We didn't have much Christ the Kinging on Sunday morning, what we did have was the new seminary intern preaching on Matthew 19:13-15. At one point he mentioned that the word that the disciples use to try to keep the people with the kids away is the same word that Jesus uses to rebuke the storm.
That got the pinball machine of my mind bouncing around and it brought up the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 that I did my exegesis ord on. In that story as well the disciples seem very much invested in keeping the wrong kind of people away from Jesus (and in the case of the Canaanite woman, keeping themselves from being embarrassed.)
I got to wondering why Matthew kept showing the disciples behaving this way. And that got me to thinking about how, of the four Evangelists, Matthew is the most explicitly Jewish and does the most work linking Jesus to Hebrew history and trying to show that Jesus is the new Moses.
I realized then that maybe the disciples had gone beyond looking to Jesus as the new Moses and moved on to looking at Jesus as the new Golden Calf. Something to be worshiped from afar, something that only the best people should be able to approach, which included them but not Canaanite women or children and their parents.
There are so many people who want to be gatekeepers for Jesus and for the church, in these two stories, at least, Matthew makes it pretty clear that he doesn't think much of gatekeepers. In Matthew 19, the Kingdom of Heaven does not belong to the gatekeepers, but to those who the gatekeepers would keep out.
