4. Matthew'S Conception Of Our Lord
MATTHEW'S CONCEPTION OF OUR LORD
P rofundity of Matthew's Suggestiveness In seeking to form an estimate of the significance of this list of designations ascribed to Jesus in Matthew, it does not seem necessary to attempt to draw out separately, as we attempted to do in the case of Mark, the evidence they supply to the primary emphasis laid in Matthew upon the Messianic dignity of Jesus and that they supply to the recognition of the divine majesty of His person. It lies on the very face of these designations that by Matthew, as truly as by Mark, Jesus is conceived in the first instance as the promised Messiah, and His career and work as fundamentally the career and work of the Messiah, at last come to introduce the promised
Kingdom. And it lies equally on their very face that this Messiah whom Jesus is represented as being is conceived by Matthew, and is represented by Matthew as having been conceived by Jesus Himself, as a "transcendent"
figure, as the current mode of speech puts it, i. e., as far transcending in His nature and dignity human conditions.
So clear is this in fact that our interest as we read instinctively takes hold in Matthew of matters quite other than those which naturally occupy it in Mark. In Mark the attention of the reader is attracted particularly to the implications of the superangelic dignity ascribed to the Messiah; and he finds himself unpremeditatingly noting the evidence of the presupposition of His heavenly origin and relations, of His pre-existence, of His more than human majesty, of His divine powers and functions. These things are so much a matter of course with Matthew that the attention of the reader is drawn insensibly off from them to profounder problems. This Gospel opens with an account of the supernatural birth of Jesus, which is so told as to imply that the birth is supernatural only because the person so born is not of this world, but in descending to it fulfills the prophecies that Jehovah shall come to His people to dwell among them and to save them from their sins.
From the very outset, therefore, there can be no question in the mind of the reader that he has to deal not merely with a supernatural life but with a supernatural person, all whose life on earth is a concession to a necessity arising solely from His purpose to save. No wonder rises in him, therefore, when he reads of the supramundane powers of this person, of His superhuman insight, of His supernatural deeds. That He is superior to the angels, who appear constantly as His servants, and is in some profound sense divine, clothed with all divine qualities, strikes him as in no sense strange. The matters on which he finds his mind keenly alert rise above these things, and concern the precise relations in which this superangelic, and therefore uncreated, Being is conceived to stand to the Deity Himself.
Richness of His Implications
It is not possible to avoid noting that all the designations applied to Jesus in this narrative tend to run up at once on being applied to Him into their highest implications. Even the simple name 'Jesus' is no exception to this.
For here it is represented as itself a gift from heaven, designed to indicate that in this person is fulfilled the promise that Jehovah shall visit His people,—for it is He who, in accordance with the prediction of the Psalmist
(130:8), shall save His people—His people, although, in accordance with that prediction, they are Jehovah's people—from their sins (1:21). Similarly the simple honorifics 'Master' and 'Lord' rise in Matthew's hands to their highest value; 'Master' becomes transformed into the more absolute "Master of the House" with His despotic power, governing all things in accordance with His will (20:15) and disposing of the destinies of men in supreme sovereignty (10:25, 13:24 seq., 36 seq.); and 'Lord' becomes the proper designation of the universal King and Judge (25:37, 44) whose coming is the coming of Jehovah (3:3). As the 'Christ' He is pictured as sitting less on David's throne than on God's (22:43, 44); as 'King,' less as the ruler of the nation for Israel than as Judge of all the world for God (25:31 seq.); as 'Bridegroom' as holding in His own hands the issues of life (22:1, 25:1); as 'the Son of Man' as passing through humiliation only to His own proper glory (16:27, 24:30, 26:64); as 'the Son of God' less as God's representative and the vehicle of His grace than as God's fellow (11:27) and the sharer with the Father in the one ineffable Name (28:18–20). Thus the reader is brought steadily upwards to the great passages in which Matthew records
Jesus' supreme self-testimony to His essential relations with His Father, and his attention is quite insistently focused upon them.
Assimilation of Jesus With God
"All things were delivered unto me of my Father," says Jesus, as reported in one of them (11:27): "and no one knoweth the Son save the Father; neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Thus our Lord solemnly presents Himself to men as the exclusive source of all knowledge of God, and the exclusive channel of divine grace. No one can know the Father save through Him, and through Him alone can rest be found for weary souls. And this His exclusive mediation of saving knowledge He makes to rest upon His unique relation to the Father, by virtue of which the Father and Son, and all that is in the Father and Son, lie mutually open to each other's gaze. Attention has been called to the fact, and it is important to observe it, that the whole passage is cast in the present tense, and the relation announced to exist between the Father and Son is, therefore, represented not as a past relation but as a continuous and unbroken one. What our Lord asserts is thus not that He once was with the Father and knew His mind, and is therefore fitted to mediate it as His representative on earth: it is that He, though on earth, still is with the Father and knows His mind—yea, and will know it unchangeably forever. The relations of time do not enter into the representation. Our Lord presents Himself as the sole source of the knowledge of God and of the divine grace, because this is the relation in which He stands essentially to the Father,—a relation of complete and perfect intercommunion. The assertion of the reciprocal knowledge of the Father and Son, in other words, rises far above the merely mediatorial function of the Son, although it underlies His mediatorial mission: it carries us back into the region of metaphysical relations. The Son is a fit and perfect mediator of the divine knowledge and grace because the Son and the
Father are mutually intercommunicative. The depths of the Son's being, we are told, can be fathomed by none but a divine knowledge, while the knowledge of the Son compasses all that God is; from both points of view, the Son appears thus as "equal with God."
Identification of Jesus With God But even this is far from the whole story. The perfect reciprocal knowledge of each by the other which is affirmed goes far towards suggesting that even equality with God falls short of fully expressing the relation in which the Son actually stands to the Father. Equality is an external relation: here there is indicated an internal relation which suggests rather the term interpenetration. There is a relation with the Father here suggested, which transcends all creaturely possibilities, and in which there is no place even for subordination. The man Jesus does indeed represent
Himself as exercising a mediatorial function; what He does is to reveal the Father and to mediate His grace; and that because of a delivery over to Him by the Father. But this mediatorial function is rooted in a metaphysical relation in which is suggested no hint of subordination. Rather in this region what the Father is that the Son seems to be also. There is mystery here, no doubt, and nothing is done to relieve the mystery. All that is done is to enunciate in plain words the conception of the relation actually existing between the Father and Son which supplies their suitable account to all those passages in Matthew in which there seems to be suggested a confusion of Jesus with God, whether in function or in person. If this be the relation of Son and Father—if there is a certain mysterious interpenetration to be recognized between them—then it is no longer strange that to Jesus is attributed all the functions of God, including the forgiveness of sins and the universal judgment of men, nor that in Him is seen the coming of Jehovah
to save His people, in His presence with men the fulfillment of the prophecy of 'Immanuel,' God-with-us, in the coming of John the Baptist to prepare His way the fulfillment of the prophecy of the messenger to make the way of Jehovah straight, and the like. All things were delivered to Him, in short, because He is none else than God on earth.
Participation of Jesus in the Name Of quite similar import is the great declaration with which the Gospel closes. In this our Lord, announcing that all authority was given to Him in heaven and earth—that is, that universal dominion was committed to Him
—commands His disciples to advance to the actual conquest of the world, baptizing all the nations into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and promises to be Himself with them unto the end of the world (28:18–20). In the absence of the former passage, it might conceivably be possible to look upon the dominion here claimed and the conjunction here asserted of the Son with the Father in the future government of the Kingdom as having no rooting in His essential nature but as constituting merely a reward consequent upon our Lord's work. In the presence of that passage we cannot void this, however, of its testimony to essential relations. And the relation here assigned to the Son with respect to deity is the same as was suggested there. The significant point of this passage is the singular "Name." It does not read, "Into the names"—as of many, but of one,—"Into the Name" of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are therefore in some ineffable sense one, sharers in the single Name. Of course it is what we know as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which is suggested here, as it was less clearly suggested in the former passage, and as this doctrine is needed in order to give consistency and solidity to the pervasive suggestion
of Matthew's entire narrative that Jesus, whose career he is recounting, is in some higher sense than mere delegation or representation not merely a superhuman or superangelic or supercreaturely person, but an actually
Divine Person, possessed of divine prerogatives, active in divine power, and in multiform ways manifesting a divine nature. It were impossible for Matthew to paint Jesus as he has painted Him, and to attribute to Him what we have seen him attributing to Him, without some such conception as is enunciated in these two great passages in his mind to support, sustain and give its justification to his representation. So far from these passages offending the reader as they stand in Matthew's Gospel, therefore, and raising doubts of their genuineness, we should have had to postulate something like them for Matthew, had they not stood in his Gospel.
Matthew's portrait of Jesus and the self-witness he quotes from Jesus' lips to His estate and dignity, in other words, themselves necessitate a doctrine of His nature and relations with God very much such as is set forth in these passages: and we can feel perfectly assured, therefore, that these passages represent with great exactness what Matthew would tell us of Jesus' deity and what he would report as Jesus' own conception of His divine relations.
And what they tell us—we must not balk at it—is just that Jesus is all that God is, and shares in God's nature as truly as in God's majesty and power.