The Keys to the Kingdom

Don: As we were concluding our discussion last week on the topic of conflict resolution, Jason asked what was the meaning of Matthew 18 verse 17: “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Gentiles and tax collectors were people of dearest concern to Jesus. Jason wondered therefore if we had not all along completely misunderstood the message of verse 17. Might it not mean that an ultimate failure to resolve conflict should be responded to via forgiveness and grace—the ultimate expression of love? This is the very opposite of the common interpretation, which is that ultimately we should shun, excommunicate, “dis-fellowhip” people who will not reconcile with us or our church.

The verse that follows 17 has also perhaps been seriously misunderstood over the centuries: Matthew 18:18: “Truly I say to you, whatever you bind [prohibit] on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose [permit] on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” This passage has often been used by churches to justify the power they wield over the individual member. Matthew 16:13-20 gives the broader context for it:

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” Then He warned the disciples that they should tell no one that He was the Christ.

This is the origin of the Catholic papacy. Peter was the first pope.

In the earlier part of Matthew 16, Jesus basically says that the authority and teaching of the Pharisees, the religious leaders of his time, was inadequate and unworthy. It was on that basis that he began to craft the new spiritual leadership out of which these scriptural passages grew. Luke 11:52, in which Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, parallels this: “Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering.” The priests prevented the people from acquiring  the key  of knowledge—the keys to the kingdom.

What are these keys to the kingdom of heaven that he has passed on to his followers? Note that he did not give them the keys to heaven itself. The picture of Peter standing at the gate of heaven and unlocking it for the saint while locking it against the sinner may be wrong and may have caused much harm over the centuries. It was taken to mean that your individual salvation was in the hands of the church and gave the church and its leaders enormous and often oppressively wielded power over people.

But what Jesus gave to Peter were the keys not to heaven, but to the kingdom of heaven. There may be a critical difference. The kingdom of heaven as Jesus taught it throughout his ministry is a kingdom within us. It is here and now. It offers an ever-present and eternal opportunity to join the heavenly community. But it is not the pie in the sky that we are typically think of as heaven.

A number of articles have been written about the meaning of “binding” and “loosing.” In Robert Young’s Literal Translation of the Bible, he translates Matthew 16:19 as follows:

“and I will give to thee the keys of the reign of the heavens, and whatever thou mayest bind upon the earth shall be having been bound in the heavens, and whatever thou mayest loose upon the earth shall be having been loosed in the heavens.”

The strong implication of this translation is that heaven is not bound by decisions made on earth; rather, man’s decisions must be in concert with what has already been decided by god in heaven.

The Amplified Bible translates it this way:

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind (declare to be improper and unlawful) on earth must be what is already bound in heaven; and whatever you loose (declare lawful) on earth must be what is already loosed in heaven.”

Mounce’s Interlinear Bible gives the same translation and comments that the Messiah is telling his disciples that they must judge a righteous judgment (c.f. John 7:24). They must know god’s law; they must know how to administer it, and they must conduct the affairs of the church with overflowing love of god and love of the brethren rather than with a bunch of legal Dos and Don’ts. He was not telling the disciples that they could make any decision, forgive any sins, or keep any sin from being forgiven, or that they could make any kinds of ritual or recitation by means of which they could earn their way back to god. Instead, he’s telling his disciples that what god has already bound or loosed in heaven, as written in the scriptures, explained in the law, and practiced in the life of Jesus and understood through the inspiration of the holy spirit, was the pattern for how the church should be administered.

In light of all this, it seems to me that the meaning of the passage about conflict resolution takes on a completely different meaning to that commonly and historically held. Instead of ostracizing someone who has the absolute intransigence to be reconciled, we should do the very opposite. Here is an example of Jesus’s friendly and collegial attitude toward the tax collectors:

Matthew 11:18-19: For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon!’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ ….”

And here is an example of his attitude toward gentiles:

Acts 10:28: And he said to them, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a man who is a Jew to associate with a foreigner or to visit him; and yet God has shown me that I should not call any man unholy or unclean.

The very next passage in Matthew expounds that the principles of heaven have to be proclaimed and operationalized and used on earth. This seems to me a compelling argument that the principle and practice of shunning the incorrigible is not a godly principle, and it requires of the most love, compassion, graciousness, and forgiveness we can ever muster.

Alice: In John 20:22, the resurrected Jesus gives his disciples the holy spirit and tells them: “If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.” The holy spirit is god and, if we as believers are blessed with it, it speaks to us of what is right. This is a supernatural communication of knowledge from god, that enables us to be in concert with the will of heaven.

David: I agree with this interpretation, but it brings back my old complaint that the obtuse and even obfuscatory language of the bible has been the cause of untold evil and suffering throughout history. The argument that the lack of clarity forces us to search for the truth and is the only valid way to really “know” the truth (apparently it won’t do just to be told the truth in plain language) seems to me insipid and cruelly insulting to all those who have suffered so that a handful of us can sit here in the 21st century and finally have the truth dawn upon us. On face value, the bible says x, but after 2000 years of scholarly discussion and debate it is determined to mean y. It is inconceivable to me that god would intend this.

Alice: The kingdom of heaven is inside all of us. The keys to the kingdom could be that simple knowledge: That it is there for us, here and now. Ecclesiastes 3:11: He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.

David: I agree. The inner light is our only reliable guide to the truth, to spiritual knowledge. Our guide surely cannot reside in these murky, shaky interpretations of stories and hearsay written in ancient languages often after centuries of oral transmission and inevitable corruption. I recognize that studying these passages helps us, in this group, to understand these issues deeper—that’s why we are here—but the passages we have been studying are telling us “Don’t bother! Don’t go there. This stuff is far too deep for your puny intellects. It can be handled only through the spirit within you, through the god in your heart. Accept that, and you are home free.” It seems to me that is the message, and it it is in plain English and in far fewer words than the bible!

Don: I don’t know that one can hold the bible responsible for people’s irresponsible use of it. Part of the keys to the kingdom is that the principles of heaven should be operationalized here on earth. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus prays: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The notion that the bible has been misused, misappropriated, and hijacked for political, selfish, and other bad reasons doesn’t necessarily undermine the opportunity for me to approach it with the keys to the kingdom as the foundational and operational principles. By that I mean, one must read the scriptures—particularly the teachings of Jesus—from the context in which Jesus gave the teaching, which is that god is love, that god is gracious, that god wants to be your friend and he does have a plan for you and your life. Hence my question about what are the operational keys, what is the lens through which we can inspect them. Because clearly, as David has pointed out, through the centuries people have looked at them through a variety of very perverse lenses, and because of that, have reaped untold havoc and discord and judgmentalism and so on, to the point of the Inquisition and its notions about heresy. For me personally, the value of biblical inquiry is the discovery of the proper lenses through which to view the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Robin: Back to Matthew 18:17: Are the tax collector and the gentile the lost sheep of the parable? The one for whom god will spare no pains to bring into the fold? It would seem he expends more love and compassion on the lost sheep than on the 99 he left behind.

Don: Yes, it fits.

Alice: Exactly. We should not judge the outsider. All we need to do is to love them, as Jesus does. It’s god’s role to go find them and bring them back; it’s my role to love them.

Jason: One lens often used throughout history is the lens of “authority.” We use it to claim authority from the bible. But authority is not a key to the kingdom. The devil’s eviction from heaven was a matter of who holds authority in the kingdom of heaven. Bickering over who holds what power is not the kind of thing that happens in the kingdom of heaven. It does not belong there. Authority does not confer a key to the kingdom, yet that is exactly how we have treated it as a result of such passages as the one we are discussing. Once you have gone through the steps prescribed for conflict resolution, which do involve the invocation of authority as one step, then you are left with a final step in which authority is meaningless and irrelevant, and you must conduct yourself as you would if you were in the kingdom of heaven and operating on the basis of its principles.

Robin: It reminds me of the verse that says Jesus is not willing that even one should perish.

Don: The idea of the kingdom of heaven is not an altogether pleasant one, not is it easy to understand. Conflict resolution is difficult—would it not be better just to walk away from it? Kingdom principles such as “the first shall be last” and turning the other cheek are hard to accept. We don’t want to accept them. They involve pain and humility. They amount to a personal rebuke of all of us individually. Jesus tells us in the Beatitudes who has access to the kingdom of heaven: They are the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Who wants to be one of those? Jesus is asking us to commit to a way of life that is actually, or at least potentially, extremely unpleasant. So it is perhaps understandable that we read the bible, and its writers wrote it, through rose-tinted lenses. These passages are not easy, and the commitment they demand is one that few of us perhaps can make without the grace of god to help us. Perhaps that is what this is all about: It is about recognizing that we cannot have religious or spiritual authority; it is about humility and going to the back of the line and turning the other cheek; it’s about innocence and being born again in a child-like state. It is a call to recognize that we are incapable of this commitment absent the grace of god.

Robin: There is always a danger of taking a piece of scripture in isolation from the rest of the bible. Jesus warned of this. Romans 16:17-19: “Now I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned, and turn away from them. For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ but of their own appetites; and by their smooth and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting….”

David: Then one certainly cannot think that these passages are intended to be read and understood by the non-intellectual person of relatively plain and simple mind and heart. So again I say, there is a desperate need for a new translation of the bible. In a sense, that is what we are doing in this class, and I think the version of the bible we are creating is simple and understandable to all, whether it is pleasant or not.

Don: In essence, Jesus wants us to re-examine how our lives are lived out in the context of the keys to the kingdom. When we do so, and discover we have misunderstood, then we must decide who does not know what god is saying: Is it me, or is it god? I would tend to put my money on its being me, and I must sometimes just admit that there are things I just cannot understand, at least not yet. Simplicity does indeed seem to be the key. Jesus himself pointed to this when, for example, he pointed straight to innocence, to babyhood, to simplicity when asked “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Jesus builds the kingdom on such foundational points. As Robin said, there is great danger in taking isolated fragments of scripture at face value, because they can appear so contradictory to other isolated fragments.

Robin: We discussed a few weeks ago the passage where Jesus talked about having to become like a child to get into the kingdom. 1 Corinthians 14:20 sheds some light on this: Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature.

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