Lecture 4: Matthew: The Themes, the Purpose, and the Shape of the First Gospel

The lecture, section by section

1. Fulfillment: what stands written comes to pass

   Matthew hooks event after event to specific Scripture. The formula appears first at the virgin conception, that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, and again with Micah at Bethlehem; elsewhere Jesus asks, did you never read in the Scriptures, and cites the rejected stone of Psalm 118. The law, or the law and the prophets, serves as shorthand for the whole Old Testament, and in chapter 5 Jesus declares he came not to abolish but to fulfill it: not the smallest letter or stroke will pass away until all is accomplished.

2. Jesus the teacher, and the five discourses

   Matthew presents Jesus above all as teacher: the scribe of chapter 8 and the Pharisees of chapter 9 both call him that, and at the end of the Sermon on the Mount the multitudes are amazed, for he taught as one having authority and not as their scribes. Five great blocks of teaching structure the book, chapters 5 to 7, 10, 13, 18, and 24 to 25, with snippets throughout, and every major discourse is directed first to his disciples: they come to him on the mountain, the twelve are instructed before being sent, the parables are explained to them privately, they ask who is greatest, they ask on Olivet when these things will be. The gospel then closes with teaching made mission: make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.

3. Disciples, rabbis, and followers who fall away

   A disciple is a learner who follows a teacher to hear him, while rabbi named an officially validated teacher, trained under the scribes, mostly of the Pharisaic sect. In Matthew the disciples are usually, by context, the twelve, and after Judas the eleven; but discipleship in itself does not guarantee faith. Judas was a disciple, and in John 6 disciples scandalized by hard teaching walk with him no more, just as the second and third soils of the sower receive the word for a time and fall away. Beyond the twelve, though, there were true followers, which is why a hundred and twenty gather in the upper room in Acts 1.

4. Righteousness in its Old Testament sense

   The righteous word group appears 26 times, and Matthew uses it as the Old Testament does, not yet in Paul's forensic sense. Joseph is a righteous man in chapter 1 as the Psalms divide Israel between the righteous and the wicked: a godly man who fears God and seeks to meet his standard. So Jesus fulfills all righteousness at his baptism, warns that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter the kingdom of heaven, and speaks of the God who sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.

5. The leaders, the people, and the blood upon this generation

   From early in the gospel the chief priests, scribes, and elders oppose Jesus, and chapter 16 announces that the religious leaders will be responsible for his death. In the temple debates Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard, built on Isaiah 5: the vine-growers kill the son to seize his inheritance, and the leaders, pronouncing their own sentence, understand he speaks of them. Chapter 23 denounces the scribes and Pharisees before the multitude, and in chapter 27 the chief priests and elders take counsel to put him to death: the Sanhedrin, official Israel, bears responsibility. But the people do not escape. Chapter 11 pictures a generation like children in the marketplace, unmoved by John's dirge or Jesus's flute, and at the trial all the people cry, his blood be on us and on our children. Essex reads that as a judicial guilt whose consequences continue on Israel as a people, abated in individuals through this age as Romans 11 teaches, until God gives the nation a new heart and a future generation is saved.

6. The church, the Gentiles, the last things, and the miracles

   Jesus speaks of the church twice, as a future reality he himself will build in chapter 16, and as the company where sin is finally to be told in chapter 18, so Matthew shows the Lord anticipating and validating the church while on earth. Meanwhile the Gentiles who appear in the gospel always put Israel to shame: the magi worship the newborn King while no one in Jerusalem stirs, the centurion shows greater faith than any in Israel, in his name the Gentiles will hope, the Canaanite woman's faith is called great, and the risen Lord sends his messengers to all the nations. The gospel breathes the era's eschatological vocabulary, the wrath to come, the judgment, the age to come, and the miracles carry evidential weight: to the imprisoned Baptist's question Jesus answers with Scripture's own signs, the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised, the poor hear good news, and blessed is the one not scandalized by me. The Pharisees cannot deny the works, so they assault their source, and blasphemy against the Spirit is the result.

7. The purpose statement everyone shares

   Putting the themes together, Matthew's narrative says this: Jesus was, and remains, the promised Messiah and Israel's King, who, risen and now in heaven, will return to establish the kingdom in the future despite Israel's past rejection of him. The key text is the entry into Jerusalem, where Matthew conflates Isaiah and Zechariah, behold, your king is coming to you, mounted on a donkey. Essex insists this purpose statement is so plainly in the text that honest commentators of every theological stripe state it nearly alike; what divides them is the meaning of the kingdom, and that interpretive question will govern how Matthew fits the whole canon.

8. Structure, option one: the geography of the King

   The classic structure follows the gospel's geographical movements, flagged by Matthew's word withdraw and his careful anchoring of events in place more than in time: Judea from the genealogy through the temptation, then the withdrawal into Galilee, leaving Nazareth to settle in Capernaum by the sea in Zebulun and Naphtali, through chapter 13; the journeys north from chapter 14, to the district of Caesarea Philippi; the movement toward Jerusalem from chapter 16; and Jerusalem itself from chapter 21 to the end, though the risen Lord gives the commission back in Galilee. It is a gospel to read with an atlas open.

9. Structure, options two and three: discourses and drama

   Twentieth-century readers noticed that each discourse ends with nearly the same formula, when Jesus had finished these words, so a second structure alternates narrative and discourse, narrative of what Jesus did leading into a block of what he taught, five times over, framed by the birth narrative and the passion. A third, dramatic structure, associated with Kingsbury, divides at the two occurrences of from that time: from 4:17 Jesus began to preach, from 16:21 he began to show his disciples he must suffer, yielding person, proclamation, and passion; Blomberg blends the two. The formulas do not make Matthew strictly chronological: the ending of a discourse closes the block and opens more narrative, and since the evangelists order some events differently, none claims a strict chronological sequence.

10. The frame and the hinge

    Whatever one makes of a full chiasm, the gospel's symmetries are striking. Jesus is called King of the Jews only at the beginning and the end, by the magi and by Pilate, outsiders both; the angel of the Lord and revelation by dreams belong to the opening and closing sections; fulfillment statements cluster densest there. The first and last discourses are both given seated on a mountain, both warn of false prophets, both contain the sentence depart from me; the narratives of chapters 8 and 15 alone commend the faith of a Gentile, speak of the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and show compassion on the multitude. All of it trains attention on the center, the Matthean hinge of 11:2 to 13:53, where commentators of every stripe hear the tone change.

11. The hinge itself: opposition rising, the announcement withdrawn

    Through ten chapters the response to Jesus is broadly positive, though 9:34 has already let the Pharisees mutter that he casts out demons by the ruler of the demons, and the missionary discourse prepares the twelve for towns that will not receive them. Then the crescendo: John the Baptist, in prison with the kingdom he announced nowhere in sight, sends to ask, are you the coming one; Jesus upbraids the unrepentant cities, Chorazin and Bethsaida, more tolerable for Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom in the judgment; chapter 12 brings the blasphemy against the Spirit; and from chapter 13 Jesus speaks to the crowds only in parables. After this point the phrase that had defined the preaching of John, of Jesus, and of the twelve, the kingdom of heaven has drawn near, is never used again in the gospel. The official rejection still lies ahead in Jerusalem, but the turn has been made.

12. Essex's outline: the King presented, rejected, and returning

    The prologue of chapters 1 and 2 establishes beyond question that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of David. The public ministry then unfolds: the King authenticated by John's baptism, the Father's voice, and victory over Satan's temptation, chapters 3 and 4; the first discourse expounding the righteousness required for entrance into the kingdom, spoken to believing disciples who will suffer until the kingdom comes, chapters 5 to 7; the power of the King in nine miracles interwoven with the demands of discipleship, and the twelve sent so all Israel will hear, chapters 8 to 10; the evidence of opposition and rejection, chapters 11 and 12, answered by the parables revealing the course of events until the kingdom is established, chapter 13; the King withdrawing, preparing his disciples, and teaching who is greatest, through chapter 18; then Jerusalem: Israel's rejection of the King in chapters 21 and 22, the King's rejection of Israel in chapter 23, your house is left to you desolate until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; the Olivet discourse on the events that will usher in his return, chapters 24 and 25; and the passion and resurrection, 26 to 28, the crucified Jesus raised and alive. The kingdom was not changed into something else; it was delayed. And that answers the Jewish Christian's hardest question, if Jesus is the King, where is the kingdom: because Israel rejected him, his first coming fulfilled the Scriptures that he must suffer and die; he will return to establish the Davidic throne on earth, and in the meantime he is building his church from all who respond to the apostolic testimony.

1. Matthew answers a believer's hardest question, if Jesus is the King, where is the kingdom, with a crucified, risen, and returning King. What present disappointments tempt you to conclude God's promises have failed, and how does Matthew's answer address them?

2. The Gentiles in Matthew worship while Jerusalem is merely stirred, and outsiders confess the King while insiders take counsel against him. What guards a person who has grown up nearest to the truth from being the last to bow to it?

3. Jesus's discourses were given first to disciples, and the commission makes teaching the church's mission. Who taught you to observe what Christ commanded, and whom are you now teaching?