Arnold Browne points out some things to look out for when digging deeper in Matthew's Gospel
Now that the summer is upon us, the holiday weeks may offer us a little time for some reading and rather more leisurely reflection. After reading 11 chapters, we are developing a familiarity with the style and concerns of Matthew’s Gospel, and this may be a good time to dig a bit deeper. Here, Arnold Browne points out some things to look out for.
The Revised Common Lectionary explains that each year we focus particularly on one of the three Synoptic Gospels, allowing it ‘to lead us to Christ’. The same gospel ‘is used largely for the festival Sundays and seasons’, and even in these summer Sundays of Ordinary Time, ‘passages and parables that are unique to one evangelist are normally included as part of the Sunday readings’.
Matthew’s Jesus and Matthew’s community
It is worth asking ourselves what we think about Matthew’s Gospel, as we read his particular version of miracles, parables and teaching of Jesus. While we read the four gospels as the primary sources of what we know about Jesus himself, we also learn from them much about the earliest Christian communities. For example, Matthew’s version of the story of Jesus coming on the water to his disciples ‘battered by the waves’, with Peter’s prayer, ‘Lord save me!’ and the conclusion that those ‘in the boat’ worshipped him saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God,’ evokes for us the challenges and consolations, the doubt and faith of Matthew’s community (14.22-33).
As well as learning from the gospels about Jesus and about the communities that followed him, we realise that each evangelist’s own concerns influence the way that he adapts and edits the oral and written sources available. Matthew emphasises Jesus’ teaching, his ‘instructing his twelve disciples’ and going on ‘to teach and proclaim his message’ (11.1, see 4.23, 9.35). To highlight Jesus’ role as the authoritative teacher of God’s people, he compares him with Moses, who also came ‘out of Egypt’ (2.15, see Exodus 2) and departed from a mountaintop (28.16-20, see Deuteronomy 34). As there are five books, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, of the Law of Moses, so Matthew groups Jesus’ teaching into five sections, the first four of which conclude with the phrase, ‘Now when Jesus had finished saying these things’ (7.28; 11.1; 13.53; 19.1). The fifth discourse ends, ‘When Jesus had finished saying all these things’ (26.1), echoing the conclusion of the Song of Moses:
When Moses had finished reciting all these words to Israel, he said to them: ‘Take to heart all the words that I am giving in witness against you today; give them as a command to your children’ (Deuteronomy 32.45-46).
We hear this echoed again at the end of Matthew’s Gospel (28.18-20), where Jesus commissions his disciples to teach not just Israel’s children but all the nations ‘to observe everything that I have commanded you’. With Jesus’ final words, ‘And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age,’ Matthew reminds us that ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ was revealed to Moses as ‘I AM WHO I AM’, and promised him, ‘I will be with you’ (Exodus 3). This promise to Moses is renewed by Jesus as a promise for all humankind. And the one revealed to Moses as ‘I AM WHO I AM’ is now revealed by Jesus to be ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’.
In Matthew, Jesus the teacher offers guidance for living well in aphorisms and beatitudes, parables and wise sayings. When, at the end of the third section of teaching, he asks his disciples, ‘Have you understood all this?’ we learn from their answer, ‘Yes’, that those who listen to Jesus’ instruction are enabled to grow in faith and wisdom. When Jesus then goes on to commend the ‘scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven’ as like ‘the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old’, we are given a glimpse of Matthew at work (13.51-52). The evangelist is among those who collected and arranged the traditions about Jesus, relating them to his understanding of the Law of Moses. Jesus’ ‘new’ teaching fulfils Moses’ ‘old’, and we need to keep both in mind when we read, for example, the story of the feeding of the 5,000 where the age-old question of Moses, ‘Where am I to get meat to give to all this people?’ (Numbers 11.13), is answered anew by Jesus’ empowering of his disciples, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat’ (14.16).
Matthew’s story and Matthew’s readers
Given his emphasis on Jesus’ teaching, it is not surprising that Matthew makes clear that Jesus’ disciples are to be teachers. When Peter recognises him as ‘the Messiah’, Jesus understands that ‘my Father’ is creating ‘my church (ekklesia)’ and gives him ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’ with their power to ‘bind’ and to ‘loose’, signifying the Church’s authority to teach in his name (16.13-20). Later, Jesus’ same words about binding and loosing are addressed to the whole Church (18.15-20), where all are equal because God alone is ‘Father’, and because ‘one instructor, the Messiah,’ interprets the law (23.8-11). At the end of Matthew Jesus charges the disciples to teach all nations ‘to obey everything that I have commanded you’ (28.20), but throughout the Gospel, the teaching ministry of Jesus’ followers is in mind: ‘whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven’ (5.19).
Matthew carefully ends his Gospel with his characteristic emphasis on the responsibility of Jesus’ disciples to be faithful to his teaching. He has not only adapted his sources in the light of his own concerns and purposes, he also has his own way of composing his narrative, of engaging his readers and encouraging them in their discipleship. Acknowledgement of the evangelists’ individual artistry informs many contemporary readings of the gospels, but was also an aspect of the decision of the Early Church to preserve not one gospel, as urged by Marcion who opted for Luke, nor a ‘harmony’ of the gospels such as compiled by Tatian, but instead to keep four separate accounts of Jesus which were seen to belong together. As long ago as the second century, St Irenaeus wrote about their four images of the Son of God: Luke, beginning in the Temple, to portray Christ as priest; Mark, beginning with Isaiah, to present him as a prophet; John, beginning with his ‘glorious generation from the Father’; and Matthew’s beginning by ‘relating his generation as a man’ (Against Heresies 3.11).
Matthew’s puzzles
Matthew’s narrative and image of Jesus are possibly not as influential or as popular as they once were. The continuing emphasis on observing the Law of Moses (5.17-20), which once commended it to Jewish Christians, is now puzzling to us. Its extension of God’s promise to all nations, that equally commended it to Gentile Christians, is perhaps compromised for us by its condemnation of Jewish teachers who are not disciples of Jesus: ‘You cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves’ (23.15). Simon Schama has pointed out that ‘it was one set of Jews, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who first planted in the mind of Christians the truism that the unconverted among their people were inhuman monsters,’ quoting the cry attributed to the crowd in Matthew 27.25, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ (The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE to 1492 CE, Simon Schama, Bodley Head 2013).
But the story Matthew is telling should be even more disturbing for us. The focus of this attack may not be any particular people, but rather all of us who put the secondary claims of family, nation or race ahead of the radical call of Jesus, whose first disciples immediately ‘left their boat and their father, and followed him’. In the first chapter, the long line of physical fatherhood from Abraham onwards finally reaches Joseph who is, much more importantly, an adoptive parent. He makes a home for Jesus because he believes that the child is ‘from the Holy Spirit’ (1.20). It is the response to God’s word that matters more than physical descent, because, as John the Baptist explains, ‘God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham’ (3.9). Jesus says to the man who wishes to bury his father, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead’ (8.22), and tells his disciples that ‘I have come to set a man against his father’ (10.35). He says of his disciples, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers’ (12.49), and says to them, ‘Call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father – the one in heaven’ (23.9). And it is only an unidentified ‘other Mary’ who joins Mary Magdalene at the tomb on the days of Jesus’ death and resurrection (27.6; 28.1). The great commission to baptise all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit creates a new identity to which our gospel readings invite us to awaken, as they also ask us challenging questions about what we need to let go.