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

Jesus is the Presence of God - A Case for Why Matthew Believed Jesus is God:  Mt.9:1 – 13

^9:1 Getting into a boat, Jesus crossed over the sea and came to His own city. ² And they brought to him a paralytic lying on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.’ ³ And some of the scribes said to themselves, ‘This fellow blasphemes.’ ⁴ And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, ‘Why are you thinking evil in your hearts? ⁵ Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, and walk’? ⁶ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’ – then he said to the paralytic, ‘Get up, pick up your bed and go home.’ ⁷ And he got up and went home. ⁸ But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men. ⁹ As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man called Matthew, sitting in the tax collector’s booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me!’ And he got up and followed him. ¹⁰ Then it happened that as Jesus was reclining at the table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were dining with Jesus and his disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why is your teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?’ ¹² But when Jesus heard this, he said, ‘It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³ But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’

One of the students in the Christian Fellowship I advise told me about a conversation that she had with a professor.  In a nutshell, the professor said, ‘The Gospel of John portrays Jesus as God, but the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not.  Matthew did not believe Jesus was God and reflects earlier beliefs about Jesus.’  Is this true?

I think that’s a very legitimate question.  And it’s worth a full treatment somewhere else.  Suffice to say here that Jesus’ claim to forgive people’s sins and cleanse the people themselves is a very Jewish claim to be God Himself.  I’ve already looked at that specifically in my reflections on Matthew 8:16 – 17 and 9:1 – 13.  You can read those, but I’ll recap them briefly here. 

Jesus’ claim to forgive people of sin is central to his claim to be divine.  The idea that Jesus could forgive people of sin is radical for a number of reasons.  First, logically speaking, only an injured party can forgive the person who sinned against her.  So for Jesus to forgive a person of their sins implies that he is the greater injured party in every conflict.  It is a powerplay, in a sense, because his forgiveness of a sinner means he is the greatest injured party and that the rest of us can only affirm the reality of his forgiveness, even if we were also injured.  Any forgiveness that we enact between ourselves can only be secondary and derived from his. 

Second, the Jewish connotations behind his forgiveness show that he is making a case to be divine.  In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, forgiveness happened at a location:  the Jerusalem Temple.  The Temple was where God’s presence was once housed.  That is why forgiveness from God was declared when sacrifices were offered there (Lev.4 – 6).  Jesus, however, claimed to be the ultimate location of divine self-revelation (Mt.12:6) and divine forgiveness (Mt.9:1 – 13).  If we, from our cultural context, miss that fact, his contemporaries did not; they accused him of blasphemy (Mt.9:3).  Therefore, he was claiming to displace the Jerusalem Temple as the abiding location for where God’s presence was housed.  And, if he was claiming that, then he was claiming to house the presence of God in his human body.

         Backing up from this story of the paralytic, we also see that Matthew is communicating something to us about Jesus’ divinity by where he places this story.  The story of the healing of the paralytic is one of ten miracles of healing that Jesus does by his word in Matthew 8 – 9.  These ten speech-acts of Jesus are a literary parallel to the ten speech-acts of God in creation in Genesis 1, the ten speech-acts of God in the uncreation of Egypt in Exodus 7 – 11, and the ten commandments of God in Exodus 20.  For a Jewish theologian like Matthew, this arrangement of material is clearly a literary decision to parallel Jesus with God.

In this same section, Matthew 8 – 9, Matthew makes multiple parallels between Jesus’ action and God’s action in the Exodus.  The first of Jesus’ ten speech-acts begins with the phrase ‘he stretched out his hand’ (Mt.8:3), which is how the Old Testament refers to God’s action to deliver Israel in the Exodus from Egypt (Ex.3:20; 7:5; Ps.136:12).  Then, after providing some evidence of Jesus’ miraculous power to heal, Matthew says Jesus fulfills the role of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 (Mt.8:17).  Matthew invokes Isaiah at this point because Isaiah 40 – 55 as a whole uses ‘new exodus’ language to describe the Messiah’s work and Israel’s return from exile:  ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they will not overflow you…Thus says the LORD, who makes a way through the sea, and a path through the mighty waters, who brings forth the chariot and the horse, the army and the mighty man.  They will lie down together and not rise again; they have been quenched and extinguished like a wick.’ (Isa.43:2, 16 – 17, cf. Isa.40:3 – 5)  Is Jesus the Messiah who enacts a ‘new exodus’?  Matthew answers this in the affirmative.  Jesus provides miraculous passage over a stormy sea (Mt.8:23 – 27) and then, true to form, casts demons inhabiting two Gentile men into the sea (Mt.8:32); that is reminiscent of God providing a passage for Israel through a sea and then drowning their Egyptian opponents in the sea.  Jesus is now delivering people – Gentile and Jew! – from sin, death, and the dominion of Satan.  Then Jesus’ claim to forgive sins (Mt.9:1 – 13) immediately follows.  Jesus’ claim means that his body is a new temple, housing the presence of God.  Matthew’s arrangement of stories follows a pattern modeled after Jewish history:  God, after Israel’s Exodus, descended in a tent and began the sacrifices that symbolized forgiveness of sin.  Matthew follows the conceptual sequence where Tabernacle follows Exodus.  Jesus declares he is the presence of God with his people after he drowns demonic opponents in the sea.

         A wider look at Matthew also confirms the parallel between Jesus and God. Just prior to this section, in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.5 – 7), Matthew portrays Jesus as giving commandments to his people from a mountain, which of course echoes God giving commandments to Israel from Mount Sinai. And, like God, Jesus welcomes and receives people’s worship, from the magi at his birth to the disciples at his resurrection (2:11; 28:9, 17); for a Jewish writer intending his work to be read by a Jewish audience, this was a stunning move, for in the Hebrew Bible, even angels did not receive people’s worship. More can be said about the material in Matthew from this point on, which readers of this devotional won’t be familiar with yet, so I’ll refrain from discussing that here. All this confirms Matthew’s argument from beginning to end: Jesus is Immanuel, God with us (Mt.1:21) who says that he is with us always, as we walk with him in his mission, even unto the end of the age (Mt.28:20). Did Matthew believe that Jesus is God? In my opinion, it is fairly certain that he did. He used every literary device he could to communicate it.

         At least on this point, we can continue to be confident that if we placed Matthew and John in the same room, they would agree on who Jesus is.  This helps build our ability to trust the New Testament authors in general.  And when it comes to Jesus himself, we can better trust that he reveals to us the one Creator God, who created the entire universe, who also meticulously crafted us out of His personal love, and cleanses us by that very same love.