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Matthew's Jesus Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 10, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 9:1-11 Matthew 22:41-45
Who do they say he is, these writers of the gospels and Paul? That is the question before us on the six Sundays leading inexorably to the cross. Imagine if you had only Matthew or Mark or Luke or John or Paul to tell you of the God revealed in a first-century Jew named Jesus? What would be missed and what would be magnified? There is no denying the fact that each gospel writer had a particular angle of vision from which to tell the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. In distinct ways, said Karl Barth, they set out to underline what lifted Jesus “right out of a list of others and placed him decidedly at the side of God.” The stories and sayings they had at their disposal were arranged and rearranged to create a unique literary genre known as a gospel. The word means, literally, good news and in two thousand years, the gospels continue to be just that in the lives of those who, by way of chapter and verse, are summoned to do business with the living God. In fact “living” is the operative word that names the unique character of the gospels. There is no sense in which the gospels were written to record the biography or the history of a person who once lived. The Jesus of the gospels who lived and really died is decidedly alive! Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote in order that we may come to know him and believe…that we may grow to trust him and follow…that we may find ourselves encountered and our lives claimed by this incomparable Son of God who was dead and behold: he is alive forevermore!
This morning we begin our series not with the gospel written closest to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection—Mark’s gospel--but with the gospel placed at the beginning of the New Testament by the early church: the Gospel according to Matthew. It turns out to be the perfect beginning for those of us who have just finished a year reading and preaching through the Old Testament. Likewise the church fathers must have had this same sort of continuity in mind when they ordered the canon. Matthew comes first, then, because his gospel is written self-consciously as a bridge between the God revealed to Israel in the law and the prophets and the same God revealed in Jesus who has come to fulfill the law and the prophets. Unfortunately the rub which guided Matthew’s plotting of Jesus’ life was Israel’s rejection of Jesus whom Peter confessed to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God. That said, I find myself wondering what about Jesus could possibly have led Matthew, a Jew, to believe otherwise. For Matthew brings to his writing of the gospel “a full set of Jewish beliefs about God” according to commentator John Nolland: that Israel is God’s chosen people; that Scripture is the story of God’s dealings with God’s people; that the actions of Israel’s God in the world are never direct but always mediated through angelic messengers and prophets and kings. But in these latter days something has led Matthew to believe Israel’s God has acted in a way that is both continuous with the story of Israel yet decisively new. The mediator of this action, he believes, is Jesus and the question remains: Why Jesus? IfI were to venture a guess, I would say that Matthew’s angle of vision was transformed by the radically unexpected nature of the reign of the Messiah in Jesus life, death and resurrection, a reign begun in the birth of Jesus and confirmed by the risen Christ on a mountain in Galilee saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has now been given to me.” In between his beginning and ending, Matthew certainly was especially taken with both Jesus’ words and his deeds, for in this gospel more than any other “Jesus embodies his speech.” He is the Teacher. But what led Matthew to worship him as more than a teacher with unparalleled integrity, I think, was Jesus’ embodiment and radical reinterpretation of Israel’s Scripture that culminated in his suffering, death and resurrection. Such an angle of vision could only be a stretch for those who still were waiting for God to end all foreign occupation of the land promised long ago to Abraham; who still were hoping for God to reestablish an enduring throne occupied, according to the promise, by David’s Greater Son. I say again: ask any Jew today why Jesus is not the Messiah and you will be directed simply to look around at the mess the world—and particularly Israel—is in. That God met the longing of God’s people in an itinerant teacher who was crucified by the Roman occupiers, raised from the dead on the third day and set to reign over all nations until the end of the age was a scandal and continues to be a shibboleth to the people Matthew believes Jesus was born to save. Nevertheless Matthew surely wrote his gospel in an attempt to do business with his own people’s hope for a king from David’s line that would unite Israel and rule God’s people with justice and righteousness. We can relate! If in our day the heightened expectation surrounding the presidential election is not the messianic hope of a nation, then I do not know what messianism is! But if in his day Matthew meant to act as Jesus’ campaign manager among the Jewish constituency, he could not have chosen a more difficult message to deliver. “For a first-century author to identify Jesus as a Messiah or a Son of David when addressing an audience made up at least in part of Christians who had grown up in Judaism was not as easy as it sounds,” writes New Testament scholar Richard Van Egmond. He perhaps could have sold them on a Messiah, but not a Messiah dead, buried and resurrected. Though more problematic that this was “the fact that ‘Messiahs’ connected with the Davidic line were often portrayed in connection with a political restoration of territorial Israel, something that was decidedly absent from Matthew’s account.” Given all of this, says Van Egmond, “we might expect that Matthew would minimize Jesus’ Davidic credentials…yet the opposite is true.” From his beginning genealogy through the story of Jesus’ passion, Matthew rings the changes on the meaning of the Son of David in relation to Jesus. To wit, where Mark (Matthew’s primary source) has the crowds shout “Hosanna” as Jesus enters Jerusalem, Matthew adds “Hosanna to the Son of David!” It is as if he is saying, “Do you not see in him the promised reign of God begun?” Likewise in our text for the morning, Matthew raises the stakes of Mark’s account and has Jesus provoke the Pharisees, “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They answer “The son of David.” In exquisite rabbinic fashion, Jesus then asks how it could be that David called his own son Lord. For if David calls him Lord, Jesus asks, how can he be his son? Or to put the question in the present tense of the gospel, how can the man Matthew has taken pains to identify as an offspring of David’s line be merely David’s son when he is also called the Lord? By implication this son of David is surely God’s Son sent to save David’s offspring from their sin. Silence reigns in response and from that moment on, says Matthew, no one dared to ask him any more questions. From that moment on the answer to Jesus’ question is given in the story of Jesus’ passion and death. Matthew then painstakingly traces the son of David tradition over the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, death and resurrection. From the prophet Zechariah, a prophet closely connected to the Davidic dynasty, come the images of a king triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on the foal of a donkey; the prediction that they will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered; the payment of thirty shekels of silver weighed out and finally thrown back into the treasury. But cannier than all of these references is the parallel drawn between David and Jesus on the Mount of Olives. On the night before his arrest, Jesus moves from the city of Jerusalem down across the Kidron valley and up to the Mount of Olives. “Using the same verb that describes David’s journey from Jerusalem, as he goes up to the Mount of Olives for a time of distraught prayer during the revolt of [his son] Absalom and Ahithophel, his trusted advisor,” Van Egmond again writes almost incredulously, “Matthew sets the stage for Jesus’ time of prayer and betrayal by one of his closest followers. [And] When, in a [story unique to Matthew], Judas later hangs himself, the echoes of Ahithophel’s suicide are unmistakable.” From beginning to end Matthew masterfully portrays Jesus as the promised king sent by God whose reign has begun. In the end Matthew fails to convince the religious leaders of the first century. Yet I think he would be quick to confess his failure as a fact held in the same mysterious will of God that met Jesus’ agonized prayer in the garden with silence. From that moment on, Jesus willed God’s will that he go to the cross to save God’s people from their sin. He thereby proves himself worthy of belief,” writes Stephen Hayes, “as the true king of Israel with [the] power to save himself and others by remaining on the cross and refusing to save himself from a death that is God’s will.” Put another way, “By not saving himself, he has saved others”: namely you and me. At the foot of the cross, then, with the centurion as our stand in, the question we asked first of Matthew is asked by Matthew of us! “Truly,” confesses the centurion, “this was the Son of God.” What, finally, has Matthew’s gospel and portrayal of Jesus to do with the faith of a decidedly gentile crowd such as this? Matthew’s Jesus, in the first place, makes it impossible for us to know him without knowing the Scriptures both Old and New. In this regard it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s efforts to combat the German Christians’ distain for the Old Testament that led to his own study of David in 1936. The study provoked one German Christian to call Bonhoeffer’s conclusions “obnoxious, vulgar nonsense” that “offend the morality and ethic of the German race.” Yet his study of David is remarkable, argues theologian Martin Kuske, “because it deems the testaments to be of equal value…: ‘The God of the Old Testament,’ Bonhoeffer writes ‘is the Father of Jesus Christ. The God who appears in Jesus Christ is the God of the Old Testament.’” Such a belief in Nazi Germany “constituted an explosive declaration both politically and theologically.” So it was in Matthew’s day and so it still is in some Christian circles today! Yet I say again, Matthew’s Jesus makes it impossible for us to know him without knowing the Scriptures both Old and New. In the second place Matthew’s Jesus also is given to us as the lens through which the whole of Scripture may be read with some warrant. Scholars shudder at the thought and yet I think, because of Matthew’s gospel, we may listen for God’s word in the Old Testament with a seriousness we could never imagine unless we were reading with an eye to Matthew’s Jesus. Again believing that God is the one God of the entire Bible and, with Luther, insisting that Christ was revealed as much in the Old Testament as the New, Bonhoeffer found Christ to be the window through which he was drawn to the Old Testament. From prison he writes in December of 1943 with Matthew’s Jesus evident in his words:
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