The gospel lectionary reading for Trinity 3 is Matthew 10.24-39. It comes after Jesus has called and sent out the Twelve to share in the ministry and mission that he himself has been undertaking. Matthew blends into this Jesus’ teaching about the longer-term mission of his people, and he collects together related sayings of teaching that are relevant to this, often moving from one to another by key connecting terms.
Join James and Ian as they discuss the issues in this text, how we should read it, and issues in preaching on it.
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A very interesting discussion, Ian and James.
What I would want to ask is : what would have been the basic message concerning ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ that the disciples were to announce in Matthew 10:7, 23 ? I think a lot of Christians think that the good news of the ‘Kingdom of heaven’ amounts to the opportunity to immediately go (at one’s demise) to a spiritual heaven as a disembodied, Platonic-style immortal soul, and start enjoying a fantastic and wonderful time in a celestial paradise.
However, Matthew’s term the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ merely seems to be a synonym for ‘the Kingdom of God’, which appears to be a future, earthly Kingdom of God (cf. Daniel 2:44; 7:27; Matt. 19:28; Matt. 5:5; Rev. 5:10; Luke 19:11-19; Isaiah 2:1-5; Isa. 65:17-25, et al). At their demise, Christians seem (as Martin Luther believed, and as Anglican scholar N.T. Wright currently believes) to ‘sleep’ in peace in the presence of Christ, until they are awakened, and given resurrection bodies at Christ’s ‘Parousia’, so as accompany the Lord Jesus back to the earth (I Thess. 4:13-18; 1 Cor. 15:18-20; 51-53; Phil. 1:21-24).