Which of the two
did the will of the father?
Matthew 21:31
Do you know what it means to be passive aggressive?
If I asked my son to do something and he angrily said no, we'd call that "aggressive," right?
But what if I asked my son to do something and he said yes ... but intentionally didn't do it? If we called the first instance "aggressive," shouldn't we call this disobedience aggressive too? It's obviously not overtly aggressive, but isn't it subtle, passively, willfully disobedient and aggressive?
I like to think of Matthew 21:28-32 as the Anti-Passive-Aggressive-Passage. In Jesus' analogy, one son said he'd do a job -- and didn't -- while the other son said he wouldn't do a job but did. The first was what? Passive aggressive. The second was what? An unlikely servant.
Maybe that's a better name for this passage than "anti-passive-aggressive." Maybe this is "The True Parable of the Unlikely Servants."
The likely servants were the Pharisees, Chief Priests, the Elders, and the Scribes. They should have been looking for the Messiah. Instead, they were looking to put Jesus to death. (And putting the Son of God to death is not passive aggressive, it's just plain aggressive.)
The unlikely servants were "the tax collectors and the prostitutes [who were] going into the kingdom of God ahead of [the Chief Priests and Elders]." It wasn't that their behavior had been exemplary throughout their lives, it's that when they encountered God, they weren't aggressive; rather, they were humbled. Their hard hearts broke open, the Spirit entered in, they followed this Shepherd, and their lives were changed.
In Christ's Love,
a guy who really doesn't like
passive aggressiveness
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