Stop looking at me weird. There’s a reason we’re wearing stuff on our heads.
Confession: Matthew has consistently been my least favorite book of the New Testament. Compared to the gospel of Mark, the pacing reads and feels soooooooo sssssllllllllooooooowwwwww. It seems like every other line in the book is a quote from the Old Testament. (News flash, Matthew: This is the NEW Testament!) Compared to the other gospels, Jesus does a whole lot of talking and teaching, and less miracle-working and cool stuff. Again, with the super-slow pace. And remind me again why I care about Jesus’ genealogy?
Oh wait. That’s right. I DON’T. I can’t even pronounce half of the names in that stinking section. /skip!
It always struck me as boring. Irrelevant. Why read Matthew when I could go read Luke or Mark? (Mark’s shorter, right? Much more better.) A repeat of the same stories over and over. Cracking my Bible open to read the gospel of Matthew often looked a lot like this:
But then I realized the problem: of course this material seemed pointless to me. I’m not a Jew. I’m a gentile. No wonder this material seemed highly irrelevant to me, I wasn’t reading the text through the eyes of a first century Jew. This was when God (in His always loving and oh-so-polite way) smacked me upside the head with this reminder. Review: What are the 3 things to remember when looking at any passage of Scripture? (1) Context. (2) Context. And (3) context.[1] For the gospel according to Matthew, we have to look at the text through the lens of an ancient Jewish reader, reading something written by a fellow Jew. This changed everything about how I understood what God was trying to show me through the gospel of Matthew.
Some things we need to know about the audience we’re joining on this journey:
(1) Israel was God’s chosen people. That was established with Abraham waaaaaay back before Egypt, before the Mosaic Law was given, before any of the adventures and failures and soap-opera-dramas Israel had participated in. (See Genesis 12) This was established before Israel even existed. The nation was barely a twinkle in its father (Abraham)’s eye. God established a covenant with Abraham that he would have many babies and grandbabies and great grandbabies, and those babies would be God’s chosen people – this was an eternal and unconditional covenant[2], which meant that it could never be broken, and it was not dependant on anything that Israel did as a nation. They could screw it up as bad as a nation could screw it up, and God would still uphold His promises in this covenant to Israel. He chose them.[3]
(2) Israel had been disobedient. Over the centuries, the nation had fallen into serious idolatry, and in God’s eyes that was the equivalent of spiritual adultery – cheating on God. Not the best idea ever. And God had disciplined Israel over and over, using every method in the book – including bringing foreign nations in to take Israel captive.
(3) Before Jesus was born, Israel had experienced 400 years of silence from God. Not a peep had been uttered from the God who had chosen them – which had led plenty of Jews to believing that God had given up on them altogether.
I want to expound on that third point a bit. Have you ever felt like you’ve messed up so bad that God can never forgive you, that God would never want you? Or when you can’t hear God’s voice it must mean He isn’t there anymore? He must have stopped caring, stopped seeing you, stopped being God in your life because of something you’ve said or done? Believe me when I say I can relate – and so could Israel.
Imagine you’re a young Jewish child, hearing stories from your grandparents and parents about the promises God had made to them, and consequently to you. Imagine hearing again and again “Any day now, God is going to fulfill his promise.” Imagine growing up never having seen those promises fulfilled, but passing on those promises and those stories to your children, your grandchildren. “Any day now. God will fulfill His promises.” Now imagine that story over 400 years, never seeing those promises come to fruition. Would it start to look pretty hopeless? Would you start to wonder if you were just too bad for God to redeem? Would you start to wonder if God was there at all?
This is where the Jewish people were when Jesus was born. Matthew, a Jewish author writing to a Jewish audience, wrote this gospel to a broken people who (in many cases) had believed God had abandoned them. Matthew communicates the things he saw FIRSTHAND of Jesus as Messiah, the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies, the hope and promise to Israel – This is the One we’ve been waiting for. This is the promised Messiah.
Matthew wrote his gospel for a few specific purposes: to showcase Jesus as Messiah and fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies, to reiterate that God had not given up on His people, and that God was extending His love to the Gentiles[4]. Matthew is going to show us these themes through Jesus’ extensive teaching throughout the book, and through people’s general reactions and interactions with this Man who was the Christ. As we go, pay attention to how even when the people in the stories react in a way that makes the present-day reader “/facepalm”, God has already predicted and foretold through His prophets that people would react that way.
What does that tell me? The very short answer is this: God is who He says He is, He does what He says He’ll do, and He knows EXACTLY what He’s doing. Matthew will go to great lengths to show the readers these things – starting with pointing the reader back to the Old Testament.
Stay tuned. Stay Jewish. And stay classy.
[1] Mantra taken from Brian Reed’s Biblical Interpretation class, then reiterated in John Correia’s Acts-Rev/Gospels class
[2] Dr. Paul Benware, Survey of the Old Testament, (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 1988, 2003) 15.
[3] For further explanation on this topic, I’d encourage you to check out this post from the book of Romans, which goes into more detail on why God chose Israel and what that has to do with Gentile-Christians.
[4] Borrowed from Professor John Correia’s “BIB 207 Gospels: Matthew Introduction” notes
No comments:
Post a Comment