THE CHURCH IN THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW
From ancient times, Christians have recognized that the Gospel of Matthew takes the most interest in how the church, the community of Jesus believers, should live and be organized.
The church is a consistent topic in the letters of Paul; among the gospels, however, only Matthew mentions it directly. Matthew occurs first in the New Testament most likely because Christians found it so useful, even practical, in guiding their communities.
Matthew’s interest in forming and leading the church shapes his gospel in several ways. He portrays the original disciples as trained scribes who learned what Jesus taught and could pass it on to their followers. Jesus bestows on his disciples and the church the authority to forgive sins and instructs them on promoting discipline in a community of both saints and sinners. And Matthew presents Jesus and his disciples as the true teachers of the Jewish Law - not the Jewish leaders, whom he depicts as collaborators in Jesus’s death.
When he wrote his gospel, Matthew inherited from his source, the Gospel of Mark, a less-than-flattering depiction of the disciples. In that gospel, the disciples never really understand Jesus, who at one point berates them as blind and as having hardened hearts. Readers of Mark may have known that the disciples later proved to be brave preachers of the Christian message, but this is not reflected in Mark. In contrast, Matthew shows the disciples’ recognition of Jesus’s divine identity and growing understanding of his teaching.
In both Mark and Matthew, Jesus warns the disciples, “Watch out, and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” In Mark, the disciples think that Jesus is talking about literal bread, and this prompts Jesus to criticize the disciples as blind and hardened in their hearts. In Matthew as well, the disciples at first think that Jesus is talking about bread, but after Jesus asks them a series of leading questions, they get the idea. “Then they understood,” Matthew writes, “that he had not told them to beware of the yeast of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” In Matthew, the disciples learn and understand.
Similarly, in chapter 13 of Matthew, Jesus tells a series of parables. At first, the disciples do not understand what Jesus means, and they ask him about one parable in particular: “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.” Jesus explains it, then tells three more parables. He asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” They say yes. Jesus then declares, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
In other words, Jesus has successfully trained the disciples as scribes, men who are knowledgeable in the Scripture and in his own teachings. They will be able to share the treasures of their knowledge with others. At the end of the gospel, Jesus sends the disciples into the world to make new disciples and to teach them everything that Jesus has commanded. The disciples are the educated, trustworthy links between Jesus and the later members of the church.
Matthew doesn’t present the disciples as perfect, however; they sometimes falter in their faith and have doubts. When Jesus walks on water, Peter asks Jesus if he can come to Jesus across the water. This shows that Peter understands that Jesus has divine power. Nonetheless, when the wind becomes strong, Peter becomes frightened and begins to sink. He cries out, “Lord, save me!” And Jesus rescues Peter and asks him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
Several times Jesus describes the disciples as having little faith. They need to have more confidence in him as their savior and as the Son of God. This persists even to the end of the gospel. When the disciples meet the risen Jesus on a mountain, Matthew says that the disciples worshiped Jesus, but that some doubted. The disciples may be trained scribes, but they sometimes lack sufficient faith in their teacher.
In this respect, the disciples do not differ from other Christians, as Matthew presents things. On the one hand, Matthew has Jesus make clear that he expects perfection from his followers. In the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus tells his listeners that their righteousness should exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus did not come to abolish the Law and the prophets, but to fulfill them—or, it seems, to make the Law even more difficult to follow. If the law says you should not commit murder, Jesus says you should not even get angry with a brother or sister. If the law says you should not commit adultery, Jesus says you should not even look at someone else with lust in your heart. At the end of chapter 5, Jesus sums up: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
On the other hand, Matthew understands that the followers of Jesus will not be perfect. That’s the message of the Parable of the Weeds, which is found in chapter 13 and appears only in Matthew. As Jesus explains later, the Parable of the Weeds is an allegory; it suggests that in the church, there are going to be righteous people and sinners, and that’s how it needs to be. Only at the end of time, at the last judgment, will the good and the bad be separated. Human beings should not try to make this separation in the meantime.
Matthew emphasizes that there needs to be both forgiveness and discipline within the church. How can the church balance these seemingly conflicting requirements? Jesus provides a formal procedure for dealing with problem church members: If a church member sins against you, first talk to the sinner privately. If the person doesn’t listen to you, bring along two or three other members for a second conversation. If that doesn’t work, the sinful member should be brought before the entire church. If the person still refuses to repent, then the church is empowered to expel the member.
Nevertheless, Jesus ends his speech with exhortations to forgiveness. Peter asks how often he should forgive a brother who sins against him, and Jesus answers, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” He then tells a parable about a slave whose master forgives him a large debt. When that slave refuses to show the same mercy to a fellow slave who owes him money, the master reverses course and orders that the unforgiving slave be tortured until he pays the debt. Jesus warns that God will do the same to Christians if they do not forgive one another.
Nevertheless, Jesus ends his speech with exhortations to forgiveness. Peter asks how often he should forgive a brother who sins against him, and Jesus answers, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” He then tells a parable about a slave whose master forgives him a large debt. When that slave refuses to show the same mercy to a fellow slave who owes him money, the master reverses course and orders that the unforgiving slave be tortured until he pays the debt. Jesus warns that God will do the same to Christians if they do not forgive one another.
The author of Matthew views the Christian church as a community of righteousness. In Matthew, Jesus calls his followers to a more perfect righteousness, a righteousness that’s based on the Law, but also deepens it. If the Law forbids murder, Jesus forbids even hatred. If the Law says you should pray, Jesus tells you precisely how, in the Lord’s Prayer. If the Law says you should fast, Jesus tells you to do it discreetly and not display your piety to others.
Matthew contrasts Jesus with other teachers of the Law, especially the scribes and Pharisees. In chapter 23, Jesus tells his followers that the scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat, and that they do in fact teach the Law rightly. But he criticizes them as hypocrites who care more about gaining respect from others than about actually being righteous. Jesus tells his disciples that they should not have titles like rabbi, father, or teacher, because they should look to the one father, God, and to the one teacher and rabbi, Jesus himself.
This is one of the distinctive themes or even paradoxes of the Gospel of Matthew. On the one hand, Matthew takes great pains to show that Jesus is the culmination of Jewish tradition. On the other hand, Matthew displays hostility to the Jews and portrays them in a harsher manner than did his source, the Gospel of Mark. He displays bitterness about the fact that so few Jews accepted Jesus as the Messiah.
In two parables in chapters 21 and 22, Matthew charges the Jews with killing Jesus. All historians agree that this is a baseless charge. Only Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, could have sentenced Jesus to death. Nonetheless, Matthew tells the story of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion in a way that shifts the blame from Pilate to the Jews. This was a trend that had already started in Mark, but Matthew takes it to a higher level.
How are we to explain all this? Matthew is telling the story of Jesus in a way that addresses the situation that his fellow Christians faced in the decades after the destruction of the Temple. The Christian church was growing slowly, but it was made up mostly of Gentiles, non-Jews. They were showing faith in Jesus as God’s Messiah, while nearly all Jews were not.
Meanwhile, Judaism was changing as well. With the destruction of the Temple, Jewish worship of God could no longer be centered around sacrifices to the Lord. The Sadducees, the priests who ran the Temple, lost their positions of authority. Instead, Jews focused their religious lives around the synagogues, where they prayed, sang hymns, and studied the Law and the prophets under learned teachers.
The movement of the Pharisees emerged as a leading force in this period. Even before the destruction of the Temple, the Pharisees had urged their fellow Jews to devote themselves to studying and following the Law. Now the Pharisees’ message was even more compelling, and their leading scholars and teachers were becoming known as rabbis. The Gospel of Matthew, then, originated in a context of competition regarding who should guide people in following the Jewish tradition after the destruction of the Temple.
Matthew wanted to reassure his Christian community that they were following God’s Messiah and Son, and he wanted perhaps to persuade unbelieving Jews to turn away from their rabbis and scribes and instead to follow Jesus, the true teacher of righteousness. Matthew looks forward to a time when he hopes these separated communities - Jews and Gentiles, those who believe in Jesus and those who do not - will join together in worship of their shared God.