We are back to Year A in the lectionary, which means that for most of the year we shall be reading from St Matthew’s Gospel on Sundays. The mainstream scholarly view these days is that Matthew wrote his Gospel after St Mark, or at least had some version of Mark’s Gospel in front of him when he wrote, and whether we believe that or not, it is certainly instructive to compare the two.
Matthew’s Gospel is, to begin with, around twice the length of Mark. It contains pretty much everything that is in Mark, although often he retells the stories more briefly – compare, for example, their versions of the Gerasene/Gadarene demoniac (Mk 5:1-20 and Mt 8:28-34). Why, then, is Matthew so much longer? Because he includes vast swathes of Jesus’s teaching that we do not find in Mark, and indeed a goodish amount that’s not in Luke either.
Actually it is striking how little of Jesus’s teaching St Mark relates: only two big parables, the Sower and the Wicked Tenants, plus a couple of little ones after the Sower and also relating to seeds. By contrast, depending on how you count, Matthew has 15, many of which are unique to his Gospel, including the Wheat and the Tares, the Dragnet, the Labourers in the Vineyard and the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Something that all of these parables have in common is the theme of judgment, the sifting of those who will enter the kingdom of heaven and those who will be cast out into the darkness where there will be (one of Matthew’s favourite phrases) “weeping and gnashing of teeth”.
Many of Matthew’s parables are gathered together in blocks within the Gospel, in chapters 13, 18 and 25. In each of these cases, Jesus concludes a substantial piece of teaching and Matthew writes something like: “When Jesus had finished these sayings” – in the last case: “When Jesus had finished saying all these things”. This is not accidental: one of the strong impressions we gain from reading Matthew through from start to finish is that his Gospel is very organised, carefully structured. This is much less obviously so in Mark especially, where one has to work quite hard to find patterns, though they are certainly there. But Matthew makes it easy for us, by gathering so much of Jesus’s teaching into these big blocks, all concluding in the same way.
Thus far I have dealt with three of these blocks, which in fact are the third, fourth and fifth of them. The second is chapter 10, which doesn’t include parables but, after the call of the 12, has lots of brief sayings about discipleship, and is sometimes called the Mission Discourse. But the most famous of all of Matthew’s five blocks is the first, the Sermon on the Mount. We shall be reading from this in the weeks leading up to Lent, beginning with the Beatitudes. The Sermon itself is carefully structured, and I wish there were space for me to share my diagrams with you, but suffice it to say that the Beatitudes at the beginning are mirrored by the warnings of judgment at the end – there’s that theme again! – and at the very heart of the Sermon is the Our Father. Around all of this Matthew gathers some of the key teachings of Christ to offer a vision of a new society, a renewed Israel gathered around Jesus to act as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
But why five blocks of teaching? For centuries it has been noticed that this seems to mirror the five books of Moses at the beginning of the Old Testament, perhaps suggesting that Jesus is a new Moses, offering a new Law. There may be some truth in this, but there is another intriguing possibility: each block concludes with that transitional “when Jesus had finished”, but there is more after the last of these. Specif- ically, there is the passion, death and res- urrection of Christ. If the first five sections of the Gospel reflect the first five books of the Old Testament, then might we not see this last part as book six, Matthew’s version of the Book of Joshua? Joshua is, after all, the same as Jesus in Greek, and it is the name of Moses’ successor. Having given us a vision of the remaking of Israel around Jesus, finally Matthew shows the true successor of Moses conquering the true Promised Land – heaven itself – by his passion, cross and resurrection.
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