The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Remember to Internalize Jesus: The Bread and the Wine:  Mt.26:26 – 28 

^26:26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, he broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ ²⁷ And when he had taken a cup and given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; ²⁸ for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.’

          Jesus clearly wanted us to remember his physical body and blood.  Why?  Because God’s healing for humanity is physically located in his body.  Here’s an analogy illustrating why this is important.  In January 2006, I donated one of my kidneys to my wife’s brother.  Paul, my brother-in-law, was at a crossroads.  Healthy kidneys normally filter out toxins from your bloodstream.  Those toxins make your urine yellow.  They need to leave your body.  But Paul’s kidneys weren’t filtering those toxins out.  So his skin had an unhealthy yellow tinge to it.  The lactic acid that your muscles give off when you’re sore after a workout was not leaving his body, so he felt tired and sore all the time.  Potassium, which we need in small quantities, was building up in his bloodstream, and unfortunately potassium is what is injected into death sentence prisoners in large quantities to send their hearts into cardiac arrest.  These poisons were circulating in Paul’s body and he was in danger of heart failure.

Although dialysis was an option, it wasn’t a good one in his case.  His dad wasn’t eligible because he had had heart surgery before.  My wife Ming was an option but she had already delivered each of our two children by C-section, and I felt like that was enough for her.  I was the best option.  I was 34, so relatively young.  And male kidneys are bigger and could filter more blood. 

So we went to the hospital.  I had never had surgery before, so I was nervous.  The surgeon had told me what would happen.  I would become unconscious.  They would turn me on my side.  He would make an incision right above my belly button, through my abdominal muscles, or what little I have left after my swimming days.  They would put two catheters into my side which had small scissors at the ends.  When the surgeon put his hand into my gut, the catheters would snip my left kidney loose, and it would roll right into the surgeon’s hand.  Then they would stitch me up and put the kidney in Paul’s right side, under his own kidney.  So, as they sedated me, I thought about all that, and I wondered, ‘Am I going to die?!?’  I prayed, ‘Lord, help…’ and then I passed out. 

Meanwhile they did all that.  As soon as the surgeon put the kidney into Paul, it began to filter out the poisons.  He peed yellow!  Within 48 hours, his creatinine levels dropped from 13 to 2, and 1.6 is normal.  So when I got up and saw Paul, he looked great.  His skin color was already looking normal.  They didn’t cut through much muscle for him, so there wasn’t that much incisional pain.  It was like getting a new oil filter in your car.  He was feeling better than he had felt in many months.  But I felt awful.  Until they switched me from morphine to vicodin, I was in pain.  But what happened in him was amazing.

I think that’s a good parallel because all of us have a poison in our bodies, a disease called evil or self-centeredness.  We need healing from it.  The reason why God became a human being named Jesus was to ACQUIRE our disease.  Second, it was to have a human body in which to DEVELOP THE ANTIDOTE to the disease.  In the physical body of Jesus, God resisted every shred of self-centeredness living in that body, pushing it all the way to its death.  He CLEANSED THAT HUMANITY.  And by raising Jesus from the dead, God gave Jesus a fresh, new humanity perfectly fused with the divine.  And God made Jesus into an ‘organ donor’ spiritually.  By connecting us to the resurrected Jesus spiritually, God can now place in us a cleansed spirit, a new spiritual heart, the beginning of a fresh new humanity that is just like Jesus because it comes from him.  To sum up:  In the physical body of Jesus, God worked out the healing to our disease so that we could all share in that healing by His Spirit.

When we eat the broken bread, we think of the brokenness that Jesus endured at his climactic death, as well as the struggles that led up to it.  When we drink the wine made from crushed grapes, we think about Jesus being crushed by the burden of bearing our condition, at his death but also throughout all of his life until then.  When we put bread and wine into our mouths and swallow them so they can nourish us and become part of us, we remember that we need Jesus’ new life to nourish and sustain us by his Spirit.  This bread and wine – and for that matter, all the food that we eat! – is our holy reminder to internalize the new heart and new life from our spiritual organ donor, Jesus.  By him in us, we are made new.