O God, help us to listen to your Word with understanding, to receive it with faith, and to obey it with courage, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.
I wonder how you view the cross. Is it a simple cross of wood or is it something more ornate? Perhaps more like the crucifix above me – I don’t think many of you would immediately think of the cross as the one hanging above the screen. We have already heard what Mark and Luke think, now it is Matthew’s turn.
This is quite difficult as he uses most of Mark’s references to the Son of God, with modifications in some instances, several of them come from Q material but six are unique to Matthew. So we could argue that Son of God is the most important Christological affirmation for Matthew. In Chapter 14 vv 33 and again in Chapter 16 vv 16 he records Simon Peter calling Jesus in clear terms ‘You are the Son of God’. He clearly identifies Jesus with Israel – Jesus is the one who fulfills the destiny of God’s son Israel. He strengthens Mark’s association between Jesus’ divine sonship and his death by inserting extra material at Chapter 27 vv 40 echoing the temptation in Chapter 4 ‘If you are the Son of God…’ and he strengthens the allusion of Jesus’ death by modifying Mark through his implication of the suffering righteous man in his account of Jesus’ baptism.
He comes closer to attributing pre-existence to Jesus as Son of God than any Christian writer before him. He identifies Jesus as Wisdom and Wisdom was thought of as pre-existent. He also uses the title Son with Father and Holy Spirit in a triadic formulation which foreshadows, in some degree, the later Trinitarian understanding of God, the authority that Jesus claims and expresses in his commission is that of the risen one. Matthew extends the understanding of Jesus’ divine sonship by dating it from his conception and attributing that to the creative power of the Spirit and depicting his sonship in terms of his mission fulfilling the destiny of God’s son Israel.
Matthew identifying Jesus as Wisdom would appear to come from his source Q and we can identify the major Wisdom passages in Matthew with similar passages in Luke. There are several passages where this is possible, without bibles in front of you it is not appropriate for me to tell you exactly where. An identification of Jesus as wisdom cannot be clearly discerned prior to Matthew. It is clear that he transforms some of Wisdom’s sayings into those of Jesus himself. Whether his readers at the time could have discerned the equation of Jesus with Wisdom is uncertain. But we today can see that it was Matthew’s own view, he has no trouble in attributing a saying of Wisdom to Jesus, presumably because Jesus is Wisdom. Whether he thought of Jesus as the incarnation of pre-existent Wisdom, or simply identified the exalted Christ as Wisdom as Paul did is less clear. Matthew transformed some of Q’s sayings into a vehicle of Wisdom Christology, where Jesus is identified as Wisdom.
It is in Matthew that Jesus is the one who sends prophets, wise men and scribes rather than them being the ‘sent.’ Because we can compare Matthew and Luke with their sources we can frequently detect where they have modified or expanded the traditions about Jesus which they received. Thanks to Matthew we can recognize that there was a ’when’ in the taking up by earliest Christianity of this type of language. That there was a development in the course of which Wisdom categories were applied to Christ himself as a new step in Christian thinking about Christ. Matthew embraces an explicit Wisdom Christology and he does this by careful but obviously deliberate redaction of his source whom we take to be Q.
In the early church Matthew’s gospel was used more widely and more extensively than any of the other gospels. It is not hard to see why it was popular, he has arranged it more effectively and his prose is rhythmical and sometimes poetic. It is nearly half as long again as Mark and contains more of Jesus’ sayings. He was also clearly influenced by the Old Testament and by contemporary Judaism. In modern times many of the gospels distinctive features attract and fascinate but some of his emphases puzzle.
Matthew twice quotes Jesus talking of taking up our cross to follow him, Luke mentions this once the other two gospels not at all. This brings into focus at an early stage the importance that the cross is to play in Jesus’ life; we are made aware of its significance of the weight that it can place upon each one of us. It was not Jesus alone who would have to suffer. How often have we railed at God about the burdens he has placed upon us, the injustices that take place around us do we consider these as our cross, some people do. Do we compare it with Jesus suffering for us? Do we echo the words of john Donne:
For when that Cross ungrudged, unto you sticks,
Then are you to yourself, a crucifix.
As perchance, carvers do not faces make,
But that away, which hid them there, do take:
Let crosses , so, take what hid Christ in thee,
And be his image, or not his, but he.
Matthew quoting the tradition that the scribes and Pharisees are the sons of those who murdered the prophets: they, too, are murderers. They are addressed as ‘You serpents, you brood of vipers’ the very words that John the Baptist had used but here specifically addressed to the Pharisees and Sadducees. Reference is then made to the ‘Christian’ prophets, wise men, and scribes whom Jesus is sending to the Jewish leaders, some of whom will be killed and crucified just like Jesus himself. Some will be scourged in the synagogues of the Pharisees and scribes and persecuted from town to town. As a result, God’s judgement will come on those who have persecuted and murdered the followers of Jesus. At the end of Chapter 23 we are told that God’s kingdom will be taken away from Israel and given to a nation producing the fruits of it. It is believed that Matthew’s anti-Jewish polemic is because his community had recently parted company with Judaism after a period of prolonged hostility. Opposition, rejection and persecution from some Jewish quarters is not just a matter of past experience: for Matthew and his community the threat is still felt strongly and keenly. Matthew is puzzled and pained by Israel’s continued rejection of Jesus and of Christian messengers who have proclaimed Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes.
Matthew’s prime concern was to set out the story and significance of Jesus in order to encourage and exhort Christians in his own day – by extension also those of our present time which is why I feel Matthew’s message of the cross is this. (Hold Jesus cross up)
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