Let’s turn to Matthew 22.
About a hundred years ago, I was a youth pastor in Chicago, and we began doing an outreach activity every Wednesday night. If you’ve ever bitten off a big chunk of food and you realize, “I can’t chew all of this,” that’s what that ministry became. When you have to come up with a bigger and better, more intense competition every single week, it becomes exhausting. We had three teams competing against each other every Wednesday night, and the teens would recruit friends to join them. Lots of crazy, intense games, preaching, food, the whole thing.
One of my favorite games—not the most intense, but one of my favorites—involved two rows of girls facing each other. They were on the same team. Then an empty bucket on one end and a full bucket on the other end, full of flour. Behind the bucket of flour was a line of guys from an opposing team with flimsy paper plates. One at a time, when I blew the whistle, they would scoop up this flour. The goal, the team that won, transported the most flour (over several rounds) from the full bucket of flour to the empty bucket on the other end.
But here’s the catch: The girls in these two lines facing each other were armed with pillows. Their goal was to try to keep the guys from the opposing team from transporting a lot of flour. They were amazing at sending the flour into the face. The entire gymnasium would be covered with this fog of flour.
Here’s the one thing I hadn’t predicted, and that was the ingenuity of the girls. Fatal mistake. Because some of them realized really quickly— they could just bash them with the pillow, or they could turn that pillow into a weapon. So they would squish the pillow to the far end of the case, they would spin the case, and they would wrap the case around their wrists (and some of them were pretty athletic).
Some of the girls would go for the flour, the others would go for the ankles of the guys running. And when you’re running on a bed of flour, it doesn’t take much to send you up into the air, and you’re down into the pool of flour. I’m watching this unfold and just praying, “Lord, please, may no one’s head get cracked,” because they were whipping these guys.
At the end of the competition, of course, the guys are saying, “It’s our turn.” No Title IX here, folks. No, no, no. That’s not going to work. But there was one guy. I don’t know why I remember this. He started the trend. He figured it out pretty quickly.
He realized, “Okay, a lot of the guys are trying to make it to the other end as fast as possible,” and they ended up on their backs. But he bent over. You weren’t allowed to cover your flour—that was one of the key rules—with your hand. But he bent over, hunched over, and then he didn’t run. He shuffled his way down. So even if you caught his ankle, it was hard to pull him off course. He moved huge amounts of flour without getting it sent or being sent, and other guys started to follow.
Now at this point, some of you should be asking, what in the world does this have to do with Matthew 22? It’s a good question. This may say more about the way my brain works than it does about the text, but this is the game I had in my mind as I was meditating on Matthew 21-22. Why?
When Jesus entered Jerusalem (the triumphal entry at the beginning of Matthew 21), he then cleansed the temple, and then he began— The vision I have is like walking through a gantlet of accusations and attacks, one after another. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians are trying to trip or trap him with his words, take him down, drive him off course. It’s like a gantlet of accusations, just like that gantlet— without the pillows or the flour.
I began worshiping Jesus as I thought about the way he navigates these high-pressure situations without getting knocked off course, panicking, or losing sight of who he is and what he came to do. He remembers. What’s the goal? The goal is not to get to the other end as fast as you can. The goal is, as we heard last week, the main thing: love God, love neighbor. But when you’re in the gantlet, loving God and loving neighbor can easily seem ancillary, unimportant. Jesus did not lose sight of the main thing.
Last week, Connor explained what real love is. Three characteristics, quoting Frame.
The closer we get to this kind of love, the more impossible it seems, the more unobtainable—as we heard last week—it becomes. This is why we ended last week with the Lord’s Supper, because Jesus didn’t come simply to parade love but to provide love, to be poured out so that he can pour out on us his love by his Spirit, who bears this kind of love out in us as the fruit of the Spirit. We begin to taste what is naturally so foreign to us, this kind of love. But in order to experience this, we have to be clear as to who Jesus is. This is where Jesus goes next, so let’s pray and then let’s go there.
Father, when we are surrounded by trials and temptations, we so easily— I so easily can be knocked off course. We can lose sight of the main thing. We panic, we run, we compromise. We do whatever we think we need to do to survive. We tend to look everywhere but to the one person, Jesus, the one we need most. Thank you, Jesus, for running the gantlet without missing the goal. Show us what that means for us and in us. We pray in Jesus’s name, amen.
Before we go any further—I probably should have done this at the beginning—we need to define our terms. What’s a gantlet? Because did any of you gamers think of an armored glove as a gauntlet? Yeah, that can mean that.
By the way, there are two different spellings. I know some of you were thinking, when you saw the church email, “Karen’s gone, and Peter can’t spell,” which is true. But there are two spellings. And they can be used in a variety of ways.
The word also can mean “to throw down the gantlet,” as in to challenge to a fight. Like hockey players, when they throw down their gloves, it’s like, “Let’s go.”
Or you can use it as I’m using it, “to run the gantlet,” which comes from an old military practice where soldiers would line up facing each other, and they would strike the one who runs down the middle trying to get to the other end.
As Jesus enters Jerusalem, this is the image I have in my mind: He’s heading to the cross through a gantlet of accusations and attacks, and it’s going to get even more intense. The worst is yet to come. Psalm 22 predicted this and describes Jesus’s experience. Verse 12:
“Many bulls encompass me; strong bulls of Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion. For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet—” (Psalm 22:12, 13, 16).
You know you’re in the gantlet when you have that feeling of being surrounded, and it could come in a variety of forms. You could be surrounded by people who are accusing you of things you haven’t done. It could be something as mundane as being surrounded by financial pressures or medical challenges, relational conflict, marriage tension… For me, it’s been a gantlet of grief. Where you feel surrounded at times, suffocating underneath whatever it is that is surrounding you.
When you’re in the gantlet—whatever form it takes, could be sexual temptations—when you’re in the gantlet, what we’re tempted to do is panic and do whatever it takes to get relief. The idea of loving God and loving neighbor is not paramount in that moment. We are tempted to lose sight of who we are, and who God is, and what he’s doing. This is why I am stunned at the beauty of Jesus. He never allows that pressure to distract him from who his Father is and what he has called him to do.
At the end of Matthew 22, we can sense almost a lull in the barrage. There have been three parables, three tests. The last one was the Great Commandment. Then you can see there at the beginning of verse 41, the Pharisees are kind of huddling together, gathering together. It’s almost as if they’re putting their heads together and trying to figure out, “What next can we go after him with?” Jesus uses this lull in the barrage to turn the tables of accusation and simply ask a question.
This unfolds in four movements: ask, answer; ask, don’t answer. Ask, answer; ask, don’t answer. Let’s walk through those movements, and then we’ll step back and say, “Okay, Lord, what are you saying to us?”
1. Jesus asks.
Verse 41:
“Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, ‘What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David.’” (Matthew 22:41-42).
Don’t miss what Jesus is doing here. Again, the Pharisees are trying to derail him. They’ve asked random questions about everything from taxes to marriage in heaven to get him off course, into the weeds, and to trap him. But Jesus doesn’t take the bait.
Again, I want to pause and take in how difficult this is to remain in the love of God, to pass that love on to others when you’re under this kind of pressure.
Jesus then turns us from the Great Commandment to the great question. What is the great question? Look at verse 42:
“What do you think about the Christ?”
What do you think about the Christ? Is there a more important question? “Christ” (Christos in the Greek) simply means “the Anointed One.” In Hebrew, “Mashiach,” “the Messiah.” There is no more important question.
Verse 42,
“Whose son is he?”
If you get on Ancestry.com, and you trace the Messiah’s lineage, whom are you going to come to? Jesus asks.
2. The Pharisees answer.
Verse 42, second half,
“They said to him, ‘The son of David.’”
The son of David. This isn’t in the text, but I wonder if the Pharisees are looking at each other like, “That’s a softball of a question.” Wondering, “Is this a setup?” Because one thing you notice is that manipulative people think other people are manipulative, whether they are or aren’t, because it’s the lens through which they look at the world.
The Pharisees have demonstrated themselves to be quite manipulative, so they’re probably wondering, “What kind of question is this? Everybody knows this.” 2 Samuel 7, Isaiah 11, Jeremiah 23:5… All of these make clear that the Messiah will come through the line of David.
They answer, “Son of David,” and Jesus asks a follow-up question.
3. Jesus asks.
Verse 43,
“He said to them, ‘How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying [and now he’s quoting from Psalm 110], “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet’”? If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?’” (Matthew 22:43-45).
Psalm 110 is the most quoted psalm in the New Testament. Jesus quotes the beginning here (Psalm 110:1). “The Lord” is Hebrew, “Yahweh,” God’s covenant name. “…said to my—” Who’s “my”? David. So King David is saying, “The Lord (Yahweh) says to my Lord (Adonai)…” King David is calling the Messiah his Lord, yet David is the Messiah’s father by lineage. So Jesus is asking them the question, “How can the Messiah be both David’s son and David’s Lord?” And the religious leaders go mute.
4. They don’t answer.
The Pharisees don’t answer. They have no response. Verse 46:
“And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions” (Matthew 22:46).
This response is both wise and tragic. A lack of response is wise because, when you don’t know what to say, you should do what? Say nothing. It’s time to shut up, something I still struggle to learn. However, when you’re in the presence of Jesus, and he says something you don’t fully understand, it seems to me that would be a really good time to ask him a question. A real question, like, “Help us understand.” But the Pharisees have no interest in understanding.
A former Pharisee named Paul answered this question specifically at the beginning of his masterful letter to the Romans. Look at this (Romans 1:1):
“Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, [here it is:] concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 1:1-4).
So there, in one sentence, he is both son of David in his humanity and Son of God in his divinity. Therefore, he is David’s son and David’s Lord.
A few hundred years later, Augustine answered the same question somewhere around 400 A.D. He said,
“Christ is both David’s son and David’s Lord: David’s Lord always, David’s Son in time. David’s Lord, born of the substance of his father; David’s Son, born of virgin Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit. Let us hold fast both.”
Now, let’s step back from the passage for a few minutes and make some observations (three). The last one will move really close to where we are right now.
1. Notice how Jesus viewed the Old Testament as Spirit-inspired Scripture.
Verse 43, Jesus says,
“David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord…”
Jesus is engaging with the Pharisees with the assumption that the Psalms, for example, written by fallible men (like David), are inspired by the Spirit and therefore reliable, so reliable that Jesus bases his whole argument on the reliability of Psalm 110.
People have asked me over the years, “Why do you trust the Bible?” I could give a lot of answers to that question, but the short answer is, “Because Jesus trusts the Bible.”
2. Jesus spent time in the Psalms to prepare for suffering.
Jesus spent time in the Psalms to prepare for suffering. How do we know? He quotes the Old Testament many, many times. Let me just show you a few examples— just in Matthew, just in the Passion Week, just from the book of Psalms.
Matthew 21:16, Jesus says, “Out of the mouth of infants…” (Psalm 8:2)
Matthew 21:42, “The stone that the builders rejected…” (Psalm 18:22)
Matthew 27:46, “My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1)
Matthew 22:44, this is the one we’re looking at today, “The Lord said to my Lord…” (Psalm 110:1)
Matthew 26:64, “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Psalm 110:1, 5; Also, Daniel 7).
These last two are from Psalm 110, and it’s easy just to blow past that. So he quoted Psalm 110? But remember, Jesus is in the gantlet. They’re coming at him.
Have you ever been there? Where somebody’s yelling at you, or questioning you, or pressuring you, trying to trip or trap you? If truths of Scripture aren’t so deeply embedded in your heart, they aren’t going to come out. Right? He doesn’t have a pocket Old Testament with him. He didn’t have scrolls that he was pulling out, “Let me quote Psalm 110.” He has spent time in Psalm 110 to prepare for this moment.
Why is that significant? If you want an excellent exposition of Psalm 110, Ben Sternick, one of our elders, just walked through Psalm 110 a month and a half ago. It’s online, on our website. I encourage you to listen. But what I want to do is move from the immediate message of Psalm 110 to what I would call the ultimate, which is Psalm 110 as Jesus uses it: as words from God the Father to God the Son.
There are at least seven promises that you can imagine Jesus being prepared for suffering as he was immersed in these seven promises. Let me run through them quickly.
God the Father says to God the Son in Psalm 110,
So we know Jesus spent time in Psalm 110 preparing for suffering. Now imagine how these seven promises would have prepared him to methodically, undistractingly, walk through a gantlet of accusations and entrapments, never forgetting who he is, who his Father is, and the promises he has been given.
3. We cannot run the gantlet successfully if our eyes are not on Jesus.
As we look to Jesus—Son of David, Lord of David—we learn we’re surrounded by more than enemies. When you’re in the gantlet, it can feel like everyone is against you, everything is against you. What the author of Hebrews does is say, when you can’t see anyone around you but those who oppose you, Hebrews 12:1,
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [who are for us], let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1-2).
Looking to Jesus is the only way, when you’re under this pressure, that you can keep from turning to functional messiahs. Do you know what I mean by “functional messiahs”? All of us are constantly tempted to look to add on a functional messiah who we think will rescue us in the midst of the pressure. I want to give you an example—from the other side of the world—of this.
One of the best books, I believe, on the Chinese house church movement is called Faithful Disobedience by Pastor Wang Yi. Pastor Wang Yi and others describe the intense pressure Christians in China have experienced under communism.
We can learn so much from our brothers and sisters. Whether our experience is similar or not, it is so helpful to step out of our cultural context and look back on our culture with fresh eyes. Whether we agree with everything or not, we’ll learn.
Pastor Wang Yi was a human rights lawyer before becoming a pastor. He describes the kind of gantlet that Christians were running through as the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party) pressured their people to come under their authority or pay the price. And the price has been heavy.
Many Christians, many pastors have been imprisoned or executed. Currently, as we worship freely, Pastor Wang Yi is in prison for his Christian convictions. However—here’s what I mean by “functional Messiah”—there is another option. The CCP will tell you, “Just get in line. Just cooperate.”
In 1954, a group of Christians in league with the Communist Religious Affairs Department started what is known as the TSPM: Three Self-Patriotic Movement. These are the registered churches that were allowed to worship freely if they agreed to submit to government oversight in areas like this. Here are a few examples:
Who will be pastors. What will be believed and taught. When churches must be shut down or merge. How many people are allowed each year to be baptized. How they view Christians from other countries (specifically the West, especially America); you have to hate them. If you do those things, then you can go free.
This is what gave rise to what is known as “the unregistered church” or “the house church movement.” They don’t always meet in houses, but informally known as the house church movement. I love what one Chinese pastor said:
“The true church is not afraid of being homeless; the true church is afraid of being spineless.”
That’s a word for all of us.
The best way to understand the core of what is at stake here is summarized by the head of the TSPM. He ran the Three-Self Patriotic Movement during the 1980s. He said this:
“My religion is not a circle with only one center. My religion is an ellipse with two foci — Christ and the nation.”
Do you see what he’s talking about there? He’s talking about adding a functional Messiah to ease the pressure. See, if we’ll simply worship— You can worship Jesus. In your school (public school, secular college), nobody has a problem with you worshiping Jesus. It’s just, you need to worship Jesus and ______. You need to worship Jesus and your personal sexual identity. You need to worship Jesus and your country. You need to worship Jesus and _______.
What Pastor Wang Yi is serving prison time for is saying, “No, no, no.” It’s a circle with one dot. There’s only one Messiah. There’s one Lord, Son of David, Lord of David. There is only one master. When push comes to shove, it’s not a question. Jesus is my Lord, and I can love my family, and I love my country, and love my job, and the gifts that God has given me, but they are all gifts. They are not gods. Jesus is my Lord. Period.
When you are in the gantlet, you have a golden opportunity to make sure you’re not turning to functional messiahs. Because when the pressure is on, often our Father is utilizing that pressure to burn away fake messiahs that will never come through for you and cannot save you. They will fail. Pastor Yi summarizes it well. He says,
“Real believers will oppose this double-minded ‘ellipse-ism’ which compromises both the gospel and the world.”
It compromises the gospel because Jesus is not one of many lords. He alone can save you, but it compromises the world because China and the United States don’t need more fake messiahs. They have enough of them. If God’s people are not clear as to who is Lord, who will be clear?
Now, we may not live under the CCP, but we face the same kind of temptation. So let’s bring this home very practically: What pressures are you currently experiencing? That may feel gantlet-like. Like they just feel like they’re closing in on you.
Students, maybe there are unexpected things you don’t know how to anticipate in this coming school year. Pressures, friendship pressures. Some of you are experiencing marriage tensions that feel suffocating. Sexual temptations, financial pressure, loneliness, conflict, misunderstandings… It could be something very mundane; it could be a massive piece of medical news.
Take a moment right now and think: When I feel pressure (i.e. fears about what’s happening politically), when I feel pressure, what form does that take? Be honest with yourself about that. That’s really important to acknowledge. You have something in your mind.
Now, to whom or to what do these pressures tempt you to look? To whom or to what do these pressures tempt you to look? Remember, Jesus walked this gantlet, assaulted. He’s calling us to follow him.
We want to be aware of the pressure, but then aware of temptation that might cause us to turn aside and pursue a functional Messiah. Something we think, “That will save me.” We don’t generally say it that way. “If I could just get more money…” “If I could just get the approval of this friend group…” If I could just solve this problem, fix this country, whatever it is.
I know this sounds weird, but for me, as I prayed through this, the first thing that came to my mind is I so often try to make myself a functional Messiah. Like, just put my head down, and I’m going to get through this delusionally. Jesus is saying, “Come to me. Come to me. I will give you rest.” He is our Messiah.
Another popular American functional Messiah is escapism through media (i.e. social media, video games). Like, I’ll just lose myself. Alcohol, drugs, workaholism. Take a moment and think about that ellipse with two dots versus the circle with one, and talk to the Lord about that in your own heart. Who is Lord?
Jesus has navigated a labyrinth of accusations and questions, and he ends with the Great Commandment and the great question. Great Commandment: love God, love neighbor. The great question: Who is going to enable you to be and live this way? It’s only Jesus. Let’s pray.
Father, whatever gain I had, I count as loss for the sake of Christ. With Paul, Lord, we say we count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ, the Messiah.
Spirit of God, we’re asking you to move among us, to give us an honesty where we as your people can be honest about the pressures we feel. They may be self-induced, they may be external, but they are real, and they can skew our thoughts, warp our allegiances, and cause us to forget your promises. Thank you, Jesus, for modeling this way of navigating the gantlet and inviting us to follow you.
I pray first for those who don’t know you, that you would call their name. Invite them to yourself, and may they repent and believe. Thank you for the people you are drawing to yourself.
I pray for many of us who are experiencing intense pressure and are feeling the temptation to turn to functional messiahs. May this morning settle that question. We worship you, Jesus. We trust you. We’re not frantic. We’re not going to panic. We’re going to rest in your promises, hearing your voice.
Speak to us now, Father. For those of us who need to repent, we repent. We turn to you, Jesus. For those who need encouragement, we pray that your Spirit would speak to us. May we now respond in faith. We pray in Jesus’s name, amen.
As we respond, please use this time. The sermon hasn’t ended. This is the most important part: What will we now do? We will have people up front who would love to pray with you. You can pray in your seat. Worship as we sing. There are prayer benches on the sides if you need to get alone and cry out to him. But let’s stand and respond to the Spirit now.
