Matthew 7:22-23: The Ones Who Were Sure

On that day, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons and do many powerful deeds?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you. Go away from me, you lawbreakers!’

Matthew 7:22-23 (NET)

The Ones Who Were Sure

The hallway empties fast after the last service. Chairs go back on the cart, a woman in the doorway is asking whether anybody has seen a small blue mitten, and the man who runs the sound board locks the booth and heads for his car. All of that is real work, and Jesus calls them works done in his name.

This is the end of the Sermon on the Mount. He has been talking a while, and then he describes a day, with himself at the center of it, saying the sentence people remember. “I never knew you.”

The people turned away come with prophecy, demons driven out, and many miracles, all of it done in his name, and he takes every item as they list it. Most of us got this verse as a question about ourselves, about whether we know Christ well enough and sincerely enough. Jesus is the one who knows them or does not, and he says so himself.

He had already said what he was after: the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. The will of the Father, in the sermon he’s just finished, looks like loving an enemy who will never apologize, and refusing to hold a brother in contempt.

The passage stays heavy and it should. These are religious insiders with real accomplishments. The people in that scene come up confident, with the work in front of them, and the question does not seem to have occurred to them.

Jesus goes on to a story about rain, where one man built on rock because he heard these words and put them into practice.

The chairs are on the cart and the mitten turns up under the third row. The man from the sound booth carries it back down the hall to the woman in the doorway, and neither of them will remember it by Tuesday.