Christ's Commentary on Achieving Greatness

This research provides an exegesis of Christ's commentary on achieving greatness, as found in Matt. 20.20-28. The research will set forth the context in which this lesson appears and then critically discuss the significance and meanings of the events in the passage.

It is virtually impossible to reach meaning with Matt. 20.20-28 without reference to the much more often quoted parable that precedes it, dealing with the laborers in the vineyard, all of whom receive the same payment for vastly different workday lengths (Matt. 20.1-16). Also relevant is the passage intervening between the parable and the request of the mother of James and John for precedence with Jesus--during which Jesus explains to his 12 disciples that he is about to be arrested, condemned, tortured, and crucified, only to rise on the third day following (Matt. 20.17-19). Together, these passages can be read as an introduction to the text beginning at 20.20, when Jesus disposes of the Zebedee's wife's request for her two sons.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard compares the kingdom of heaven, not to the vineyard or the workers, but rather to the employer, who must be seen as having the authority to dispense the largesse of heaven on the labor pool. The employer's sole discretion = the sole discretion of heaven, which cannot be questioned legitimately: "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for man

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the sole discretion of God, its landowner. That being so, it must be so even (or especially) if Jesus is made the absolute equivalent of God the Father. In any case Jesus is embarking on a project of absolute abnegation, placing himself last, which suggests that self-denial, not self-aggrandizement, is the more certain ticket (if there is one, which the parable says there is not) to heaven. On the other hand, abnegation, or utter defeat, would, by the logic of the vineyard parable, ipso facto position Jesus at the pinnacle of grandeur. The trouble with the mother of James and John is that she is grounded in a logic that makes the parable of the vineyard needful. The vineyard and the kingdom of heaven that administers it are features of a new nexus of God and man. The newness is a paradoxical logic--paradoxical because as a matter of known logic in the ancient or any other world the last cannot be first and vice versa, logical because it bespeaks a different mind-set from that of Jewish law: [T]he Messiah who is supposed to bring the new eon is defeated by the powers of the old eon. The defeat of the Messiah on the Cross is the most radical transformation of the symbol of the Messiah, so radical that Judaism up to the present day

Category: Philosophy - C