Receiving a Reward - Reflections on Matthew 10:40-42, Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

by John C. Holbert on Wednesday, April 8, 2026

         I believe that small instructive texts such as the one we have today are among the most difficult to address in a classroom or in a sermon. They are bare-bones declarations that have little clear context, and thus sound rather like free-floating statements of command or comment that bid us to do what they say or accept their claims and try to connect them with the ways we live our lives. The brief three verses we examine now are classic examples of these sorts of texts that appear as sore thumbs, thrusting up from the miracles and sermons and teaching tales that dot the Gospel of Matthew. I admit to being somewhat at a loss to know where to go. Still, the lectionary collectors have given them to us, and I feel duty-bound to have a go at them.

         “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me” (Mt.10:40). Well, that seems straightforward enough. Jesus is speaking to the disciples, his inner circle, and says to them that they are to be representatives of him in the same way that he is the representative of the one who sent him, namely God. Such a line sounds rather more like John’s Gospel, where much is made of the way Jesus is from God, is in fact God’s very Word, and the disciples are to find their ongoing vocations as models of their master, Jesus. It might well be said that what these verses point to is a look at the Matthean community where one finds disciples, prophets, righteous ones (?), and little ones, the latter perhaps being the community as a whole or a group of simple, especially pious people within it (see especially Mt.18:6,10,14). Hence, we might summarize Mt.10:40 like this: “Be like me, says Jesus, as I am like God; do what I have done, what God has charged me to do.”

         Mt.10:41 strikes me as more problematic, more obscure in its purpose. “Whoever receives a prophet in a prophet’s name will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever receives a righteous one in a righteous one’s name will receive a righteous one’s reward.” What might this mean? What exactly is a “prophet’s reward?” And what is a “righteous one’s reward?” I find myself grasping for answers to these questions. Just before these verses Matthew has had Jesus offer a stark warning about bringing not peace to the earth but a sword (Mt.10:34), and has gone on to say that “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me,” adding “Those who find their lives will lose them and those who lose their lives for my sake will find them” (Mt.10:38-39). I might then conclude that “a prophet’s reward” is the result of "taking up the cross;” and “losing one’s life for Jesus’s sake, thus finding it” is also a prophet’s reward. A reward in this case might well be death on the cross, thus following the master with courage and resolve. And it has long been historically true that genuine prophets seldom find a peaceful reward for their efforts. Certainly in our own time, outspoken persons like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, Robert Kennedy, among many others have found sometimes grisly ends to their lives. Too often, that has been the prophet’s reward.

         What Matthew means by “the righteous reward” is very difficult to discern. Was there some group in Matthew’s community known particularly as “the righteous?” The Greek dikaios, and its many adjectival and noun uses, is a very common word used in myriad ways in the New Testament, from those who do what is right legally to those who are religiously correct in their actions, doing what is right with respect to the commands of God. The Hebrew word chasid may be an equivalent term, referring in later Judaism to a class of Jews known especially for their rigorous attachments to Torah in actions and dress. What exactly Matthew means by the “righteous reward” may have something to do with a group in the early Christian community that was particularly known for piety and strict practice, but that must remain only speculation. 

         Mt.10:42 is much clearer and perhaps far more important as a community instruction and model for behavior. “And whoever gives one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, Amen I say to you, that one will not lose his reward.” Here Matthew bids his Christian siblings to perform the appropriate actions with respect to the “little ones” in their midst, either a special group or a designation for the whole community—I tend to favor the latter meaning— which is the free gift of “a cup of cold water.” That gift, so welcome in the hot and dusty climate of the first century, so simple yet so delightful, is a sign and promise of a certain reward. And what is that reward? Nothing less, or nothing more than the satisfaction of aiding a sibling in Christ. In that way, Matthew anticipates the grander scene of Mt.25, where it is made certain that any act done for the members of the community, however small, however unrecognized, are in reality acts done for Jesus himself. Matthew 25 is not the Parable of the Last Judgment, as it is so often characterized, but the parable of the daily judgment. All acts done for the “little ones” at any time are done for Jesus, and the little ones are with us always, ready for our actions on their behalf.