Matthew 7:24-29 — Wise Builder

Linda Brown: A card on your fridge for your mom's cardiology appointment next month, and a concrete footing under your house that nobody has looked at since the day it was poured. Those two things don't seem to have anything to do with each other... so why do I think they're today's episode?

Frank Edwards: They have everything to do with each other, and Jesus says so. The appointment is coming whether you're ready or not, and when it comes, it won't decide what you're standing on. It'll only show you. The storm doesn't decide which house stands. The foundation decided that a long time before the first drop of rain.

Linda Brown: Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, we are so glad you're here. Today is Matthew chapter seven, verses twenty-four through twenty-nine, the very last words of the Sermon on the Mount. We're also doing something a little different: we're going back over the last twenty days together and pulling those threads into one piece. Frank, why stop and recap here, of all places?

Frank Edwards: Because the passage stops and recaps! It opens with the word "therefore," and that one word reaches back over three whole chapters, over everything Jesus has said since he sat down on that hillside and the crowd gathered around him, the scene we started with on day one. Jesus is doing the gathering up himself, and we're just following him. Let me read it.

Frank Edwards: "Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because its foundation was on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell... and great was its collapse!" When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astonished at His teaching, because He taught as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.

Linda Brown: "These words of Mine." Does he mean just the last few lines, or does that cover everything? The Beatitudes, the part about worry, the narrow gate, all of it?

Frank Edwards: All of it. The blessings on the poor in spirit, salt and light, the six times he said "you have heard that it was said... but I tell you," the Lord's Prayer, the birds of the air, the narrow gate, the tree you know by its fruit... every stone we've looked at for twenty days. The claim at the center of this passage is actually simple to say, even if it's hard to live. Jesus' own words are the foundation, and hearing them without doing them is building on sand. Look at what he assumes. He assumes you heard. Both builders heard. He assumes the storm comes. It hits both houses, with the same rain and the same wind in the same order, word for word in both halves. The only variable, the only thing that differs between those two men, is buried underground where nobody can see it. Everything else in the sermon has been laying stone, and now he asks what you set it on.

Linda Brown: Everybody knows you don't build a house on sand, though. A kid knows that. It's a parable written for people who have never seen a house, so why would Jesus end his greatest sermon on something that obvious?

Frank Edwards: [laughs] Because to the people listening, it wasn't obvious at all. Picture the hill country of Galilee in summer. The dry riverbeds, the wadis, are baked flat and smooth, with sandy floors that look like the easiest building site in the world. You could put up a house there in an afternoon without hauling a single stone. Then the winter rains hit the highlands, and a channel that was a footpath at noon is a roaring flood by evening. Sand looks exactly like ground until the water comes. The word Matthew uses for the wise man helps here. It's phronimos, and it doesn't mean clever or well-read. It's the word for someone who sees what's coming and acts now because of it. Matthew uses it again for the bridesmaids who brought extra oil, and Jesus uses it when he says, "be wise as serpents." The foolish builder isn't stupid. He's shortsighted. He's betting on July.

Linda Brown: Foresight, then. The wise builder isn't smarter than his neighbor, he just actually believes the rain is coming... that is what you are saying?

Frank Edwards: He believes it enough to spend a hard day digging when an easy afternoon was sitting right there. And the grim part is that in July you can't tell the two houses apart. Same roofline, same garden. Proverbs had already drawn this picture centuries earlier: "When the whirlwind passes, the wicked is no more; but the righteous is an everlasting foundation." Ezekiel adds a darker version, false prophets slapping whitewash over a flimsy wall and telling people it's fine, until God sends the storm to tear it down. So the sandy house isn't only the careless person. It can be a whole religious life that sounds comforting and has nothing underneath it. The whitewash can be very good whitewash. Which brings up the question I think every listener is asking right about now... where's the storm in my life?

Linda Brown: The storm is the phone call from your dad's doctor, or the words "we'd like to run a few more tests," or a hospice brochure sitting on the kitchen counter. Three weeks ago "do not worry about tomorrow" sounded beautiful, and tonight tomorrow has a biopsy scheduled at nine a.m.

Frank Edwards: Jesus never promised the wise builder a dry winter. People miss that. The rain fell on the rock house too. Faith in Christ doesn't route the flood around your family. What he promises is that the flood won't be the thing that decides the outcome, because the outcome was settled underground.

Linda Brown: This is where I get uneasy. For twenty days we've heard that the sermon starts with grace, "blessed are the poor in spirit," empty hands, all of that. Now the ending is basically "do what I said or your house collapses." That's the treadmill. That's where my standing with God depends on how well I perform.

Frank Edwards: It would, if the sermon didn't have a front door. Think of it as an envelope. It opens with Jesus seated on the mountain pronouncing blessing, and no commands yet, only gifts spoken over beggars. It closes on the same mountain with the storm. The whole impossible middle, the enemy-love and the deepened law, sits between grace at the front and endurance at the back. The order matters. Theologians make the distinction between justification, God declaring you right with him through Christ alone, and sanctification, the lifelong work of being made new. The doing in this parable belongs to the second. It doesn't earn you the rock. It shows you're already standing on it. The poor in spirit from chapter five are the builders in chapter seven. He blesses the beggars first and only then shows them what their house can withstand.

Linda Brown: Honestly, that doesn't settle it for me. Take a woman caring for her father. It's two in the morning, he's gotten up for the fourth time, she snaps at him, says something she can't take back. She's heard every word of this sermon, and in that moment she didn't do it. By this parable, which house is she?

Frank Edwards: The one on the rock, if she comes back to his words in the morning. Look at who the sand builder actually is, just before this. He's the man saying "Lord, Lord," prophesying, doing mighty works, and hearing "I never knew you." He isn't someone who stumbled. He's someone the words never touched. James has a sharp picture of him: a man glances in a mirror, walks away, and forgets his own face. That's the sand. And the woman at two in the morning who lies awake remembering exactly what she said, who apologizes to her confused father even though he may not remember it tomorrow? She hasn't forgotten her face. She's looking right at it. Luke's version of this parable says the wise builder "dug and went deep." Repentance is digging. Is it possible that going back to him broken is one of the most rock-built things a person can do?

Linda Brown: I'll give you part of that. The mirror helps. The failure isn't the sand, the forgetting is. Still, "dug and went deep" sounds like my shovel, my back, my effort. We're still talking about me doing the work.

Frank Edwards: It is work, and I won't pretend otherwise. Jesus calls it doing. The rock, though, isn't the work. Isaiah twenty-eight has God himself speaking: "Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone... a precious cornerstone of a sure foundation." God lays the stone, and you dig down to what he already put there. Paul says it straight out to the Corinthians: "no one can lay any other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ." You don't make the rock by digging hard enough. Your shovel only finds it.

Frank Edwards: And to find it, you have to look at the phrase Jesus keeps repeating. "These words of Mine." Twice in five verses. He doesn't say "these principles," or "the Law as I've explained it." He says his words. This is what the church calls union with Christ, and it means you can't build on his teaching while keeping him at arm's length, because the words and the Speaker come together. To build on what he says is to build on him. Which is exactly what stunned the crowd.

Linda Brown: Why, though? A rabbi who quotes the great teachers before him sounds humble to me, like good footnoting. Why is "not like the scribes" supposed to be astonishing and not just a matter of style?

Frank Edwards: Because the footnotes were the authority. A scribe was a trained, deeply respected interpreter of the Law, and when he taught, he laid one name on top of another like a mason laying courses of brick: Rabbi Hillel says this, Rabbi Shammai says that, the elders before them handed down the other. The longer the chain, the heavier the ruling. That was the only sound religious teaching had. Then Jesus opens his mouth and the chain is gone. "You have heard that it was said... but I tell you." The word for authority here is exousia, and it's more than volume or confidence. It's the right to decide and to command, the kind that belongs to someone by who he is rather than by permission from someone above him. Nobody stands behind Jesus vouching for him. He stakes your whole house on his own say-so. After the resurrection he makes the full size of it plain: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." So what is the rock, really... is it a set of good ideas?

Linda Brown: The rock is a person. Not a principle, not a moral code with a nice frame around it, but him.

Frank Edwards: Him, and a rock who has already been through the flood. The source for today puts it beautifully. The house doesn't stand because the builder was clever or strong. It stands because the rock doesn't move. Christ stood in the storm of judgment that beats on every house, took the full force of it on the cross, and rose unmoved on the third day. Your grip on him may be very thin at two in the morning. His grip on you isn't thin.

Linda Brown: What it costs, then, in real terms. It costs making the call to your brother about Dad's power of attorney, the one you've dreaded for a year. It costs going to the appointment when you'd rather let the nurse handle it. It costs forgiving a mother who is too far into her dementia to ever ask you for it. None of it looks brave. Mostly it looks like sitting in a parking garage outside the oncology wing.

Frank Edwards: It won't feel like building. It'll feel like tiredness. Nobody applauds a footing. Nobody drives past a house and admires the concrete underneath it. You'll probably never see the stone you're laying. You'll only find out it was there.

Linda Brown: And there's the part that still bothers me. If the foundation is underground, then I don't really get to find out what I built on until the storm comes, do I? I could be sitting in the parking garage right now and honestly not know.

Frank Edwards: [short pause] No, you can't fully see it from above ground, and I'm not going to pretend this passage lets you. Jesus left that tension in place on purpose. What he did give us is the front door of the sermon. The blessing came first. He called the poor in spirit blessed before he ever asked anyone to build, and the rock he points to is himself, a stone God laid, tested, and set in place long before your storm was on the calendar.

Linda Brown: The blessing first, and the storm still coming. Both are true at once, and I think we're supposed to leave with both of them.

Frank Edwards: Matthew ends with the crowd astonished at what they'd heard. Astonished, though, is not the same as built. They went back down that mountain amazed, and whether they went down as builders, Matthew never tells us. The rock is still there, and so is the storm. The rest is still being dug.

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