The Gospel of Matthew Matthew
Matthew
All four gospels are emphatically Jewish in tone and content, but Matthew’s is the most obviously so. The book is structured around five blocks of Jesus’ teaching, corresponding to the five books of Moses. The early chapters have Jesus re-enacting the exodus from Egypt; the closing chapters highlight Jesus’ death at Passover. The book opens with a genealogy from Abraham to the Messiah, and closes with a scene echoing Daniel’s picture of the enthroned son of man. Matthew repeatedly draws attention to the way in which events concerning Jesus fulfill biblical promises. At every turn he insists that Jesus is what Israel had been waiting for—even though this fulfillment turned out to be shocking.
The genealogy itself tells the whole story, for those with eyes to see. Matthew organizes it into three sequences of fourteen generations, from Abraham to David, David to the Babylonian exile, and the exile to Jesus. Abraham is the founder of the family through whom the one God would rescue the world; David is the king who is promised an heir to rule the world; the Babylonian exile is the point at which, in line with the covenantal warnings in Deuteronomy, the world seems to have won and the promise to be lost forever. But God’s faithfulness continues, and the Messiah is the one who will save his people from their sins. He inaugurates the seventh “seven,” the Jubilee of forgiveness. But the Messiah is not simply the long fulfillment of Israel’s promises. He is also “Emmanuel,” “God with us.”
The story unfolds as Jesus embodies Israel’s history, going into Egypt as a baby and then returning, and then, in his baptism, re-enacting the crossing of the Red Sea and the Jordan. In his wilderness temptations, he succeeds where ancient Israel had failed. All this prepares us for Jesus’ opening announcement of God’s kingdom arriving on earth as in heaven, and his enactment of this, throughout the story, in powerful deeds of healing, in his feasting with tax-collectors and sinners, and in his refashioning of the kingdom-hope in sermon and parable. The five great blocks of teaching open with the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5—7) and continue with the instructions to the disciples (chapter 10), the parables of seeds and sowing (chapter 13) and the further instructions for his followers’ communal life (chapter 18), before the last block mirrors the first in its length (chapters 23—25), looking ahead with warnings and promises to the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the rescue and vindication of Jesus’ followers.
Throughout the story the question of who Jesus really is, and how exactly he will bring God’s kingdom, is never far away. It reaches a central climax with Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Messiah . . . the son of the living God,” and with the transfiguration. But Matthew leads the eye relentlessly towards the final events of Jesus’ dramatic entry into Jerusalem, his action in the Temple, the Last Supper, and the arrest, trial and crucifixion. Matthew makes it clear that these events all interpret one another, and together point to the long-awaited act of divine and messianic rescue: the forces of evil do their worst and are defeated. Texts from the Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel and elsewhere are drawn together to say that this is the ultimate saving act promised all along. The resurrection of Jesus is then the beginning of an entirely new phase of history for the people of God, as Jesus commissions his followers to announce the good news to the whole world.
The Gospel of Matthew
Currently Selected:
The Gospel of Matthew Matthew: NTFE
Highlight
Copy
Compare
Share
Want to have your highlights saved across all your devices? Sign up or sign in
a. The New Testament for Everyone, Third Edition. Copyright © 2011, 2018, 2019 by
Nicholas Thomas Wright, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. All rights reserved. Published by Zondervan, 2023.
Learn More About The New Testament for Everyone