Matthewchapter 18
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Speaks with:Matthew 18×5Mark 9×3Matthew 5×3Luke 17×4Matthew 6×3Matthew 20×2
Summary
Chapter summary
Discourse 4. Community in the kingdom. Who is the greatest. The child received. Offense and the cutting off of the hand. The lost sheep. Church discipline. Between two, before witnesses, before the church. Peter's question and the parable of the unforgiving servant: 'until seventy times seven.'
Context
Gospel · Matthew — Matthew overview
- A. 1–14 Greatest in the Kingdom; the One Sheep That Wandered
- B. 15–20 When Your Brother Sins Against You
- C. 21–35 Seventy Times Seven and the Unforgiving Servant
The outline
A.Greatest in the Kingdom; the One Sheep That Wanderedvv. 1 to 14
Read vv. 1 to 14 →B.When Your Brother Sins Against Youvv. 15 to 20
Read vv. 15 to 20 →C.Seventy Times Seven and the Unforgiving Servantvv. 21 to 35
Read vv. 21 to 35 →
The world behind this chapter
Matthew 18The history
Children had no standing to lose. They were loved, but they were legally and socially at the bottom — no rank, no rights, no honour to trade on. Setting one in the middle of a rank dispute was not sentimental; it was deliberately deflating.
The procedure for handling an offence follows Jewish legal practice closely. The requirement of two or three witnesses comes straight from Deuteronomy, and the final step of treating the unrepentant as an outsider mirrors the synagogue's own discipline, which could exclude a member from the congregation.
The debt in the parable is calculated to be absurd. Ten thousand talents was an unimaginable sum — Josephus records that the entire annual tax revenue of Galilee and Perea together ran to a small fraction of it. No servant could ever have owed it, and that is the joke.
The second debt is real and small: a hundred denarii, about a hundred days' wages for a labourer. Debt slavery was legal — a man, his wife, and his children could be sold to recover what he owed — and the jailers handed the debtor to at the end were expected to squeeze payment out of his family.
What it meant to them
Peter's offer to forgive seven times was generous by the standards of his day; the usual teaching suggested three. The answer effectively removes the counter.
For scattered congregations already fracturing over grievances, this chapter was the working constitution. Go to the brother privately first. Bring witnesses only if you must. And remember which debt in the story is yours.
Sources cited
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament
- Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews (Whiston translation)
The text of this chapter
This site records the readings below for this chapter. Spelling and word-order differences that change no meaning are passed over.
Matthew 18:11
"The Son of man is come to save that which was lost"
A much-loved sentence that the earliest manuscripts of Matthew do not contain, because it belongs, word for word, to Luke 19:10.
What the manuscripts read here →
Connections from this chapter
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.