A similar confidence in God’s response has already been articulated at 7:7 (see there). There is no specific restriction on the scope of prayer here, but the link with 21:21 suggests that the focus of prayer should be in line with the priorities of the mission of Jesus in relation to the coming of the kingdom1

1 Nolland, J. (2005). The Gospel of Matthew: a commentary on the Greek text (pp. 853–855). Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press.

Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away! Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away! Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.