Chapter 24 - Responding to Christ with Criticism or Indifference (11:16-24)

24 Responding to Christ with Criticism or Indifference (11:16-24)

“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places, who call out to the other children, and say, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’ 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-gatherers and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

Then He began to reproach the cities in which most of His miracles were done, because they did not repent. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. Nevertheless I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment, than for you. And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You shall descend to Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day. Nevertheless I say to you that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for you.” (11:16-24)

Jesus’ words in verse 15 were a warning to the people to take seriously what He had just said about responding to John the Baptist: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” A fundamental teaching of Scripture is that God’s truth demands response.

In the present passage Jesus continues to deal with various responses of men to Himself. John’s questioning had reflected honest doubt. For the various reasons already discussed, he came to have some misgivings; but his primary attitude was not doubt but faith, because even when doubts came he looked to Jesus to resolve them.

Now Jesus mentions two negative responses—criticism and indifference—that were much more serious than John’s, because they reflect basic rejection of Christ. As is John’s case, honest doubt can come even to a believer. But the criticism and indifference Jesus mentions here came from unbelief.

THE RESPONSE OF CRITICISM

Although Jesus’ miracles had already established His messianic credentials beyond any legitimate question, most of the Jewish people who witnessed those miracles refused to recognize the facts or accept Him as the Messiah.

But to what shall I compare this generation reflects a common oriental expression used to introduce a parable or other illustration. The Midrash, an ancient compilation of Jewish traditional teaching, contains many expressions (such as “To what is the matter like?” or “How can I illustrate this point?”) used by rabbis to introduce illustrative metaphors, analogies, and stories. In this tradition Jesus was saying, “How can I illustrate the responses of this generation of God’s people to His truth and work? To what do they compare?”

Some of those who refused to believe the gospel covered their unbelief with criticism. Jesus compared them to foolish children sitting in the market place who objected to everything the other children did. They were like many people today who find fault with whatever the preacher and other church leaders do. No matter what is said or done, such people pick it apart and use the objection—whether real or imagined, justified or unjustified—as an excuse for rejection. Because they have no saving relationship to Christ, they refuse to receive His truth or serve in His church. But they love to harp against both.

The agora (market place) was a central area of cities and towns where people went to do business and to socialize. On certain days of the week, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants of all sorts would bring their produce or wares to sell from stalls, tents, carts, or simply from a cleared place on the ground.

Children played with each other in the market place while their parents sold, bought, or visited. Two games, “Wedding” and “Funeral,” were particularly popular. Weddings and funerals were the two major social events, and children liked to mimic their elders by performing mock weddings and mock funerals. Weddings involved festive music and dancing, and when children played the wedding game they expected everyone to dance when the imaginary flute was played, just like grownups did in the real ceremony. Likewise, when they played the funeral game they expected everyone to mourn and wail when the imaginary dirge was played, just like the paid mourners did when a person actually died.

There were always holdouts, however, who refused to go along with the rest of the children. If the game was “Wedding,” they wanted to play “Funeral,” and vice versa. Nothing the other children did satisfied them. They were peevish, perpetual spoilsports who threw a wet blanket on everything their friends did.

Jesus applied the first illustration to the response of the people to John the Baptist. When John came neither eating nor drinking, the people said, He has a demon! The phrase neither eating nor drinking was a figurative description of John’s austere life-style. He ate a Spartan diet of locusts and wild honey, and he lived in the desert and dressed in uncomfortable garments of camel’s hair (Matt. 3:4). His message was serious and severe as he cried out for repentance and for corresponding good works.

John’s message and way of life were in the funeral mode, so to speak. Some people became so resentful of his continual emphasis on repentance and judgment that they charged him with having a demon. He grated against their immoral and unspiritual nerves, and they railed out against him. They tolerated him for a short while, enjoying the novelty and excitement of his preaching. But he would not let them be neutral bystanders, uncommitted onlookers who heard and observed without decision or commitment. When they saw they had to choose, they chose not to believe or follow him. Instead of accepting John’s rebuke of their wickedness, they rebuked his righteousness. They charged the prophet who had no equal, who was greater than any other person “born of woman” (11:11), with being demon possessed.

Jesus applied the second illustration to the response of the people to Himself: The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners!” Jesus lived basically in the normal pattern of Jewish life, eating and drinking like everyone else. In contrast to John’s ascetic life-style, Jesus participated in all the normal social activities. He traveled throughout most of Israel, going from city to city, village to village, synagogue to synagogue. He had individual, intimate contact with many hundreds of people as He talked with them, healed their diseases, forgave their sins, and called them to follow Him.

Just as John lived in the funeral mode Jesus lived in the wedding mode. That fact did not escape the notice of John’s disciples, who had already asked Jesus, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?” (Matt. 9:14). In reply, Jesus used the figure of a wedding: “The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?” (v. 15). But Jesus’ critics ridiculously exaggerated His normal activities, charging Him with being a gluttonous man and a drunkard.

The wine Jesus and most other Jews drank was oinos, a drink made by boiling or evaporating fresh grape juice down to a heavy syrup or paste in order to prevent spoilage and simplify storage. To make a beverage, water would be added as needed to a small quantity of the syrup. That mixture was nonalcoholic, and even when allowed to ferment it was not intoxicating, because it was mostly water. Perhaps Jesus miraculously made wine from water for the wedding at Cana by creating the paste.

The second charge, that Jesus was a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners, was true, but not in the sense His critics meant. In identifying Jesus with those social and moral outcasts the critics also intended to identify Him with the outcasts’ sin and wickedness. But when Jesus associated with sinful people, He not only did not participate in their sin but offered deliverance from it—because that is why He came to earth (see Matt. 9:12-13).

As William Barclay points out,

The plain fact is that when people do not want to listen to the truth, they will easily enough find an excuse for not listening. They do not even try to be consistent in their criticism. They will criticize the same person and the same institution from quite opposite grounds and reasons. If people are determined to make no response, they will remain stubbornly and sullenly unresponsive no matter what invitation is made to them. (The Gospel of Matthew [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1958], 2:10)

Jesus’ unnamed critics were not interested in truth or justice but in condemnation. John the Baptist and Jesus were enemies of traditional religion, with its elevation of human wisdom and disregard for divine. Because John and Jesus could not be reasoned down they would be shouted down; and if no truth could be found against them, falsehood would be eagerly used.

Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds, Jesus said. Corrupt human wisdom produces corrupt human deeds, such as the false accusations against John and Jesus. On the other hand, the righteous, divinely empowered wisdom of John and Jesus produced righteous deeds that resulted in repentance, forgiven sin, and redeemed lives.

Through the centuries the church’s detractors have found it easy to criticize its people and its work. Yet they are hard pressed to explain how so many lives have been changed from wickedness to righteousness, from despair to hope, from anger to love, from sadness to happiness, and from selfishness to self-giving by the power of Christ.

Jesus’ rebuke of His critics was serious, but it contained a certain restraint, a restraint not seen in the brief series of withering rebukes He proceeded to give those who treated Him with indifference.

THE RESPONSE OF UNBELIEVING INDIFFERENCE

Jesus’ harsh reproach against the cities in which most of His miracles were done seems on the surface to be less justified than His comparatively mild rebuke of those who openly criticized Him. For the most part, the three cities mentioned here—which typified all the places where His miracles were done—did not take any direct action against Jesus. They simply ignored Him. While the Son of God preached, taught, and performed unprecedented miracles in their midst, they carried on their business and their lives as usual, seemingly unaffected. From the human perspective, their indifference appears foolish but it does not appear to be terribly sinful.

But indifference is a heinous form of unbelief. It so completely disregards God that He is not even an issue worth arguing about. He is not taken seriously enough to criticize.

As the young King Josiah declared, the great sin of Israel in that day was that the people had “not listened to the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us.” And for that disregard of God’s Word the king said, “the wrath of the Lord . . . burns against us” (2 Kings 22:13).

In the parable of the royal wedding feast, the guests who were first invited “paid no attention and went their way, one to his own farm, another to his business” (Matt. 22:5). They did not mistreat and kill the king’s slaves as some of the other citizens did (v. 6), but they were equally excluded from the feast. They picture the many people Christ calls but whose indifference excludes them from being among the few who are chosen (v. 14).

Indifference to the Lord will continue in the world until He returns. “Just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it shall be also in the days of the Son of Man,” Jesus said; “they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building;… It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed” (Luke 17:26-28, 30). Some of the people in Noah’s day doubtlessly criticized him abusively for building a ship in the middle of the desert; and some of the worst inhabitants of Sodom tried to homosexually attack the angels who came to rescue Lot. But most of the people in the days of Noah and of Lot paid no attention to the Lord or to His servants. Yet they, too, were totally destroyed, because they rejected God just as totally as those who actively expressed their unbelief.

Jesus’ righteous anger boiled against the privileged cities who witnessed the awesome evidence of His divine power and goodness yet did not repent. In His holy fury He declared to them, Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!

The interjection woe is sometimes used in Scripture to represent grief (see, e.g., Rev. 18:10), but most often it represents denunciation, as it clearly does here.

Probably most inhabitants of Chorazin and Bethsaida had personally witnessed Jesus’ miracles, and everyone else knew about His mighty works from the reports of friends and relatives. But the number who responded in faith was small (cf. Matt. 7:13-14).

When people have great opportunity to hear God’s Word, and even to see it miraculously demonstrated, their guilt for rejection is intensified immeasurably. It is far better to have heard nothing of Christ than to hear the truth about Him and yet reject Him. “For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain terrifying expectation of judgment, and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries” (Heb. 10:26-27). The greater the privilege, the greater the responsibility; and the greater the light, the greater the punishment for not receiving it.

Jesus’ marvelous works should have shaken to the foundation every Jew in Galilee, even more than the preaching of Jonah shook every person in pagan Nineveh, from the king down to the least servant (Jonah 3:5). But most Galileans did not respond to Christ at all, much less repent.

Chorazin was a small village nestled in the hills some two and a half miles north of Capernaum. It has long ceased to exist, and its ruins are known today as Charaza, a variation of Chorazin. Bethsaida, the home town of Philip, Andrew, and Peter, was located still farther north and to the west, in the plain of Gennesaret. These were two of the many towns and villages Jesus visited as He ministered out of His headquarters in Capernaum.

To Galilean Jews, Tyre and Sidon epitomized pagan, Gentile corruption and worthlessness. The people in those cities were descendants of the ancient Phoenicians, the renowned seafaring merchants and colonizers of the Mediterranean. Both cities were typical seaports, noted for their immorality and godlessness (even by pagan standards) and were deeply involved in the licentious Baal worship. A certain king of Tyre was so proud and evil that Ezekiel used him as a picture of Satan (Ezek. 28:11-15). The city’s violence, profanity, pride, injustice, greed, and immorality were so excessive that the Lord destroyed it (vv. 16-19; cf. Jer. 25:22; 47:4). It had even sold many of God’s own people into slavery (Amos 1:9).

Yet those two wicked cities would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes, Jesus said, if they had had the privileges of Chorazin and Bethsaida. The self-righteous, traditional religion of Galilean Jews blinded them more to God than the heathen religions did the Gentiles of Tyre and Sidon. Those chosen people had so long rejected God and His Word that they were totally indifferent to His Messiah when He came to them.

Few things Jesus might have said could have stunned Jews more than to be unfavorably compared to Gentiles. Nevertheless, I say to you, Jesus continued, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment, than for you. At the great white throne judgment, the dead of all the ages will be brought before the throne of God to be judged and sentenced to eternal punishment. And at that judgment the unbelieving Gentiles of Tyre and Sidon will fare better than the unbelieving Jews of Chorazin and Bethsaida.

Jesus here makes two truths clear: there will be degrees of punishment in hell, and among those given the severest punishment will be those who have received the divine revelation and been the most religious and outwardly upright. Those who thought they were eternally safe—because they were Abraham’s physical descendants and because they kept the religious traditions of their forefathers—looked with contempt on all Gentiles. Yet in hell many Gentiles will look down on those Jews.

But another city of Galilee was guiltier still. And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You shall descend to Hades. Jesus made His headquarters in this beautiful, prosperous fishing village on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. He performed more miracles and preached more sermons in and around Capernaum than at any other place during His entire ministry. It was there that He raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead and healed the nobleman’s son. It was here that He healed the demoniac, Peter’s mother-in-law, the woman with the hemorrhage, the two blind men, the centurion’s servant, the dumb demoniac, and the paralytic who was lowered through the roof by his friends.

Yet those marvels had little impact on most citizens of Capernaum; and because of their indifference they would not be exalted to heaven as they thought they deserved but would rather descend to Hades.

Although Hades is sometimes used in Scripture to represent the place of all the departed dead, it is often used, as here, to represent hell, the place of eternal punishment for the unsaved.

Jesus said that the miracles He performed in Capernaum were so amazing that, had they occurred in Sodom,… it would have remained to this day. Its people would have repented of their sin, turned to God, and been spared destruction.

Even in the secular world, Sodom is a synonym for moral depravity and has the infamous distinction of lending its name (in sodomy) to the most extreme forms of homosexuality and sexual bestiality. When a group of Sodom’s worst perverts tried to rape the angels at Lot’s house, they were struck blind. But their homosexual enslavement was so intense that even after being blinded “they wearied themselves trying to find the doorway” in order to satisfy their perverted lust (Gen. 19:11).

As far as is known, the people of Capernaum had no homosexual problem or any other apparent moral deficiency. Most of them were upright, law-abiding, and decent. Yet because they ignored and rejected the Son of God, their fate on the day of judgment will be worse than that of Sodom.

Capernaum exceeded Chorazin and Bethsaida in privilege, and Sodom exceeded Tyre and Sidon in wickedness. In these striking and sobering contrasts, Jesus makes plain that people who are the most blessed by God will receive the worst punishment if they reject Him. Judgment against the moral abominations of Sodom will be exceeded by judgment against the spiritual indifference of Capernaum. For the respectable and upright unbelievers of Capernaum, Hades will be hotter than for the crude and immoral unbelievers of Sodom. The self-righteous orthodox person is even more repulsive in God’s sight than the idolatrous and immoral pagan.

The people of Capernaum never persecuted Jesus, and few of them even criticized Him. They never mocked Him, ridiculed Him, ran Him out of town, or threatened His life. Yet their sin was worse than if they had done those things. Theirs was not the sin of violence or of immorality but of indifference. As G. A. Studdert-Kennedy has written in his poem “Indifference,” “They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.”

Jesus’ teaching perhaps mildly interested them, and His miracles entertained them, but nothing more. His grace never rent their hearts, His truth never changed their minds, His warning about sin never provoked repentance, and His offer of salvation never induced faith. And because of their indifferent unbelief, Jesus said to them, I say to you that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you.

The eighteenth-century commentator Johann Bengel wrote, “Every hearer of the New Testament truth is either much happier or much more wretched than the men who lived before Christ’s coming.” Such a hearer is also either more secure or more condemned.