In an Easter special, BRUCE C WEARNE looks at what Matthew records in chapter 28 – in the final passage of his Gospel – about the resurrection and its implications for then and now…
The day after the Sabbath, as the first light of another week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary [of this story] went to see the grave.
Then it happened that there was a great earthquake, and that was [evidently] because one of God’s angels descended from Heaven and upon drawing near rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was brilliant as a flash of lightning, and his clothing was as white as snow.
And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men.
But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come here, and see the place where He lay. Now make haste and go tell His disciples that He has been raised from the grave, and, as it happens, goes even now before you to Galilee where you will see Him. Attend carefully to all that I have told you.”
So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell His disciples.
It happened that as they went, Jesus met them with, “Grace and peace to you!” And they came up and took hold of His feet and worshipped Him.
Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”
While they were on their way, some of the guards went into the city to tell the chief priests all that had taken place.
When they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel together, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money telling them, “This is so you will tell people, ‘This man’s disciples came by night, stole his body while we slept.’ And if this should come to the ears of the Governor, we will explain and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money, did as directed, and that is the story that has been spread among the Jews to this day.
So the 11 disciples went on to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.
And seeing him they worshipped Him, but some doubted. Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” – Matthew 28:1-20/transliteration by Bruce C Wearne
This is the culmination of Matthew’s story. It is surprisingly brief and says in summary: “Well the story goes on, there’s not much more that needs to be said. You will know the rest. Jesus rose on the third day after His great trial as He said He would. The circumstances were such that His resurrection was on the day of a significant earthquake and the women who had prepared the spices for the burial came early only to find the guard had fled in terror because of the earthquake. Instead of having to figure out how to get into the tomb, they saw it was already open and met an angel reminding them of Jesus’ instruction that after He was raised, He would meet them back in Galilee. And on the way to tell the disciples, Jesus Himself met them. And so the command to return to Galilee was confirmed. From then on it was the women’s word against the chief priests who had bribed the soldiers to say that Jesus’ disciples had stolen the body.”
And there it stood, Matthew says – at least, that is how it was understood from the popular opinion that circulated for a time in Jerusalem. How could the witness of the women be believed? The most credible story was the one the murderers had concocted for the soldiers.
But we are left wondering whether the account of the grave’s opening, with the earthquake and the angel’s descent, was also part of what the soldiers told of their experience when they gave an account of themselves to the chief priests.
PICTURE: Artem Sapegin/Unsplash
“Matthew’s “cracking Good News story” concludes with his implicit question of his readers: So who are we going to believe – the already compromised religious authorities and their bribed security cohort, or the women and the 11 from Galilee?”
And further – what would these soldiers say when they were no longer under the shadow of these evil conspirators? That is conjecture, but the power of evil was confirmed by this monetary bribery: as with the execution of Jesus, so with the curious aftermath.
So that was how the “good news” of the chief priests and the Pharisees prevailed and, says Matthew, they relied upon the fraudulent witness of soldiers. They were bought off with large sums of money. (Were they Roman soldiers or could they have been ‘Temple security’? We don’t know for sure.)
Matthew’s “cracking Good News story” concludes with his implicit question of his readers: So who are we going to believe – the already compromised religious authorities and their bribed security cohort, or the women and the 11 from Galilee?
And just for good measure, Matthew concludes with Jesus’ final parting words and His handing on to the disciples what has come to be called the Great Commission.
It leaves us, early 21st century readers, with a question and it is a rather long question and it is world-shakingly profound:
If you are a Jew working as a tax-collector for the occupying Roman administration, working in the thick of daily-life,
in which there is an ongoing religious-political-cultural tension already at work between the Roman Governor and your own community’s religious leaders – priests who are called to serve you in the name of the God of Israel,
and if this Lord of Israel has promised a Messiah who will make you into the people He has promised you to be as the ambassadors of a Divine amnesty to the nations,
and if that Messiah comes along, convincing you that He is the hope of all ages, by His works of mercy, by His teaching and by the wonders wrought by His hands that, yes, He is the One sent from God, just as John the Baptist (the also-executed) had said about him,
and if he then is betrayed by one of his closest disciples, and falsely accused of blasphemy by the chief priests, tried for sedition before the Roman Governor, found innocent but nevertheless executed,
and if He then makes himself known to you after three days as the Resurrected Saviour of the World, only then after another seven weeks to depart,
how are you ever going to proclaim this story as Good News?
Well, in Matthew’s case it was by becoming, perhaps slowly and by one small step at a time, a Kingdom of God expert in the law (13: 52). That would also involve taking responsibility as a Good News story-teller, one who conveys by artful narrative the wonders and wisdom of Jesus’ ministry, helping those who believe to understand the strange but compelling events that can be found in it. And so, this is Matthew’s specially compiled Good News scroll.
How is the coming of Jesus into the world and His serving in the midst of his own people, His immediate family and relatives, to be conveyed? Matthew tells us of Jesus’ ministry to the hurting people of the region of Galilee, those deeply bruised and fearful after the execution of the “voice of one crying in the wilderness” and how Jesus developed His ministry, all the way up to Jerusalem, in that political context. All of Israel was within His purview, and with deeds and words, He brought many to express amazement at what God was calling Him to do, and at times this ministry couldn’t but spill over the border into Samaria, at times crossing strict ethnic lines by bringing a healing word to Gentiles resident within Israel.
“[Jesus’] community, the nation of little-faith faithful (ολιγοπιστοι), needed ongoing care and nurture. They were those – the Scriptures had taught – whose hearing was restricted because their ears were full of wax and whose sight was blurred because of a spiritual astigmatism. Their hearing and sight had to be restored…”
His community, the nation of little-faith faithful (ολιγοπιστοι), needed ongoing care and nurture. They were those – the Scriptures had taught – whose hearing was restricted because their ears were full of wax and whose sight was blurred because of a spiritual astigmatism. Their hearing and sight had to be restored and so Jesus prepared His closest disciples, those he called to be apostles, to minister by means of His parables, as He continued to teach them openly and then, privately, by explaining to the 12 how to apply these parables to themselves, to their own work. He also showed them what working for people’s healing involved.
These wisdom sayings and stories needed to be understood and interpreted. They needed to be shared. These were the metaphors of the Kingdom of Heaven for those taking their initial “baby-steps” in obedient response to the Messiah’s coming now that John’s preparatory work of calling for repentance had concluded.
Matthew’s Scroll is filled with appreciation for John’s ministry and that call for repentance was not cancelled by John’s murder. The call was actually deepened and, it could be said this way, made even more urgent by Herod’s psychotic cowardice.
But it was not enough to just have the story. Having the Scroll on the shelf is of itself insufficient. It needs to be opened and heard. The disciples are trained to teach those who have already received the story. Those who knew the Kingdom of Heaven references in the parables needed to be able to pass them on, to be part of the cultivation of the fields of the Lord. But from what he wrote in his Scroll we learn that Matthew also knew that these parables had to be framed by a “crackin’ good tale”, an account of how, when, and why they were set forth in the first place. These parables, as he and the other Gospel writers document them, were obviously doing the rounds among Jesus’ disciples. We have suggested that many of these were already well known in the Galilee region where Jesus’ ministry had taken off. Matthew’s contribution became that of a Kingdom of God scribe. his Scroll is primary evidence for him becoming a Kingdom of Heaven expert in the law and the prophets. Matthew had been taught the old and the new by the Son of God himself (Matthew 5:17-20). It is thus as a story-telling scribe that the story has been composed about Jesus’ sojourning with his people. Immanuel.
These were a people requiring ongoing healing and teaching, ongoing instruction, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year. And this instruction, now that Messiah had come, would be part of a new way lived daily, in moment-by-moment gratitude to the Lord of Israel for fulfilling his promises to David, for ensuring an inheritance that, initially promised to Abraham, was now being poured out so that “…by his seed all the peoples of the earth shall bless themselves, bathing in Divine favour”.
So these people were in need, not merely of having parables explained in artful ways – so they could be instructed in the Wisdom of the Kingdom of Heaven – they also stood in need of being taught about the work of Messiah Jesus when he lived with them as a wandering Galilean Rabbi. His life, what he did, had to be proclaimed. And so God’s care for his dearly belovéd Son was proclaimed long before He came, and then at His conception in Mary’s womb. By sending John, the last of the prophets, to prepare His way, His Father was showing himself to be busy caring for Him ahead of time.
Those believing needed to be taught about all that He taught and did. They needed the same Holy Spirit to live in the way He had lived in their midst.
Their need was not so very different from our need today. They needed healing, they needed mercy, they needed to hear and understand what Jesus said when the disciples of His cousin John the Baptist came as His messengers from prison, asking Him whether He was in fact Israel’s Messiah as promised or whether they should now be waiting for someone else to be revealed as the Chosen of the Lord (Matthew 11: 1-6). Jesus referred John’s disciples to His own Bar Mitzpha from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”
He had recited this in His own hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30) and He then added for John’s encouragement: “Blessed be the person who takes no offence at me” (Matthew 11:6).
The poignant irony of the reference is that, in Jesus’ own hometown, the synagogue did take offence. The exchange with John’s disciples discloses to us the solidarity Jesus and John enjoyed as those persecuted for the sake of righteousness by those they had been sent to serve (Matthew 5: 11-12).
“In the final sentences of this Scroll, Matthew tells us with words that came from Jesus’ lips that their life in this world is ‘to keep going’ (Genesis 12: 1-2) into all the world proclaiming this Good News to every creature.”
In other words, it is in this Person that Israel’s Mission as salt of the earth and light of the world (Matthew 5: 13-14) has most assuredly come to its culmination. In the final sentences of this Scroll, Matthew tells us with words that came from Jesus’ lips that their life in this world is “to keep going” (Genesis 12: 1-2) into all the world proclaiming this Good News to every creature.
That is what has happened with the coming of Messiah Jesus. God’s own “little people”, His children, are sent generation-to-generation on their way to proclaim God’s love and mercy. This is the pearl of great price, the field with a great treasure that it is worth selling up everything to obtain (Matthew 13: 44, 45-46). The disciples are sent as apostles on their way with the assurance that Israel’s Messiah has given His personal guarantee as their Lord and their God to be with them through thick and thin, to the end of all things.
The Great Commission is indeed the ‘Good News’ republication of the “cultural mandate” issued from the sixth day of creation (Genesis 1: 26-31).
And for that ongoing task, those whose ears are prone to be full of wax, whose eyes blinded by a demonic blurring and double-vision, need to hear not just the parables, and not just the application of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles to their everyday life – they also will need the story of Jesus, a story the telling of which to our amazement, our wonder, is all about what God the Lord did when His Son walked the Galilean roads on His way up to Jerusalem to His death. They will need to be instructed about the emancipation from the guilt of sin that His death and resurrection and ascension have now brought into our sinful human life. Mercy has indeed triumphed over sacrifice (Matthew 9:13; 12:7).
They will need to be reassured, and nurtured, as John in prison before his murder was reassured and encouraged, by the words of Jesus conveyed by faithful messengers. They will need to be assured that their heeding of John’s call to repentance was no “flash in the pan”, no mere stop-gap ritual to make an unbearably confusing life bearable until it’s all over. No. This is a call to the people Jesus lived with to embrace life, the life that God has created, that sin and rebellion has corrupted, and which Jesus Christ, Israel’s Messiah, in His death and rising and ascending to the Right Hand of the Most High, has fully overcome.
The warfare, the inner rebellion against God that the human race inherits, and of which its best resistance cannot overcome, is not the end. Matthew’s Scroll is the proclamation of the Good News. Jesus Christ, Israel’s Messiah, the promised Prince of the world’s princes, has redeemed the entire world and every creature needs to hear that it is so.
And then, in line with the teaching of John, this tax-collector, who, in answering Jesus’ call “Follow me”, became a Kingdom of God story-teller (Matthew 13: 51-52), also gives attention to the way in which Jesus taught His disciples to think about the decisive character of God’s future judgement. There are many instances in Matthew’s Scroll of Jesus’ own apocalyptic teaching, alongside and confirming John’s apocalyptic and prophetic ministry. In that sense Matthew’s Scroll is also a literary forerunner to Jude and the Apocalypse of John.
The story recounted in this Scroll ends with the affirmation that this story and the telling of it has to go on. It goes on as we go on. And so, it would seem, Matthew’s Good News Scroll is written with a keen eye for how the Galilean disciples of Jesus came to inherit and live out their days blessed in the enduring Shekinah that had come upon them from Heaven, when the Lord Jesus Christ walked and ministered and taught in their midst.
OPEN BOOK SPECIAL: “HE HAS RISEN, JUST AS HE SAID”
In an Easter special, BRUCE C WEARNE looks at what Matthew records in chapter 28 – in the final passage of his Gospel – about the resurrection and its implications for then and now…
The day after the Sabbath, as the first light of another week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary [of this story] went to see the grave.
Then it happened that there was a great earthquake, and that was [evidently] because one of God’s angels descended from Heaven and upon drawing near rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was brilliant as a flash of lightning, and his clothing was as white as snow.
And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men.
But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come here, and see the place where He lay. Now make haste and go tell His disciples that He has been raised from the grave, and, as it happens, goes even now before you to Galilee where you will see Him. Attend carefully to all that I have told you.”
So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell His disciples.
It happened that as they went, Jesus met them with, “Grace and peace to you!” And they came up and took hold of His feet and worshipped Him.
Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”
While they were on their way, some of the guards went into the city to tell the chief priests all that had taken place.
When they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel together, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money telling them, “This is so you will tell people, ‘This man’s disciples came by night, stole his body while we slept.’ And if this should come to the ears of the Governor, we will explain and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money, did as directed, and that is the story that has been spread among the Jews to this day.
So the 11 disciples went on to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.
And seeing him they worshipped Him, but some doubted. Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” – Matthew 28:1-20/transliteration by Bruce C Wearne
This is the culmination of Matthew’s story. It is surprisingly brief and says in summary: “Well the story goes on, there’s not much more that needs to be said. You will know the rest. Jesus rose on the third day after His great trial as He said He would. The circumstances were such that His resurrection was on the day of a significant earthquake and the women who had prepared the spices for the burial came early only to find the guard had fled in terror because of the earthquake. Instead of having to figure out how to get into the tomb, they saw it was already open and met an angel reminding them of Jesus’ instruction that after He was raised, He would meet them back in Galilee. And on the way to tell the disciples, Jesus Himself met them. And so the command to return to Galilee was confirmed. From then on it was the women’s word against the chief priests who had bribed the soldiers to say that Jesus’ disciples had stolen the body.”
And there it stood, Matthew says – at least, that is how it was understood from the popular opinion that circulated for a time in Jerusalem. How could the witness of the women be believed? The most credible story was the one the murderers had concocted for the soldiers.
But we are left wondering whether the account of the grave’s opening, with the earthquake and the angel’s descent, was also part of what the soldiers told of their experience when they gave an account of themselves to the chief priests.
PICTURE: Artem Sapegin/Unsplash
“Matthew’s “cracking Good News story” concludes with his implicit question of his readers: So who are we going to believe – the already compromised religious authorities and their bribed security cohort, or the women and the 11 from Galilee?”
And further – what would these soldiers say when they were no longer under the shadow of these evil conspirators? That is conjecture, but the power of evil was confirmed by this monetary bribery: as with the execution of Jesus, so with the curious aftermath.
So that was how the “good news” of the chief priests and the Pharisees prevailed and, says Matthew, they relied upon the fraudulent witness of soldiers. They were bought off with large sums of money. (Were they Roman soldiers or could they have been ‘Temple security’? We don’t know for sure.)
Matthew’s “cracking Good News story” concludes with his implicit question of his readers: So who are we going to believe – the already compromised religious authorities and their bribed security cohort, or the women and the 11 from Galilee?
And just for good measure, Matthew concludes with Jesus’ final parting words and His handing on to the disciples what has come to be called the Great Commission.
It leaves us, early 21st century readers, with a question and it is a rather long question and it is world-shakingly profound:
If you are a Jew working as a tax-collector for the occupying Roman administration, working in the thick of daily-life,
in which there is an ongoing religious-political-cultural tension already at work between the Roman Governor and your own community’s religious leaders – priests who are called to serve you in the name of the God of Israel,
and if this Lord of Israel has promised a Messiah who will make you into the people He has promised you to be as the ambassadors of a Divine amnesty to the nations,
and if that Messiah comes along, convincing you that He is the hope of all ages, by His works of mercy, by His teaching and by the wonders wrought by His hands that, yes, He is the One sent from God, just as John the Baptist (the also-executed) had said about him,
and if he then is betrayed by one of his closest disciples, and falsely accused of blasphemy by the chief priests, tried for sedition before the Roman Governor, found innocent but nevertheless executed,
and if He then makes himself known to you after three days as the Resurrected Saviour of the World, only then after another seven weeks to depart,
how are you ever going to proclaim this story as Good News?
Well, in Matthew’s case it was by becoming, perhaps slowly and by one small step at a time, a Kingdom of God expert in the law (13: 52). That would also involve taking responsibility as a Good News story-teller, one who conveys by artful narrative the wonders and wisdom of Jesus’ ministry, helping those who believe to understand the strange but compelling events that can be found in it. And so, this is Matthew’s specially compiled Good News scroll.
How is the coming of Jesus into the world and His serving in the midst of his own people, His immediate family and relatives, to be conveyed? Matthew tells us of Jesus’ ministry to the hurting people of the region of Galilee, those deeply bruised and fearful after the execution of the “voice of one crying in the wilderness” and how Jesus developed His ministry, all the way up to Jerusalem, in that political context. All of Israel was within His purview, and with deeds and words, He brought many to express amazement at what God was calling Him to do, and at times this ministry couldn’t but spill over the border into Samaria, at times crossing strict ethnic lines by bringing a healing word to Gentiles resident within Israel.
“[Jesus’] community, the nation of little-faith faithful (ολιγοπιστοι), needed ongoing care and nurture. They were those – the Scriptures had taught – whose hearing was restricted because their ears were full of wax and whose sight was blurred because of a spiritual astigmatism. Their hearing and sight had to be restored…”
His community, the nation of little-faith faithful (ολιγοπιστοι), needed ongoing care and nurture. They were those – the Scriptures had taught – whose hearing was restricted because their ears were full of wax and whose sight was blurred because of a spiritual astigmatism. Their hearing and sight had to be restored and so Jesus prepared His closest disciples, those he called to be apostles, to minister by means of His parables, as He continued to teach them openly and then, privately, by explaining to the 12 how to apply these parables to themselves, to their own work. He also showed them what working for people’s healing involved.
These wisdom sayings and stories needed to be understood and interpreted. They needed to be shared. These were the metaphors of the Kingdom of Heaven for those taking their initial “baby-steps” in obedient response to the Messiah’s coming now that John’s preparatory work of calling for repentance had concluded.
Matthew’s Scroll is filled with appreciation for John’s ministry and that call for repentance was not cancelled by John’s murder. The call was actually deepened and, it could be said this way, made even more urgent by Herod’s psychotic cowardice.
But it was not enough to just have the story. Having the Scroll on the shelf is of itself insufficient. It needs to be opened and heard. The disciples are trained to teach those who have already received the story. Those who knew the Kingdom of Heaven references in the parables needed to be able to pass them on, to be part of the cultivation of the fields of the Lord. But from what he wrote in his Scroll we learn that Matthew also knew that these parables had to be framed by a “crackin’ good tale”, an account of how, when, and why they were set forth in the first place. These parables, as he and the other Gospel writers document them, were obviously doing the rounds among Jesus’ disciples. We have suggested that many of these were already well known in the Galilee region where Jesus’ ministry had taken off. Matthew’s contribution became that of a Kingdom of God scribe. his Scroll is primary evidence for him becoming a Kingdom of Heaven expert in the law and the prophets. Matthew had been taught the old and the new by the Son of God himself (Matthew 5:17-20). It is thus as a story-telling scribe that the story has been composed about Jesus’ sojourning with his people. Immanuel.
These were a people requiring ongoing healing and teaching, ongoing instruction, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year. And this instruction, now that Messiah had come, would be part of a new way lived daily, in moment-by-moment gratitude to the Lord of Israel for fulfilling his promises to David, for ensuring an inheritance that, initially promised to Abraham, was now being poured out so that “…by his seed all the peoples of the earth shall bless themselves, bathing in Divine favour”.
So these people were in need, not merely of having parables explained in artful ways – so they could be instructed in the Wisdom of the Kingdom of Heaven – they also stood in need of being taught about the work of Messiah Jesus when he lived with them as a wandering Galilean Rabbi. His life, what he did, had to be proclaimed. And so God’s care for his dearly belovéd Son was proclaimed long before He came, and then at His conception in Mary’s womb. By sending John, the last of the prophets, to prepare His way, His Father was showing himself to be busy caring for Him ahead of time.
Those believing needed to be taught about all that He taught and did. They needed the same Holy Spirit to live in the way He had lived in their midst.
Their need was not so very different from our need today. They needed healing, they needed mercy, they needed to hear and understand what Jesus said when the disciples of His cousin John the Baptist came as His messengers from prison, asking Him whether He was in fact Israel’s Messiah as promised or whether they should now be waiting for someone else to be revealed as the Chosen of the Lord (Matthew 11: 1-6). Jesus referred John’s disciples to His own Bar Mitzpha from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”
He had recited this in His own hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30) and He then added for John’s encouragement: “Blessed be the person who takes no offence at me” (Matthew 11:6).
The poignant irony of the reference is that, in Jesus’ own hometown, the synagogue did take offence. The exchange with John’s disciples discloses to us the solidarity Jesus and John enjoyed as those persecuted for the sake of righteousness by those they had been sent to serve (Matthew 5: 11-12).
“In the final sentences of this Scroll, Matthew tells us with words that came from Jesus’ lips that their life in this world is ‘to keep going’ (Genesis 12: 1-2) into all the world proclaiming this Good News to every creature.”
In other words, it is in this Person that Israel’s Mission as salt of the earth and light of the world (Matthew 5: 13-14) has most assuredly come to its culmination. In the final sentences of this Scroll, Matthew tells us with words that came from Jesus’ lips that their life in this world is “to keep going” (Genesis 12: 1-2) into all the world proclaiming this Good News to every creature.
That is what has happened with the coming of Messiah Jesus. God’s own “little people”, His children, are sent generation-to-generation on their way to proclaim God’s love and mercy. This is the pearl of great price, the field with a great treasure that it is worth selling up everything to obtain (Matthew 13: 44, 45-46). The disciples are sent as apostles on their way with the assurance that Israel’s Messiah has given His personal guarantee as their Lord and their God to be with them through thick and thin, to the end of all things.
The Great Commission is indeed the ‘Good News’ republication of the “cultural mandate” issued from the sixth day of creation (Genesis 1: 26-31).
And for that ongoing task, those whose ears are prone to be full of wax, whose eyes blinded by a demonic blurring and double-vision, need to hear not just the parables, and not just the application of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles to their everyday life – they also will need the story of Jesus, a story the telling of which to our amazement, our wonder, is all about what God the Lord did when His Son walked the Galilean roads on His way up to Jerusalem to His death. They will need to be instructed about the emancipation from the guilt of sin that His death and resurrection and ascension have now brought into our sinful human life. Mercy has indeed triumphed over sacrifice (Matthew 9:13; 12:7).
They will need to be reassured, and nurtured, as John in prison before his murder was reassured and encouraged, by the words of Jesus conveyed by faithful messengers. They will need to be assured that their heeding of John’s call to repentance was no “flash in the pan”, no mere stop-gap ritual to make an unbearably confusing life bearable until it’s all over. No. This is a call to the people Jesus lived with to embrace life, the life that God has created, that sin and rebellion has corrupted, and which Jesus Christ, Israel’s Messiah, in His death and rising and ascending to the Right Hand of the Most High, has fully overcome.
The warfare, the inner rebellion against God that the human race inherits, and of which its best resistance cannot overcome, is not the end. Matthew’s Scroll is the proclamation of the Good News. Jesus Christ, Israel’s Messiah, the promised Prince of the world’s princes, has redeemed the entire world and every creature needs to hear that it is so.
And then, in line with the teaching of John, this tax-collector, who, in answering Jesus’ call “Follow me”, became a Kingdom of God story-teller (Matthew 13: 51-52), also gives attention to the way in which Jesus taught His disciples to think about the decisive character of God’s future judgement. There are many instances in Matthew’s Scroll of Jesus’ own apocalyptic teaching, alongside and confirming John’s apocalyptic and prophetic ministry. In that sense Matthew’s Scroll is also a literary forerunner to Jude and the Apocalypse of John.
The story recounted in this Scroll ends with the affirmation that this story and the telling of it has to go on. It goes on as we go on. And so, it would seem, Matthew’s Good News Scroll is written with a keen eye for how the Galilean disciples of Jesus came to inherit and live out their days blessed in the enduring Shekinah that had come upon them from Heaven, when the Lord Jesus Christ walked and ministered and taught in their midst.
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