The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

The Happy Ending and Israel’s King:  Mt.1:1

^1:1 The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David…

Since Matthew writes for a Jewish audience, he introduces Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, which was the title of the King which the Israelites expected to come and rule over both Israel and the Gentile world.  This King would rule with peace and justice; he would deliver the true Israel; he would bring restoration to the world as the good Creator God always intended – a messianic era.

But before we even explore that question, let’s back up.  Why did Israel hope for a Messiah King, anyway?  It developed logically from Israel’s assertion that there is only one true God, who is all good and loving.  Since there is evil in the world, however, that means this one God must act in a decisive way to defeat evil.  And since human beings are the main agent in the world, God would act through a single human being to overcome humanity’s evil.  This was Israel’s messianic hope.  God would not abandon the world or simply let it go on in endless cycles of good and evil.  Instead, He would act to save the world.  The logical consequence of Israel’s monotheism was messianic hope – a happy ending.

          Perhaps you or other people you know live in a circular story which just goes around and around forever.  Do you think that there are two or more gods of equal power who will keep fighting it out forever (e.g. Zoroastrianism)?  Do you think there is one god who is both good and evil where the distinction between good and evil is an illusion in our own heads (e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism)?  Do you think there is no god and therefore no ability to change human nature or escape the endless cycles of conflict (e.g. atheism)? 

          Perhaps you want to live in a story with a happy ending but you’re not sure why the story ends up that way.  Every story with a happy ending must overcome the fundamental problem to reach that happy ending.  But if the problem in your story is external to humanity, then why haven’t we figured out what to fix?  For example, Western Enlightenment modernists and neo-conservatives believe the problem is ‘lack of democracy.’  An external problem that we can fix.  But is that true?  Why then were the great liberal democracies (France, Germany, Britain, U.S.) uniformly racist?  Why was racial segregation maintained by democratic means in the U.S.?  Why was Hitler democratically elected?  Or Hezbollah?

          We can go on and on about issues external to humanity:  better schools, better environments, better families, etc.  Don’t get me wrong – those are important tasks to shoot for.  But what if the problem is internal to humanity?  What if we are the problem?  That is the deeper opinion voiced in the Old Testament, and Jesus says later in Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Out of the heart comes evil…’ (Mt.15:18)

          Then the Messiah must also be God’s human agent to undo the evil in humanity.  We are the problem that must be overcome in order to reach the messianic happy ending.  That must be Jesus’ role and destiny!  Indeed, we’ll see that in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection where he becomes a fresh, new kind of human being, physically saturated by the love and glory of God.

          Today, try to have a conversation in which you ask someone, ‘Do you think the problems with the world go back to something external to humanity or internal to us?’  See what they think, and what kind of conversation you can have about that, just sharing observations about the world.