The Beginning-Matthew 1
The (New) Beginning (powerpoint). As our 2019 theme is to See Jesus More Clearly, I plan to preach on Matthew by referencing Stanley Hauerwas’ excellent commentary. Hauerwas’ Christ exalting exposition unexpectedly rekindled, renewed and reignited my love for the gospel.
What is Matthew all about? Matthew’s Gospel is all about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, who has inaugurated the kingdom of God. The subject of Matthew’s gospel–Jesus–is inexhaustible. Matthew witnesses to God’s desire to save all creation through the life of Christ. We must learn to see the world in which we live as the world that the Father created and redeemed through the Son. This challenges our assumptions about the way things are.
Matthew is a training manual for disciples. Matthew wrote to train us and to make us disciples of Jesus. He wants his readers to be a follower of Jesus, knowing that Jesus would be killed and raised from the dead. This means that we must be transformed if we are to live in obedience to the new reality of a redeemed world. After Jesus there is no “normal,” or put differently, after Jesus we are able to live “normally” (which would be “odd” to the world) only because of his birth, life, death and resurrection.
The crowds. Matthew understands that most of us will be tempted to be a member of the ever-present crowd depicted in the gospel. The crowd was often impressed by Jesus’s teachings and his miracles, but when push came to shove, the crowd called for his crucifixion. Jesus’s disciples also abandoned him at the end, but Jesus had called them to follow him, making them the continuation of the story.
Jesus has changed the world, requiring that our lives be changed if we are to live as people of the new creation. The gospel is not information that invites us to decide what we will take or leave. We are not to understand Matthew in light of our understanding of the world. Rather, Matthew would have our understanding of the world fully transformed as a result of our reading of his gospel. Matthew writes so that we become followers, as disciples, of Jesus. To be a Christian does not mean that we are to change the world, but rather that we must live as witnesses to the world that God has changed. The way we live should make the change visible. To be committed to nonviolence is crucial for the church, for we live in a violent world.
The beginning (Mt 1:1). To rightly understand the story of this man Jesus, we must begin with God because Jesus is God’s Messiah. When one believes in God the thought is that God is the explanation for why there is something rather than nothing (Gen 1:1-2). Eschatology describes the way things are and that the world, including ourselves, has a story that has a beginning and an ending. Creation is the first movement in the story that involves Israel, kingship, sin, exile and redemption. All the gospels including Matthew proclaim that Jesus is the “summing up” of the history of Israel so that Jew and Gentile alike can now live as God’s people.
Why did Matthew begin this way? The word translated “genealogy” in most versions is “genesis.” Maybe Matthew is beginning his story by saying: “This is the genesis of Jesus Christ,” the origin of Jesus the Messiah, in terms of his human lineage. Or perhaps more intriguingly is the suggestion of some recent scholarship: This is the Book of Genesis of Jesus the Messiah, a new beginning. (In fact the Greek text is: Βίβλος γενέσεως). Just as God spoke his Word and began his work of creation (Gen 1:3; Ps 33:6), so the advent of Jesus Christ in the world marks the beginning of God’s ultimate work of redeeming that broken, bruised, and groaning creation. Matthew’s prelude may not be different from John’s gospel (Jn 1:1-3). In addition, the term “genesis” might refer rather specifically to the ancestry of Jesus, or more broadly to the birth narratives, or even more broadly still to the entire gospel of Matthew, as the new beginning in the story of God’s relationship to his creatures brought about by the advent of Jesus into the world, his ministry, his death, his resurrection, and the ongoing work of his followers in fulfilling the Great Commission of 28:16-20.
“Out of nothing, by his word, God makes a world, a home. Out of the virgin’s womb (Mt 1:18; Lk 1:35), Christ is conceived. Out of the world-threatening death on Calvary, life is new-born from an empty tomb. Christ’s terror is God’s Word’s human vulnerability. But, it is just this vulnerability, this surrender, absolute relationship, which draws out of darkness finish life, forgiveness of sin.” (Martyrology of Jerome, 5th century.) This bold claim is matched by the prologue of John’s gospel (Jn 1:1-5). The word has a name, Jesus the Messiah, the 2nd person of the Trinity, present with the Father and the Spirit in the creation of the world. These are grand claims that animate every word of Matthew’s gospel.
Creation is the subject of the opening line of Matthew’s gospel, suggesting that the very destiny of God’s creation is at stake in the life of this Jesus the Messiah. This is the renewal of God’s creation by a new creation. If so, why is Jesus the Messiah identified as “the son of David, the son of Abraham”? It seems that Matthew, like Luke, should trace Jesus’s genealogy back to Adam. Yet by identifying Jesus as “the son of David, the son of Abraham,” Matthew testifies to Israel’s faith and emphasizes God’s faithfulness to Abraham, through whom all people will be blessed. God’s response to the history of human sinfulness, graphically depicted in Genesis 1-11, is to call Abraham from his country to be the father of a new people.
God’s response to humanity’s rebellious attempt to replace their dependence on God by creating their own heaven and their attempt to overcome their contingency was to benevolently scatter the people of the world so that they might learn to respect the other and to learn humility. Yet the gift of difference was, like all gifts, capable of being perverted by us. The humility required to know others like us but different from us gave birth to unending fear and led to unending violence and war. Yet God had a response: he called Abraham to be the father of Israel, a people who would be given his law that they might learn to live among the nations, trusting only in God for their protection. Such a people were called to be holy, to be sanctified, so that their very existence would be unintelligible if the God who had called them to be a light to the nations did not exist.
A king who will be sacrificed. Jesus recapitulates Israel’s life and is thus identified as “the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Matthew reminds us time and time again that what happened to Jesus or what Jesus did or said was so that the scriptures could be fulfilled. Richard Hays observes, “Matthew is … thinking about the shape of Israel’s story and linking Jesus’ life with key passages that promise God’s unbreakable redemptive love for his people” (2005, 176). The shape of that story is suggested by the genealogy that begins with the identification of Jesus as “the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Why does Matthew name Jesus as the son of David? Matthew is telling the story of one that was born a king, yet a king to be sacrificed. Jesus is also the son of Abraham. God had tested Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac. Matthew is preparing us to recognize that this is a king who will end up on the cross.
To be a disciple is to learn why the one true king must be crucified. So at the very beginning of his gospel Matthew introduces the central question of the story he will tell: How can it be that the one long expected, the Messiah, the one Israel believes will free it from political servitude, will not triumph as kings do with their armies? To be trained as a disciple is to learn why this Jesus, the son of David, the one true king, must suffer crucifixion. Matthew’s gospel is meant to train us, his readers, just as Jesus had to train his disciples, to recognize that the salvation wrought in the cross is the Father’s refusal to save us according to the world’s understanding of salvation, which is that salvation depends on having more power than my enemies.
Even Jesus’ own disciples couldn’t comprehend how God can save through a crucifixion. The crucial turning point in Matthew’s gospel is Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi. In response to Jesus’s question regarding his identity, Peter rightly confesses he is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Yet Peter rebukes Jesus when he begins to “show” the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem to “be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Mt 16:13–23). Peter cannot imagine that the one to save Israel, the successor to David, should undergo crucifixion. Jesus’s prediction of his resurrection does not prevent Peter from rebuking Jesus, for Peter is unable to hear anything other than what he takes to be a prediction of failure. Peter, as well as the other disciples, is not yet prepared to comprehend how God will save not only Israel but all of God’s creation through a crucifixion.
The sacrifice of Isaac is profoundly offensive. The crucifixion of the Messiah, Jesus, also explains his identification as “the son of Abraham.” Abraham was told by God to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, the very embodiment of God’s promise to make Abraham the father of a nation. We must confess, Peter-like, that we find the story of the sacrifice of Isaac profoundly offensive. We do so because as modern people the language of sacrifice simply makes no sense to us. Israel may have continued to make animal sacrifices on the altar in the temple to expiate the sins of the people, but we side with the prophets (Hos 6:6) and Jesus (Mt 12:7), who suggest that what God requires is “steadfast love (mercy) and not sacrifice, / the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
We make sacrifices as a way to control God. Yet it seems that if we are to read Jesus’s struggle in Gethsemane rightly (Mt 26:36–46), as well as his trial and crucifixion, a sacrifice must be made so that we might be free from the sacrificial systems that dominate our lives, for whether we acknowledge it, our lives continue to be dominated by the language of sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of war. Indeed, sacrifice is the preeminent human action that gestures our rightful desire to return to God, but we are subtle creatures capable of perverting any good gift. So we have tried, as Israel tried, to make our sacrifices a way to control God’s good gift. We continue to do so even as we are told in the book of Hebrews that Jesus abolished forever burnt offerings and sin offerings because it was the Father’s will that a people be “sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all” (Heb 10:10).
We use the Bible/God to serve our own desires. God had given Israel the law to provide the means through which Israel might become a holy people capable of sacrifice. Israel, however, became the exemplification of our ability to make God’s law serve the devices and desires of our own hearts. So the Father sent the Son, humbled in human form, obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, to end forever any sacrifice not determined by his cross. Our Father restrained Abraham, providing a ram in place of Isaac; but the Father did not spare his only Son’s becoming for us the sacrifice necessary to free us from our endless attempts to secure salvation for ourselves on our own terms.
The politics of Jesus vs. the power politics of the world. Jesus, the Son of God is a king who puts an end to all the sacrifices that leaders of this world use to enhance themselves. Political power exposes Herod’s response to the news of the birth of one who is identified by the “wise men from the East” as the “king of the Jews.” Herod does not hesitate to murder in order to secure his power. So Matthew’s gospel is about “the politics of Jesus,” which entails an alternative to the power politics of the world. The politics of Jesus requires a people, a community whose fundamental political act is the sacrifice of the altar—an alternative to Herodian power politics. The church be an alternative politics to the politics of the world. That politics is one that presumes, as the gospel of Matthew presumes, that the whole life of Jesus is to be understood as determinative for the life of the church.
Separating the person and work of Christ. The political character of Jesus “the son of David, the son of Abraham” means that the person and work of Christ cannot be separated. That Jesus’s teachings have been separated from what some understand to be salvation reflects the accommodation of Christians to the world. The doctrine of the incarnation has unfortunately been used by an accommodated church to give itself the illusion it is faithful because it believes the right doctrine. But incarnation properly understood means that Jesus’s person and work cannot be separated because Jesus saves by making us participants in a new way of life. The name of that way of life is church.
Attend to Jesus’ whole life. Too often the emphasis on the incarnation leads some to focus on the birth or the crucifixion and resurrection as the defining events of Jesus’s life. To emphasize the birth as the central event of Jesus’s life is often associated with Eastern Christianity, whereas the West is thought to have focused on the death and resurrection. But either emphasis fails to do justice to the gospel. Both ways of locating the significance of Jesus fail to account for the significance of his calling the disciples, his teachings, his miracles, his controversies with the leaders of Israel, his call to obey the law and the prophets. Incarnation rightly reminds us that Jesus is very God and very man, but that does not mean we do not have to attend to Jesus’ whole life. Matthew’s narration of the salvation wrought in Jesus requires a full disclosure of Jesus’s life, including his birth, his relation to the disciples, his teaching and controversies, his miracles, his crucifixion and resurrection. The narrative of this life indicates the kind of politics required for the kingdom that Jesus proclaims. Too often Christian traditions that represent quite orthodox theologies of the incarnation ignore or provide tendentious readings of TSOM in order to justify Christian participation in war. Yet the one who surely is very God and very man is also the one who heals, teaches, calls disciples, and was crucified and raised. A high Christology is correlative of a community that learns what it means to forgive enemies. God, through Israel, desires the redemption of all and that redemption entails the creation of a people called to be holy. Accordingly, Matthew shows how the story of Jesus requires that we see how the story of Israel is inclusive of the Gentiles. This is why Mt 1:1 announces the genesis of a new age begun in Jesus, the Messiah long expected, “the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
The genealogy from Abraham to Jesus is a commentary on the extraordinary claim that with Jesus we have a new beginning. The genealogy is divided into 3 series, the first two consisting of 14 generations and the last of 13 generations–only 13 generations because the church that Jesus calls into existence constitutes the 14th generation.
The 1st generational history tells the story of Israel’s triumph as a nation, ending with King David, who represents for Matthew the climax of Israel’s history. David, the mighty king, the lover of justice, ruled Israel in fulfillment of the law given to Moses (Ps 99). However, their history is also one of loss, because the next series climaxes with the Babylonian captivity, an exile that still haunts Israel’s life even after the return to Palestine. Matthew, like the OT writers, don’t try to hide Israel’s failure to trust God or God’s judgment on Israel’s unfaithfulness through exile. That Israel continues to tell the stories of her failure is a witness to the community’s conviction—a conviction learned through the hard discipline that affirms the story it has to tell—to God who makes her very existence intelligible. Matthew also witnesses and testifies to God’s continued faithfulness to Israel through the coming of Jesus.
The last genealogical series is about the restoration of Israel through the birth of Jesus. To be Israel’s Messiah means that Jesus does not simply represent Israel, but that he is the renewing of the law, he is the promise of the land, and he is the temple. Jesus is the long-awaited king. He is the restoration of all that makes Israel the promised people. Through Joseph’s adoption, Jesus stands in the line of David, becoming for Israel its king unlike the kings of this world. Jesus is the climax of Matthew’s genealogical story of Israel’s past, at once representing Israel’s story while profoundly transforming her existence.
Matthew’s genealogy includes 4 women: Tamar (Gen. 38), Rahab (Josh. 2), Ruth, and Bathsheba wife of Uriah (2 Sam. 11–12; 1 Kgs. 1). This is unusual because the genealogies of Israel (e.g., those in Gen 5; 10; 11) are lists consisting of only males. Matthew naming these women cannot be insignificant. Given the role that Gentiles will play throughout his gospel, Matthew names these women, who are in different ways outsiders to Israel, to indicate how God used them to sustain the promise people. These women are not from the people of Israel, yet they serve God’s providential care of Israel by making the Davidic line possible. Confronted with untenable situations that seem to preclude their full inclusion, these women use their wits to force the men of Israel to claim them as members of God’s promise. They prefigure the Canaanite woman who calls to Jesus to cure her daughter tormented by a demon (Mt 15:21–28). Jesus at first refuses to answer her, responding that he was sent only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she kneels before him, confessing, as we confess in the prayer of humble access, that she is ready like the dogs, an Israelite description of Gentiles, to eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. Jesus commends her faith and heals her daughter.
Are you willing to receive leftover crumbs as God’s gifts? These women represent the undeniable reality that God’s promise to Israel has spread to the Gentiles. Matthew’s gospel is an ongoing commentary of the fact that Jesus is acknowledged by those who are not Israel. Matthew makes it a point to show us that Gentiles recognize Jesus. Like the Canaanite woman, we must recognize that Jesus has the power to restore us to life even if it means we receive God’s gifts as crumbs from the table.
God’s people were NOT pious nor admirable people. The list of women in the genealogy are anything but an admirable group of folk. The unscrupulous but entertaining Jacob won his position in the line that leads to Christ by lying and cheating his blind father; David, the ruthless and highly successful bandit, unites the tribes of Israel through intrigue and murder; Rehoboam son of Solomon loses most of David’s gains through arrogance and greed; Ahaziah son of Ahab continued his father’s ways as a sadistic mass murderer. Things get only relatively better with the exile partly because the line of kings ends. Matthew’s genealogy is a stark indication that God’s plan is not always accomplished through pious people, but through “passionate and thoroughly disreputable people.” The moral is almost too obvious to belabor: Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of middle-class respectability, but rather he belonged to a family of murders, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars—he belonged to us and came to help us, in doing so he came to a bad end, and gave us some hope.
Jesus’s birth makes clear the extraordinary story that Matthew tells of God’s action on our behalf. Mary, engaged to Joseph, is pregnant with a child “from the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:18, 20; Lk 1:35). This is no ordinary conception. This is God acting on our behalf by becoming fully one of us. The church describes this as the mystery of the incarnation. The timeless one is conceived in time through the work of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. The work of the Spirit is to point to the humanity of Christ.
The Holy Spirit is necessary for our recognition of Jesus as the Son of God, given our presumption that it is surely not possible for God to be one of us. Our temptation is to believe that if God is God then God must be the biggest thing around. We describe God with superlatives: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. God is all powerful, all knowing, and everywhere present. But these descriptions make it difficult to understand how God can be conceived by the Spirit in Mary. Yet that is to presume we know what it means for God to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent prior to God being found in Mary’s womb. This challenges our presumption that we can assume we can know what God must be prior to knowing Jesus, but such presumption is just another word for sin. By Mary’s conception through the Spirit, our prideful assumption that we are capable of knowing God on our own terms is challenged. As Jesus will later claim, a claim inherent in his conception: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27).
God refuses to abandon us. Do we have to believe the virgin birth? Those who worry about whether we are required to believe in the virgin birth do so assuming they are being asked to believe something for which there is no evidence. But Matthew is telling the story of the God who refuses to abandon us—and even becomes one of us that we might be redeemed. Virgin births are not surprising given that this is the God who has created us without us, but (as Augustine observes) who will not save us without us. What the Father does through the Spirit to conceive Mary’s child is not something different than what God does through creation. What should startle us, what should stun us, is not that Mary is a virgin, but that God refuses to abandon us.
Creation, the virgin birth, Trinity, incarnation, Jesus being fully God and fully man are the mystery of God that is inexplicable in human terms. Any attempt to explain, to render the virgin birth explicable in naturalistic terms, is a mistake. Just as we cannot explain creation we cannot and should not try to explain how Jesus can at once be fully God and fully man. Nicea and Chalcedon do not explain the Trinity and incarnation, but rather they teach us how to speak of the mystery of God without explanation. Nicea and Chalcedon reproduce the character of the gospels, that is, the only way to speak of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ is to tell the story, the story of Mary’s being found with child though she and Joseph had not “known one another.” Matthew does not provide a transition from the genealogies to the story of Mary’s pregnancy. Rather, he tells us in a straightforward, if not blunt, manner that “the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.” Matthew does not assume that it is his task to make God’s work intelligible to us, but rather his task is to show us how we can live in light of Jesus’s conception and birth.
Christ was born. The 2nd person of the Trinity was conceived and born needing the care of a mother. To be human is to be vulnerable. Jesus was a baby refusing to forego the vulnerability that would climax in his crucifixion. Jesus was entrusted to the care of Mary and Joseph. They could not save him from the crucifixion, but they were indispensable agents to making his life possible. We rightly celebrate, therefore, the Holy Family.
Joseph’s attitude is like Jesus’ attitude toward sinners. Matthew’s story of Mary’s pregnancy lacks the charm and detail of Luke’s account. One of the great enemies of the gospel is sentimentality, and the stories surrounding Jesus’s birth have proven to be ready material for maudlin sentiment. Matthew’s account of Jesus’s conception and birth is unapologetically realistic. Joseph, not Mary, is the main actor. John Chrysostom praises Joseph as a man of exceptional self-restraint since he must have been free of that most tyrannical passion, jealousy. Unwilling to cause Mary distress, to expose her to public disgrace, he planned to dismiss her discreetly (Mt 1:19). Joseph, therefore, refused to act according to the law, but rather chose to act in a manner that Jesus himself would later exemplify by his attitude toward known sinners (Mt 9:10–13).
Jesus the new Joshua. Yet Joseph still required a revelation so that he would know the character of Mary’s pregnancy (Mt 1:20). He is also given the honor to name Jesus as the new Joshua capable of rescuing his people from their sins (Mt 1:21). The Joshua of old had been given the task of conquering the promised land, but this Joshua is sent to save his people from their sins, making it possible for them to live as the people of the promise. Joseph did as he was instructed, taking Mary for his wife and naming his son Jesus (Mt 1:24-25).
A virgin conceiving. Mt 1:22-23 tells us all this was done so that the prophecy of Isa 7:14 would be fulfilled. This is the first time that Matthew uses the formula “all this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord,” but he will use the formula often to show how Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the OT. We now rightly know how to read Isa 7:14 because Mary is the young woman and she is a virgin. Mary had to be a virgin, because Jesus is the Son of God. There is no way to prove Mary’s virginity. But without Mary’s virginity the story cannot be told. The one to whom she gave birth is none other than Emmanuel, “God with us” (Mt 1:23), and such a one can have no other father than the Father who is the first person of the Trinity.
Mary, the mother of the church. We do not have “here am I” in Matthew as we do with Luke’s Mary (Lk 1:38), but that does not in any way lessen Mary’s significance. Without Mary’s obedience, without Mary’s willingness to receive the Holy Spirit, our salvation would be in doubt. With some justification Mary is often identified as the second Eve, but Mary is also our Abraham. Just as Abraham obeyed God’s call for him to leave his familiar land to journey to a foreign destination, so Mary through her willingness to become the very Mother of God is the beginning of the church. She is the firstborn of the new creation faithfully responding to the Son who calls into being a new people. Just as Abraham is the father of Israel, so Mary is the mother of the church.
Jesus is Jewish. When Christians lose the significance of Mary in our salvation we risk losing our relation with the people of Israel. Jesus is born of a Jewish mother. His flesh is Jewish flesh. Christians dare not forget that the flesh that is “very man” is particularly the flesh of Mary. The one born of Mary is he who has come to free Israel from its sins (Mt 1:21). Jesus is very God and very man, but that formula does not mean we can ever forget that the God he is, and the man he is, is the same God that has promised to always be faithful to the people of Israel.
Reference: Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.
