Matthew 7.21-29: A Historical Reading

Warning 3: There are two kinds of hearers (Matthew 7.24-27)

With today’s Gospel, we arrive at the final and climactic warning. The one who not only hears but also practices the Sermon is likened to a wise man who builds his house on rock. As a whole, modern commentators read this parable against the backdrop of wisdom literature (the classic distinction between the wise man and the foolish) and subsequently pass over any possibility of historical referents.  However, I think the most likely reading of this text is that it is an allusion to the Temple, “the House” built on the foundation stone by the wise man, King Solomon.  It makes best sense of the wise man/house/rock constellation.

What Jesus was calling for from his disciples was the building of another “house”—an alternative Temple to the Herodian renovation in Jerusalem that would serve as the last stronghold of Jewish resistance against Rome in 70 AD. In retrospect, we can see why Jesus passed over the Temple in silence when expounding the subject of “surpassing righteousness” earlier, despite the centrality of the Jerusalem Temple to Jewish piety.

A new eschatological Temple is unveiled, here at the Sermon’s end, as the end of the Sermon. It is the fulfillment of everything for which the Jerusalem Temple stood: the locus of Torah, worship, deeds of loving-kindness. From this vantage point, Jesus’ audience must again see that the Jerusalem Temple has thus rendered obsolete and de-centered. The old House is no longer the seat of the kingdom which one must possess or preserve in order to enter the kingdom.

What is necessary for entrance, rather, is hearing and doing the words of Jesus. Everyone who hears and does what Jesus proclaims here on the mountain participates in the building of the true and lasting eschatological Temple. To depart from the call of the Sermon, to refuse Jesus’ vision for Israel—whether by embracing armed resistance against Rome or by a “peaceful” attempt to preserve the status quo—is in the end to make only one decision: to build on sand and thereby choose wreckage.

The dichotomy is sharp: to refuse one way is to choose the other. The rains, the floods and the winds of divine judgment—the peirasmos dealt in the military wrath of pagan Rome—will break upon both Temples, but only one of these houses will be spared of destruction. This description of a storm that destroys a house is strikingly similar to Ezekiel 13.10-16. Signicantly, the Ezekiel text consists of an oracle of judgment against Jerusalem and the false prophets who proclaim to her a false peace, i.e. those who tell her inhabitants that the Babylonian incursions of the seventh and sixth centuries BC would neither last nor lead to prolonged exile. It was revealed, on the contrary, to Ezekiel that there would be a “deluge of rain, great hailstones will fall, and stormy wind break out” (Ezekiel 13.11) and that both the city and the false prophets would be destroyed—as was the case when Jerusalem was decimated by the Babylonian “storm” in 587 BC. That Jesus follows his own warning against false prophets with the announcement of an imminent “storm” can hardly be coincidental. He saw a future pagan assault on Jerusalem as clear and present danger.

The house will survive whose builders heed the command, “Do not resist” and learn to pray, “Lead us not into peirasmos but deliver us from the evil one”. The other house in Jerusalem, to which all other kingdom agendas lead, will also attempt to weather the Roman storm, yet it will fall. Its builders are “foolish” (mōros) and like the salt that has been “rendered foolish” (mōrainō, Matthew 5.13) they will be trampled under foot by men. Of this house Jesus said, “Great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7.27).  The Sermon snaps shut, leaving the course of history to be its vindicator.