A Community Measured by Its Smallest Members

“At the same time” is literally “in that hour”, straight after Jesus has told Peter that the king’s sons are free. In Mark the disciples argue on the road and fall silent when asked (Mark 9:33–34); in Matthew they bring the question to Jesus openly. It opens the fourth of the book’s five long discourses, closed at 19:1.

The setting is still the house in Capernaum of 17:25, so the child may belong to the household. A late legend made him Ignatius, later bishop of Antioch; nothing in the text supports it. Jesus sets him “in the midst”, the place he will promise to occupy himself in verse 20.

“Be converted” is the plain Greek verb strepho, to turn, the word used when Jesus “turned” to rebuke Peter in 16:23. It means a change of direction, not yet a technical religious term. The disciples asked about rank inside the kingdom; the reply questions whether they will get through the door.

A child in first century Judea had no standing: no testimony in court, no property, no voice in the household’s affairs. To humble oneself “as this little child” is to take that low place, not to copy a supposed childish virtue. The same root, tapeinos, is the “lowly in heart” Jesus claimed for himself in 11:29.

“Receive” is the word of hospitality, of taking a guest in under your roof. In 10:40 Jesus said that whoever received the apostles received him. Now the same promise attaches to a child who has no mission, no message and nothing to offer the host.

“Offend” is skandalizo, from skandalon, the trigger stick of a trap. The millstone is mylos onikos, the “donkey’s millstone”, the great upper stone turned by an animal, not the hand mill two women work in 24:41. Josephus records Galileans drowning Herod’s partisans in the lake.

“It must needs be” renders ananke, necessity. The pattern returns almost exactly at 26:24: the Son of man goes as it is written, “but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed.” That something is bound to happen does not lift the guilt of the one who does it.

This repeats 5:29–30 from the Sermon on the Mount, where hand and eye were about lust; here hand and foot sit inside a warning about causing others to fall. “Halt” means lame, and “maimed” is kyllos, the word used of the crippled whom Jesus healed on the hillside in 15:30–31. “Everlasting fire” returns in 25:41.

“Hell fire” is literally “the Gehenna of fire”. Gehenna is the valley of Hinnom below Jerusalem’s south wall, where Kings Ahaz and Manasseh burned their own children (2 Chronicles 28:3; 33:6) and which Josiah defiled so no one could do it again (2 Kings 23:10). The phrase first appeared in 5:22.

To see the king’s face was the language of the royal court for those with standing access to him: Esther 1:14 names seven princes “which saw the king’s face”. The angels of the least regarded believers hold the closest access in heaven, and they hold it “always”.

The verse is absent from the earliest manuscripts and is widely taken to have come in from Luke 19:10. There the Son of man comes “to seek and to save”; here the King James text has only “to save”, and the seeking is left to the shepherd of the next verse.

Luke’s shepherd leaves the flock “in the wilderness” (Luke 15:4); Matthew’s climbs “into the mountains”, the hill pasture of Galilee. The sheep here has “gone astray”, planao, the verb later used for disciples deceived by false Christs (24:4–5, 11, 24). It is a wanderer, not merely a lost item.

Where Luke’s shepherd searches “until he find it” (Luke 15:4), Matthew’s says “if so be that he find it”: the outcome is not guaranteed, which gives the search its urgency. There are no friends and neighbours called in to rejoice here, only the shepherd’s own joy.

“One of these little ones” now sounds for the third time in the chapter (verses 6, 10, 14), framing the parable. “Perish” is apollymi, the same root as “lost” in verse 11. The sentence closes the parable by naming the Father’s will rather than the shepherd’s feeling.

“Against thee” is missing from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus; without it the rule concerns any sin a brother commits, not only a private injury. “Gained” is kerdaino, a merchant’s word for profit, used of gaining the whole world (16:26) and of the talents doubled (25:17). Behind it stands Leviticus 19:17: rebuke your neighbour and do not let sin rest on him.

The Dead Sea community wrote a near parallel. The Damascus Document (CD 9) required a member to rebuke an offender before witnesses before bringing him to the elders, and treated a charge laid without that prior rebuke as vengeance. The one or two added here witness the conversation and the refusal, not necessarily the original wrong.

“Neglect to hear” is parakouo, to refuse to listen, a stronger word than simply not hearing. Heathen and publican were paired in 5:46–47 as people who love only their own. It is a pointed phrase in the one Gospel whose list of the twelve calls its namesake “Matthew the publican” (10:3), a man Jesus called from the tax booth (9:9).

Binding and loosing were rabbinic terms for forbidding and permitting, and for imposing and lifting a ban. The Greek verbs are future perfect in form, “shall have been bound”, which some grammarians read as the earthly decision following what heaven has already settled; others take the form as a simple future. Grammarians have argued the point for a century.

“Agree” is symphoneo, to sound together, the root of “symphony”. “Any thing” translates pragma, which Paul uses for a lawsuit (1 Corinthians 6:1), so some read the promise as first about a disputed case settled by two in agreement, with prayer attached. The “two” matches the smallest party of verse 16.

A saying in the Mishnah runs close: if two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Divine Presence rests between them (Avot 3:2). Here the presence is Jesus himself, gathered to “in my name”. Matthew opened with Emmanuel, God with us (1:23), and will close with “I am with you alway” (28:20).

The Talmud later records a teaching that a man is forgiven three times and not a fourth, drawn from Amos’s “for three transgressions... and for four” (Babylonian Talmud Yoma 86b). If something like that was current, Peter has doubled the figure and added one, and expects to be praised.

The Greek can be read as seventy seven. The same phrase stands in the Greek of Genesis 4:24, where Lamech boasts that if Cain is avenged sevenfold, “truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold”. Lamech’s vengeance without limit is answered by forgiveness without limit.

“Take account” is the bookkeeper’s phrase for settling accounts, repeated in 25:19 when the master returns to reckon with the servants who held his talents. A king’s “servants” were often high officials, governors or tax farmers answering for revenue, not household slaves; the debt in the next verse assumes someone of that rank.

Ten thousand, myrioi, was the largest number in Greek, and the talent the largest unit of money. A talent was about six thousand denarii, roughly twenty years of a labourer’s wages. Josephus says the whole annual tribute from Judea, Samaria and Idumea under Archelaus came to six hundred talents.

Selling a debtor with his family was ancient practice; a creditor comes to take a widow’s two sons as bondmen in 2 Kings 4:1. A slave fetched perhaps five hundred to two thousand denarii, so the sale would recover a sliver of the sum. The order punishes; it cannot repay.

“Worshipped” is proskyneo, to prostrate oneself, the word used of the wise men before the child (2:11). In front of a king it is the posture of a petitioner, face to the floor. His promise to pay all is the speech of a desperate man, not a plan.

“Moved with compassion” is splanchnizomai, a gut word Matthew otherwise uses only of Jesus (9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 20:34). “Forgave him the debt” uses aphiemi, the verb of the Lord’s Prayer, where sins are called debts: “forgive us our debts” (6:12). “Loosed” is the verb of loosing from verse 18.

A penny is a denarius, one day’s wage (20:2), so a hundred pence is about a hundred days’ work, a real sum and some six hundred thousand times smaller than his own. “Took him by the throat” is pnigo, to choke. Roman law allowed a creditor to haul a debtor to court by the neck.

His fellow falls down, but the verse does not say he worshipped. His plea echoes verse 26, except that the oldest manuscripts lack the word “all” here. Unlike the first servant’s, this promise was realistic: a hundred days’ wages could be paid.

A debtor in prison could not earn, so the sum had to come from family or friends, who were pressured by his confinement. The same picture ended 5:25–26: cast into prison, “till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” “He would not” is the flat refusal the chapter has been warning against.

“Very sorry” is the same Greek phrase as the disciples’ “exceeding sorry” in 17:23. “Told” is diasapheo, to make clear, to lay out in full. The fellowservants act as the witnesses of verse 16, bringing a matter to the one with authority after seeing it with their own eyes.

“Because thou desiredst me” means because you begged me; the servant had only asked for time. “O thou wicked servant” is the address used again for the servant who buried his talent (25:26). The king does not mention the size of the debt, only that it was all of it.

The King James varies its English, “compassion” and “pity”, but the Greek repeats one verb, eleeo, to show mercy: should not you have shown mercy, as I showed mercy to you? It is the verb of the beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy” (5:7).

“Tormentors” are basanistai, jailers who used torture to extract money or confessions; basanos was first the touchstone for testing gold. “Till he should pay all” sets a condition he can never meet. The first sentence was sale; this one has no end in view.

The sentence gives the parable the same point Jesus attached to the Lord’s Prayer: “if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (6:15). “From your hearts” is added here, and “his brother” brings the chapter back to the brother of verses 15 and 21.