In these chapters we see two aspects of Jesus’ teaching working together that many people find hard to reconcile: on the one hand, the seeming severity of Jesus’ teaching and, on the other, his tender generous grace. On the one hand Jesus says things like: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.” On the other hand, in this same block of teaching, we also have his most generous expressions of grace: the parable of the lost sheep, in which the shepherd rejoices more over one redeemed sinner than over ninety-nine righteous; and the parable of the unmerciful servant in which the king shows mercy to a subject who then fails to pay that forward. The unifying factor here is God’s tender love for his children. A loving father gets angry when he sees his little children being spiritually abducted and hurt. Jesus is expressing the heart of the father when he rails against evil in this chapter. It is not because God wants to condemn people. On the contrary, God wants his children to come home and he laments the things that lead them astray. Every evil doer in the world is a lost child that God longs for and those who are hurt by them are also the objects of God’s longing. There are not good and bad people in the world. There are only lost people who God wants to be reconciled with. You are one of those people.
Ask God to draw you closer to him.
Read Mathew 18:1-20 and Mark 9:38-50
