The Topsy-Turvy Kingdom

Matthew 18: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+18&version=NIV

This Holy Saturday just a reflection on the very first part of Matthew 18: Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? There are a hundred metrics by which the world measures greatness: biggest, strongest, fastest, tallest. I think of movies like Wall Street from the 80s, where the measure of greatness is how much money you can make and your willingness to do anything necessary to achieve that goal. Even that word, achieve, is a word the world recognizes as a mark of greatness. It starts when we’re children: what grades did you make in school? Who won the game? (When they were young, my children played in a soccer league that didn’t keep score…but you can bet everyone from players to parents knew the score!)
Then here comes Jesus, defining greatness with a little child. In that era, a child was nobody. Any standing they had was only because of their parents, especially their father, and that standing was really only potential. A child might grow up in his father’s image. The child himself, though, was better seen and not heard, or even better neither seen nor heard. There was no idealization of childhood in the first-century. When Jesus called that little child, the disciples most likely responded with a cringe: “Oh, man, what’s he bringing a kid over here for? We’re trying to have a serious conversation!” And that’s exactly Jesus point: in the topsy-turvy way of the kingdom, humility matters more than achievement. Grace dominates over self-assertion. The failure is lifted up.
Why is this a good reflection for Holy Saturday? Because the cross looks a great deal like abject failure. There were plenty of messiahs in Jesus’ day, and each one of them ended up dead at the hands of the Romans. To get crucified meant that you had challenged Rome’s might and lost. That’s what was on the minds of the disciples that first Saturday after the crucifixion. “We backed the wrong horse. Despite the crowds and the miracles and everything we hoped, Jesus was just one more false messiah.”
But the cross is not failure for Jesus. It’s the ultimate act of selflessness. Jesus wins by losing, because in His death the failures of an entire race—the human race—are swallowed up. In His death, death itself is swallowed up. On the cross, Jesus accepts that the wages of our sin is His death. Tomorrow is Easter, the day when the Father vindicated His Son, the day when He declared, “This death, shameful as it was, does not make my Son a failure; this death shows my Son the one who is faithful even to death; this death shows that grace and mercy and humility are better than anything fallen humans could ever do for themselves. This death is not a failure, but a victory for my topsy-turvy kingdom.”