Matthew Matters

The Yoke of Wisdom and the Church of Tomorrow

Michael Lodahl

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781725261150
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Gospel of Matthew says some things about Jesus, and attributes words to Jesus, that are unique to this Gospel. If we pay careful attention to these passages, we may find Matthew both challenging some of our most treasured assumptions and providing new, exciting possibilities for the life of the church. Jesus as the teacher and embodiment of Divine Wisdom, calling to us to learn gentleness and humility from him, leads us into a path of discipleship that has profound implications for Christians' relationship with the world--but especially with Jews and Muslims.

1

Wisdom’s Invitation

One of the reasons why Matthew matters is that only Matthew includes this perennially beloved invitation of Jesus:

Come to me,

all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,

and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;

for I am gentle and humble in heart,

and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

(Matt 11:28–30)

This text provided inspiration for the justly famous statue of Jesus as “Christus” that adorns the apse of the National (Lutheran) Cathedral of Denmark. Celebrated Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen was commissioned to create iconic sculptures of Jesus and his twelve apostles as part of the rebuilding of the cathedral after its destruction in 1807 by the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. These inviting words from Matthew’s Gospel are inscribed on the base of this imposing icon, which portrays the figure of Jesus with arms outspread, hands open: he stands in regal invitation. This is the church that Søren Kierkegaard most often attended, and it is not difficult to imagine Kierkegaard finding inspiration in this sculpture as he wrote the opening chapters of his classic text Practice in Christianity.

In those opening chapters, Kierkegaard offers an extended meditation on this Matthean invitation; repeatedly in those pages the Melancholy Dane, in response to the passage, simply exclaims “Amazing!” For example, “The helper is the help. Amazing! . . . Ordinarily a physician must divide himself among his many patients, . . . [b]ut when the helper is the help, he must remain with the patient all day long, or the patient with him—how amazing, then, that this helper is the very one who invites all!”1

In another striking line, Kierkegaard writes, “In order to invite them to come to one in this way, one must oneself live in the very same manner, poor of the poorest, poorly regarded as the lowly man among the people, experienced in life’s sorrow and anguish, sharing the very same condition as those one invites to come to one, those who labor and are burdened.”2 Lovely as this may sound, and as inviting—and even true!—as Kierkegaard’s words may feel to our contemporary Christological sensitivities, one may wonder if they match very well Matthew’s portrait of Jesus. Perhaps only a closer examination can tell. Certainly we can agree with Kierkegaard on one thing: “Amazing!”

The Nazarene and the Baptist

But of course this amazing invitation has a context. These are the concluding words of Matthew 11, a chapter that opens with Jesus proclaiming his good news from town to town and John the Baptist stuck in a prison cell. Then those haunting words: “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing [lit., “the deeds” or “works” of the Messiah, or “messianic deeds”], he sent word by his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the Coming One, or should we look for another?’” (11:2). The poignancy of this question should not elude us. Matthew had depicted Jesus’s baptism as having occurred without a doubt from John, other than whether or not their roles should have been reversed: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (3:14). It is difficult to determine whether, for Matthew, Jesus’s ensuing baptismal experience was more than a private one. While it is true that “suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him” (3:16), perhaps implying a solitary experience, Matthew then reports “a voice from heaven” (3:17) that affirmed Jesus’s divine sonship. Was this a voice that John would have heard? It seems that the text fairly demands it on two counts: 1) the words “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (3:17) sound more like a public announcement than like reassuring words addressed directly and privately to Jesus; and 2) there already existed in Jewish tradition the notion of the bat kol, the “heavenly voice,” that was believed to have been audible, and to more than just one person, from time to time. Indeed, the general idea with the bat kol is the public expression of the divine will in a social setting. The point is that Matthew very likely implies that John was party to at least some of the extraordinary phenomena that the Gospels associate with Jesus’s baptism. This, to be sure, makes his question from Herod’s dungeon all that more spiritually poignant.

We may add to the baptismal scene the manner in which Matthew summarizes the preaching of both John and Jesus. In 3:2 we read that John’s message was, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” After Jesus’s baptism, we read that “Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (4:17). The Greek is identical, and this is likely no accident. It would seem that Matthew wants his readership to appreciate that, by all early appearances, John and Jesus were on the same page. They are proclaiming the imminence of God’s reign. John has witnessed something powerful at the Jordan River, a divine voice from the heavens confirming Jesus’s unique status. Yet, these months later, as John awaits his fate in chains, he sends his disciples to ask Jesus the questions of an agonized heart: Are you really the One? God’s Coming One? Or should we be looking for somebody else?

We should note how carefully Matthew stipulates what it was, exactly, that raised these questions for John: it was when he “heard what the Messiah (ho Xristos) was doing,” or, more literally, “when he heard of the deeds of the Messiah” (11:2). The obvious implication is that Jesus was doing things that John did not expect of a messiah, of God’s “coming one” (Gr., ho erkomenos). This in turn suggests that even though the preaching of both could be characterized as “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” they may have had radically differing notions about that approaching kingdom. Perhaps John expected by now to see the ax not only lying at the root of the trees ...