Sunday
Sunday
Matthew, Part 1—Jesus the Christ
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet.
Matthew 1:22
Matthew presents Jesus as the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, in whom the promises of God were being fulfilled. His favorite formula, which occurs eleven times in his Gospel, is some variation of this: “Now this took place that what was written in the prophets might be fulfilled.”
It is appropriate, therefore, that Matthew should begin his Gospel with the genealogy of Jesus, in which he traces the royal line and specially emphasizes Abraham, the founding father of Israel, and David, the ancestor of the Messiah who would be “the son of David.”
The theme of fulfillment is most clearly displayed in Jesus’s inauguration of the kingdom of God. All four evangelists write that he proclaimed the kingdom, but Matthew had his special emphasis. In deference to Jewish reluctance to pronounce the sacred name of God, Matthew uses instead “the kingdom of heaven” (about fifty times). He also grasps that the kingdom is both a present reality and a future expectation.
One of Jesus’s most remarkable sayings was recorded by Matthew, as also by Luke:
Blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.
For I tell you the truth, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.
Matthew 13:16–17
In other words, the Old Testament prophets lived in the time of anticipation; the apostles were living in the time of fulfillment. Their eyes were actually seeing, and their ears actually hearing, what their predecessors had longed to see and hear. So Matthew does not portray Jesus so much as another prophet, one more seer in the long succession of the centuries, but rather as the fulfillment of all prophecy. Matthew also sees Jesus as confronting Israel with a final summons to repent and as already beginning to create a new Israel, his twelve apostles complementing the twelve tribes of Israel.
For further reading: Matthew 23:37–39