Who Is the Greatest?

We’re studying the Gospel of Matthew at my congregation’s Sunday morning Scripture Study. This Sunday we begin Matthew 18. In preparing, I came across this (in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture) from Epiphanius the Latin.

At the end of Matthew 17, Jesus sends Peter to catch a fish, which will have in its mouth a coin worth four drachmas. He tells Peter to pay the tax for the both of them.

Matthew 18 then begins with contention among the disciples. “At that time” (literally “at that hour”), the disciples ask Jesus about who is greatest in the kingdom. Given the context (and several fathers interpret it this way), it seems they are envious that Peter was just honored in this way. Jesus then sets a little child in their midst, and says humility is the path to greatness.

This is the attitude needed in the Synod, in my congregation, and most of all in my own heart:

Here the Lord not only repressed the apostles’ thoughts but also checked the ambition of believers throughout the whole world, so that he might be great who wanted to be least. For with this purpose Jesus used the example of the child, that what he had been through his nature, we through our holy living might become—innocent, like children innocent of every sin. For a child does not know how to hold resentment or to grow angry. He does not know how to repay evil for evil. He does not think base thoughts. He does not commit adultery or arson or murder. He is utterly ignorant of theft or brawling or all the things that will draw him to sin. He does not know how to disparage, how to blaspheme, how to hurt, how to lie. He believes what he hears. What he is ordered he does not analyze. He loves his parents with full affection. Therefore what children are in their simplicity, let us become through a holy way of life, as children innocent of sin. And quite rightly, one who has become a child innocent of sin in this way is greater in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives such a person will receive Christ.

Matthew 14-28: Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (IVP, 2002), pp68f.

Romanism and Catholicism

Philip Schaff, the great nineteenth century historian, on the error of identifying Rome with the Church Catholic:

[Rome’s] hierarchy is an absolute spiritual monarchy culminating in the Bishop of Rome, who pretends to be nothing less than the infallible Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth. It proudly identifies itself with the whole Church of Christ, and treats all other Christians as schismatics and heretics, who are outside of the pale of ordinary salvation.

But this unproved assumption is the fundamental error of the system. There is a vast difference between Catholicism and Romanism. The former embraces all Christians, whether Roman, Greek, or Protestant; the latter is in its very name local, sectarian, and exclusive. The holy Catholic Church is an article of faith; the Roman Church is not even named in the ancient creeds. Catholicism extends through all Christian centuries; Romanism proper dates from the Council of Trent.

The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, pp83f