Matthew for Everyone, Part 2

Chapters 16-28

N. T. Wright

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781611640397
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Enlarged print edition now available! Tom Wright's eye-opening comments on the Gospel of Matthew and what it might mean for us are combined, passage-by-passage, with his fresh translation of the Bible text. Making use of his true scholar's understanding, yet writing in an approachable and anecdotal style, Wright captures the urgency and excitement of Matthew's Gospel in a way few writers have.

Tom Wright has undertaken a tremendous task: to provide guides to all the books of the New Testament, and to include in them his own translation of the entire text. Each short passage is followed by a highly readable discussion with background information, useful explanations and suggestions, and thoughts as to how the text can be relevant to our lives today. A glossary is included at the back of the book. The series is suitable for group study, personal study, or daily devotions.

MATTHEW 16.1–12

The Leaven of the Pharisees

¹The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tried to catch him out by asking him to show them a sign from heaven.

²This was his reply to them: ‘When it’s evening you say, “It’s going to be fine, because the sky is turning red. “ ³And in the morning you say, “It’s going to be stormy today, because the sky is red and gloomy. “ Well then: you know how to work out the look of the sky, so why can’t you work out the signs of the times? ⁴The generation that wants a sign is wicked and corrupt! No sign will be given to it, except the sign of Jonah. ‘

With that, he left them and went away.

⁵When the disciples crossed over the lake, they forgot to bring any bread. ⁶’Watch out, ‘ said Jesus to them, ‘and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.’

⁷They discussed it with each other. ‘It’s because we didn’t bring any bread, ‘ they said.

⁸But Jesus knew what they were thinking.

‘You really are a little-faith lot!’ he said. ‘Why are you discussing with each other that you haven’t got any bread? ⁹Don’t you understand, even now? Don’t you remember the five loaves and the five thousand, and how many basketfuls you picked up afterwards? ¹⁰Or the seven loaves and the four thousand, and how many baskets you picked up? ¹¹Why can’t you see that I wasn’t talking about bread? Watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees!’

¹²Then they understood that he wasn’t telling them to beware of the leaven you get in bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Our generation is bombarded with signs. Drive along a city street, especially at night, and your eyes will be dazzled with signs of all sorts. Some of them are necessary to tell you where to go and where not to go: if you ignore red and green lights you will be in danger. Others are merely for decoration and information, pointing to particular buildings or illuminating them. Many others are designed to catch your imagination – and your money. Advertisements twinkle and flash enticingly until their message has worked its way into your memory.

Part of growing up is learning to distinguish signs that matter, which must be obeyed, from signs that don’t matter, that can (and perhaps should) be ignored. Something of the same puzzle faces us as we read the gospels. Sometimes Jesus does things which he himself speaks of as ‘signs’. Particularly in John’s gospel, but also in the others, some of his powerful deeds, especially his healings, are seen as signs of who he is, signs that the disciples at least, and probably others as well, are meant to notice, to ‘read’, to understand.

But when the Pharisees and Sadducees ask for a sign, something different is going on. (They didn’t normally work together; they must have regarded this as something of an emergency.) Matthew says they were trying to catch him out; it was a test, a trick. Perhaps they were wanting to accuse him again of being in league with the devil (see 12.24–45). Perhaps they were hoping to bring a charge against him that he was a false prophet, using signs and wonders to lead Israel astray, as the scriptures had warned (Deuteronomy 13.1–5). Perhaps Jesus saw their challenge as being like the cynicism of Israel in the wilderness, putting God to the test to see whether he was really among them or not (Exodus 17.1–7). In any case, Jesus refused to comply with the request. He would not perform signs to order, as though he had to pass some kind of test. To do so would be to treat God himself as a kind of circus performer.

Of course, Jesus was doing all sorts of ‘signs’; the gospel story is full of them. And he longed for people to be able to read ‘the signs of the times’: to see the gathering storm-clouds in Israel’s national life, to recognize the way in which corrupt leaders, false teachers, and people bent on violence were leading the nation towards inevitable disaster, from which only repentance and a fresh trust in God’s kingdom could save them. The irony was that they were asking him for a sign, but they were blind to the many signs all around them.

So he refused to perform some special sign just for them. His powerful works were done from love, not from a desire to submit his mission to a laboratory test. They weren’t that kind of thing. The only sign he would give such people, as he said before, was the sign of Jonah (12.38–42, where the meaning of this is spelled out). If people watched him with only cynicism and criticism in their hearts, they would see nothing – until the moment when the rumour went around that he had been raised from the dead. That would be the final and devastating sign that God had indeed been with him all along.

The truth of the matter, of course, was that both the Pharisees and the Sadducees, in their different ways, held aims, beliefs and hopes which were seriously out of line with those Jesus was offering. Like established political parties that suddenly become aware of a new movement threatening to undermine their support, they are ready to do anything they can to discredit it. But Jesus not only sees through their plot; he has his own warning to give against them.

Like a parent teaching a child not to be led astray by the flashy signs of city advertisements, he warns them of the ‘leaven’ of the Pharisees and Sadducees. This was puzzling to the disciples, who thought Jesus was referring cryptically to the fact that they’d forgotten to bring any bread with them. It is even more puzzling to us, because unless we have grown up knowing something about Judaism we probably don’t know what leaven could stand for.

The point is this. At Passover, one of the greatest Jewish festivals, all leaven had to be cleared out of the house, commemorating the time when the children of Israel left Egypt in such a hurry that they didn’t have time to bake leavened bread, and so ate it unleavened. Gradually, ‘leaven’ became a symbol not for something that makes bread more palatable, but for something that makes it less pure. Warning against the ‘leaven’ of someone’s teaching meant warning against ways in which the true message of God’s kingdom could be corrupted, diluted, or (as we say, referring to drink rather than bread), ‘watered down’.

Bring the whole scene forward two thousand years, and we face the question for ourselves. What are the ‘signs of the times’ in our own day? Where are leaders and teachers, official and unofficial, leading people astray? What are the true signs of God’s work in our midst? How can we learn to tell the difference, in our moral and spiritual life together, between the signs we must observe and those we would do better to ignore?

MATTHEW 16.13–20

Peter’s Declaration of Jesus’ Messiahship

¹³Jesus came to Caesarea Philippi. There he put this question to his disciples:

‘Who do people say that the son of man is?’

¹⁴’John the Baptist, ‘ they replied. ‘Others say Elijah. Others say Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. ‘

¹⁵’What about you?’ he asked them. ‘Who do you say I am?’

¹⁶Simon Peter answered.

‘You’re the Messiah, ‘ he said. ‘You’re the son of the living God!’

¹⁷’God’s blessing on you, Simon, son of John!’ answered Jesus. ‘Flesh and blood didn’t reveal that to you; it was my father in heaven. ¹⁸And I’ve got something to tell you, too: you are Peter, the rock, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell won’t overpower it. ¹⁹I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you tie up on earth will be tied up in heaven, and whatever you untie on earth will be untied in heaven. ‘

²⁰Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

The Tibetan Buddhists believe in the transmigration of souls. When someone dies, they suppose that the soul of that person goes immediately into a different body, the body of a child born at the same instant.

This belief becomes vitally important when their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, dies. A search is made for a boy born at the moment when the great leader died; and that boy is taken away and brought up as the new leader. Everybody, including the person himself, knows from the very beginning that he is the new Dalai Lama. It sounds very strange to modern Western ears. We prize highly the right of every person to freedom of choice about their future. Even hereditary monarchs can abdicate. But the Dalai Lama has no choice; and there is no question about who he is.

In Judaism it was very different. Many Jews of Jesus’ day believed (and many Jews today still believe this) that God would send an anointed king who would be the spearhead of the movement that would free Israel from oppression and bring justice and peace to the world at last. Nobody knew when or where this anointed king would be born, though many believed he would be a true descendant of King David. God had made wonderful promises about his future family. Some would have pointed to the prophecy of Micah 5.1–3 (which Matthew quotes in chapter 2) as indicating that the coming king should be born in Bethlehem. And the word for ‘anointed king’ in the Jewish languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, was the word we normally pronounce as ‘Messiah’.

What would the Messiah be like? How would people tell he had arrived? Nobody knew exactly, but there were many theories. Many saw him as a warrior king who would defeat the pagan hordes and establish Israel’s freedom. Many saw him as one who would purge the Temple and establish true worship. Everybody who believed in such a coming king knew that he would fulfil Israel’s scriptures, and bring God’s kingdom into being at last, on earth as it was in heaven. But nobody had a very clear idea of what all this would look like on the ground. In the first century there were several would-be Messiahs who came and went, attracting followers who were quickly dispersed when their leader was caught by the authorities. One thing was certain. To be known as a would-be Messiah was to attract attention from the authorities, and almost certainly hostility.

So when Jesus wanted to put the question to his followers he took them well away from their normal sphere of activity. Caesarea Philippi is in the far north of the land of Israel, well outside the territory of Herod Antipas, a good two days’ walk from the sea of Galilee. Even the form of his question, here in Matthew’s gospel at least, is oblique: ‘Who do people say the son of man is?’, that is, ‘Who do people say that this person here, in other words (but without saying it) I myself, am?’ Jesus must have known the answer he would get, but he wanted the disciples to say it out loud.

The disciples report the general reaction – which tells us a good deal about the way Jesus was perceived by the people at large. Not ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’; not the cosy, comforting friend of little children; rather, like one of the wild prophets of recent or of ancient times, who had stood up and spoken God’s word fearlessly against wicked and rebellious kings. Jesus was acting as a prophet: not simply ‘one who foretells the future’, but one who was God’s mouthpiece against injustice and wickedness in high places.

But within that prophetic ministry there lay hidden another dimension, and Jesus believed – otherwise he would scarcely have asked the question – that his followers had grasped this secret. He was not just God’s mouthpiece. He was God’s

Messiah. He was not just speaking God’s word against the wicked rulers of the time. He was God’s king, who would supplant them. That was indeed the conclusion they had reached, and Peter takes on the role of spokesman: ‘You are the Messiah, ‘ he says, ‘the son of the living God.’

It’s important to be clear that at this stage the phrase ‘son of God’ did not mean ‘the second person of the Trinity’. There was no thought yet that the coming king would himself be divine – though some of the things Jesus was doing and saying must already have made the disciples very puzzled, with a perplexity that would only be resolved when, after his resurrection, they came to believe that he had all along been even more intimately associated with Israel’s one God than they had ever imagined. No: the phrase ‘son of God’ was a biblical phrase, indicating that the king stood in a particular relation to God, adopted to be his special representative (see, for instance, 2 Samuel 7.14; Psalm 2.7).

Very soon after Jesus’ resurrection, his followers came to believe that the same phrase had a whole other layer of meaning that nobody had hitherto imagined. But it’s important, if we are to understand the present passage, that we don’t read into it more than is there. What Peter and the others were saying was: you are the true king. You’re the one Israel has been waiting for. You are God’s adopted son, the one of whom the Psalms and prophets had spoken.

They knew it was risky. With this, they were not only signing on to be part of a prophetic movement that challenged existing authorities in God’s name; they were signing on for a royal challenge. Jesus was the true king! That meant that Herod – and even faraway Caesar – had better look out. And as for the Temple authorities …

To begin with it looked as though Jesus was simply endorsing their dreams. If Peter had declared that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus had a word for Peter as well. The name ‘Peter’,or, in his native Aramaic, ‘Cephas’, means ‘rock’ or ‘stone’. If Peter was prepared to say that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus was prepared to say that, with this allegiance, Peter would himself be the foundation for his new building. Just as God gave Abram the name Abraham, indicating that he would be the father of many nations (Genesis 17.5), so now Jesus gives Simon the new name Peter, the Rock.

Furthermore, just as in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus told a story about a wise man building a house on the rock (7.24), so now Jesus himself declares that he’s going to do just that. Here, as there, we are meant to imagine in the background the great city, Jerusalem, built on the rocky heights of Mount Zion. In some Jewish traditions, the Temple in Jerusalem was the place where heaven and earth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Map
• Matthew 16.1–12 The Leaven of the Pharisees
• Matthew 23.13–22 Condemnation of Scribes and Pharisees (1)
• Glossary