Reflections
on the Book of Matthew
The Gospel of Matthew is at the heart of what draws me to its protagonist – Christ Jesus – and what disturbs me. What draws me is what has drawn most people over the centuries: the Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes (Matthew, 5:3-12) and the “Judge not…” commandment (Matthew, 7:1); the compassion of Jesus toward the part of humanity that meant nothing in terms of wealth, power, or status; the very idea of God translating some part of his being into our form to bring light and truth into the world (and the true understanding of the Law in Matthew), to suffer death on the cross to do so; the most important commandment – “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew, 22:36-40); and the true meaning of the commandment and indeed of the first book of Genesis, God creating the human form in his own image – “What you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me.” Indeed, together with “The Good Samaritan” and "The Prodigal Son" from Luke (10:35-47; 15:11-32), and the forgiveness of the adulteress in John (8:1-11) and a few other passages like the opening of John and John 3:16, the prophetic appeals to social justice and compassion . . . that is essentially what gets past my head and goes into my heart. I confess very little else does (Psalm 23).
Matthew is said to be the “most Jewish” or the gospels in that – modifying Mark, which is said to be a main source along with Q – it understands Jesus as preserver and indeed fulfiller of the law; as the Jewish Messiah ushering in the Kingdom of God, fulfilling the deeper meaning of Judaism by universalizing it; by framing the life of Jesus as fulfilling Old Testament / Torah prophecies; and by framing how we should live in terms of Deuteronomic law and the proverbs, which emphasize reward for obedience and threaten punishment for disobedience. It’s just with Jesus the meaning of all of this, the Law, the Messiah, the Kingdom of God, reward and punishment take on a radically new and paradoxical twist. "Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved" – Matthew 9:17. Indeed!
I only want to focus on the main difficulty
I have with Matthew, leaving out as secondary for me the changes to Mark in
order to stress Jesus embeddedness in Jewish prophecy. My main difficulty is
that Matthew usually writes as though goodness is rewarded from outside. The
sheep inherit the kingdom; the goats are cast out. The righteous receive reward;
the wicked – i.e., those who do not believe in Jesus and embrace the Law as he
understands it in Matthew, receive terrible, eternal punishment – burning
mostly. What must these images mean if God is truly the highest Good; if God is
love? If there is no evil in God? And the
answer is, basically, that Heaven is not a prize beyond goodness. That Heaven
is goodness, truth, beauty, holiness, and love brought to completion in union
with God. Hell is the final refusal of that union.
Well, I again have to rely on thinkers more
able to grasp all this than myself, for every time I reread Matthew as a whole
I suffer the same tension.
St.
Augustine, Confessions (Book X)
Augustine argues that everyone wants
happiness. But what is happiness? He follows Plato here. The answer is not
pleasure, success, power, honor, or even virtue considered abstractly. His
first answer: "And the happy life is this – to rejoice unto Thee, in Thee,
and for Thee; this it is, and there is no other." Radical stuff. He does not say that the happy life is to
obey God so that one may obtain heaven. Nor does he say that the happy life is
to receive rewards from God or the happy life is to possess happiness which God
gives. He says plainly that the happy life is joy in God himself. Period.
The implication is clear. For Augustine,
God is not the means to happiness; God is happiness. Then, in the next chapter,
he goes even further: "For a happy life is joy in the truth. For this is
joy in You, who are the Truth, O God..." The chain of reasoning is: Truth is
God; joy in truth is joy in God; happiness is joy in truth; therefore, happiness
is joy in God. This is a different
key from Matthew's reward language. The structure is no longer ‘be good, get to
Heaven.’ It is loving truth leads to loving God, which as a by-product leads to
joy and happiness, all converging into a single reality. "This is the
happy life which all desire; this life which alone is happy, all desire; joy in
the truth do all wish for."
He is saying that every human being already
seeks God, even if unknowingly. We think we seek all the worldly goods people
connect to happiness. But happiness itself is secretly joy in Truth. And Truth
is God. Thus every finite desire is, at bottom, a hidden search for God.
Then comes an interesting move: "I have known many who wished to deceive, but none who wished to
be deceived." Augustine uses this as evidence that human beings are
naturally ordered toward truth. Even liars want the truth when they are the
ones receiving information. Therefore, something in us loves truth as such. The
tragedy is that we often love other things more. As he puts it, people are
"more strongly taken up with other things which have more power to make
them miserable than that which they faintly remember to make them happy."
In other words, we know, dimly, where happiness lies but we become absorbed in
lesser goods.
Now connect this back to doing good for the
reward of Heaven and avoiding evil to avoid horrible punishment. Augustine denies you should love God to get to Heaven because
that still treats God as a means. You love God because God is Truth itself. God
is Beauty itself. God is Goodness itself. God is Happiness itself. And
therefore heaven cannot be something added on afterward. Heaven is simply the
complete possession and enjoyment of the God already loved. "The happy
life is this – to rejoice unto Thee, in Thee, and for Thee." Is this what
I take from Matthew as a whole? Not the parts I cited above, but from Matthew
as a whole?
St.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles
Aquinas also rejects the Heaven as the
reward, or wage, for faith and Hell as the punishment imposed on the faithless
soul. The key theme of the Contra Gentiles is that every creature tends
toward its ultimate end (finis ultimus), and the ultimate end of rational
creatures cannot be anything finite. In Book III, Aquinas argues – as did Plato,
Aristotle, and Augustine – that things like wealth, honor, power, even virtue
cannot our final end, or fulfillment. Can’t lead to true happiness. The final
end is the vision of God. We do not seek God in order to get happiness; rather,
happiness consists in God’s (infinite love, the source of all finite love and
longing) full presence. In Book III, chapters 25–63 (especially the sections on
ultimate happiness), Aquinas argues that beatitude (the vision of God or living
in God) is not an external reward added onto virtue but the fulfillment of the
intellect's natural desire for truth and the will's desire for goodness. “The final
end of every intellectual substance is to understand God.” That also moves away
from the idea of heaven as payment.
Benedict writes:
Jesus
admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and opulence,
who has created an impassable chasm between himself and the poor man; the chasm
of being trapped within material pleasures; the chasm of forgetting the other,
of incapacity to love, which then becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst….
The encounter with Christ is the decisive act of judgment before whose gaze all falsehood melts away. Judgment is not first a courtroom and not primarily sentencing. It is simply reality revealed, fantasy, illusion, rationalization, narcissism stripped away, the naked soul make manifest. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation "as through fire." The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. The fire is not something external to Christ. Christ himself is the fire. The encounter burns away illusion and the pain is simultaneously judgment and healing. This was my view long before I read the Pope had the same view, which of course was a nice conformation. The pain, as I imagined, was feeling all the pain others and the world suffered on account of your words and actions. Be that as it may, as Benedict writes:
There
can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness
to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for
hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying
thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of
our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction
of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell,
The
point is that Hell is not God the judge sentencing the soul to eternal
damnation. Hell is the terrifyingly possible consequence of a life which has
totally failed to become what it was meant to be, like a rose failing to blossom, and has “lost the good of
intellect” (Dante) i.e. can no longer truly love, can no longer apprehend
reality, and can no longer care that they
can’t love, and live in self-imprisoning fantasies but don't care.
I always consult Orthodox theology, which I
consider very deep. Unfortunately, my knowledge of it is limited. But in this
book Kallistos Ware gives the Eastern form: heaven and hell are not two
different “places” where God either loves or stops loving; the same divine love
is joy to the receptive and torment to the self-closed. Ware cites a theme
found in figures such as Isaac the Syrian: namely, those who are punished in
Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love. The idea is that God's love never
ceases. The same divine reality is experienced differently. Ware writes in
several places that heaven and hell are not two separate locations where God is
present in one and absent in the other. Rather God is present everywhere: the
saints experience that presence as joy whereas the self-enclosed experience
that same presence as torment.
C.
S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”
So, to add an Anglican Christian and one of
the best Christian minds. His starting point is the objection that Christianity
seems to be appealing to self-interest. "Be good and you'll get
heaven." (and Santa will bring you toys.) Lewis argues that this objection
assumes all rewards are of the same kind when they are not.
He distinguishes two kinds of reward. 1)External or mercenary rewards, that is, rewards that have no intrinsic connection to the activity. His examples are money paid to a worker; a schoolboy studying only for prizes; a man marrying a woman solely for her fortune. The reward is something different from the activity. In these cases, one may indeed be motivated by greed or self-interest. 2) Natural rewards, i.e., rewards that are not really "added on" at all but are the fulfillment of the activity itself. Lewis gives examples such as these: the proper reward of a successful courtship is marriage; the proper reward of a journey is arriving at one's destination; the proper reward of learning is knowledge; the proper reward of battle is victory. So marriage is not a payment for courtship; arrival is not a payment for traveling; knowledge is not a payment for studying; victory is not a payment for fighting. Rather, each is the completion of what was already being sought.
Now Lewis applies this to Heaven. The critic
imagines heaven as a kind of celestial paycheck, which is the wrong picture. The
Christian claim is not that you first love God and then later receive a prize. The
reward of seeking God is finding God. Or the reward of loving God is more of
God. In that sense Heaven resembles marriage after courtship much more than
wages after labor.
Lewis says Christianity does not encourage us to desire heaven because heaven contains pleasant things. The desire for heaven is already present in our deepest longings. The joy we occasionally glimpse in beauty, in nature, in friendship, in music, in love…is not the thing itself. It is a sign, the famous Lewis idea of Sehnsucht of a certain kind of joy (explored to brilliantly in Surprised by Joy). The longing itself points beyond itself. Thus heaven is not a reward added to the longing but the reality toward which the longing was directed all along. This is very close to Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. For Lewis, the reward is the thing itself brought to completion.
Lewis's argument works beautifully if Heaven
is understood as union with God, truth, beauty, and goodness. It works less
well if one returns to some of Matthew's imagery: rewards, thrones, punishments,
outer darkness, separation of sheep and goats, etc. Lewis is explaining what he
thinks those images ultimately mean.
Two
Readings
The simple picture in Matthew is ‘be good,
receive Heaven as your reward; be bad, and you are sentenced to eternal torture
in Hell. In that picture, goodness is a means and heaven is the end. I think Matthew
(and Jesus) believed many Jews implicitly practiced their faith in this spirit.
The Pharisees and Sadducees are fiercely targeted by Jesus.
On the one hand, Matthew seems to reject
acting from external rewards. Jesus castigates giving for public praise, praying
to be seen by others as pious, opening fasting so as to impress others with
your righteousness, not just refraining from lust in public but not lusting in
your heart, not only not murdering but not feeling rage and hatred in your
heart, etc. All of this points inward. The concern is not merely what one does
but why one does it. Matthew 6 seems almost obsessed with motivation. The
hypocrite performs virtue for applause; the humble person performs virtue
because it is right.
But Matthew also contains threats of Gehenna, outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal punishment, rewards in heaven, treasure stored up, crowns and thrones, wages paid in full. Those passages appeal to consequences. The result can feel like two moral psychologies sitting side by side.
Jesus may be attacking one kind of
consequentialism while retaining another? The Pharisee in Matthew 6 seeks status,
honor, prestige, admiration. Those are immediate social rewards, which causes
Jesus to warn: If that's what you wanted, you've got it. The phrase "they
have received their reward" is almost sarcastic. In that reading, Jesus is
not condemning all reward-seeking. He is condemning seeking the wrong reward. The
question is whether you desire human approval or God's kingdom? That softens
the tension but does not remove it.
A deeper interpretation – enter Augustine
and Aquinas. They basically say that Jesus is gradually educating desire
itself. At the beginning, people may obey from fear. Then from hope of reward. Then
from love. This is close to Aquinas's distinction between servile fear, imperfect
charity, perfect charity. Aquinas posits that the fear of hell as a motive for love is not
ideal, but it is better than indifference. It can be the beginning of moral
formation. The end is loving God for God's sake.
If perfect love is the goal, why continue
appealing to reward and punishment at all? Why not simply love the good because
it is good. That sounds closer to philosophers I love like Plato, Murdoch,
Weil, and Gaita. Of course, Jesus was not mainly a moral philosopher. He was
speaking as a Jewish prophet announcing judgment if we can trust Ehrman. The
atmosphere of Matthew is not the atmosphere of the Republic or the Nicomachean
Ethics. More in the world of the Old Testament prophets. A covenantal and apocalyptic world. The question is how we shall stand
when God judges? (not why is the Good worthy of love? This question becomes
central later, when Christianity encounters Greek philosophy.)
Perhaps there is a real tension between
two kinds of moral maturity within Matthew. It is like a child who asks what
will happen to it if it does this. The mature adult asks whether this is good. Matthew
contains language that addresses both. Sometimes Jesus speaks to fear,
sometimes to hope, sometimes to love. And sometimes – especially in the Sermon
on the Mount and the other parts that speak most deeply to me – he points
beyond both fear and reward toward a transformed heart.
Take Matthew 5:8: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. One can read this two ways. The simple reading: be pure and then you'll get a reward. But for Augustine purity of heart is already the beginning of seeing God. The reward is not something different from the purity; the purity is the beginning of the reward. That is the move the theologians I mentioned take.
Or I could connect this to Iris Murdoch, for whom moral growth consists in learning to attend to reality rather than to oneself. For Matthew's hypocrites, the self remains at the center: How do I appear? What do I gain? How am I judged? But in the pure heart, attention turns outward, toward God, reality, neighbor.
Does Matthew fully escape the
self-regarding framework he critiques, or does the Gospel contains an
unresolved tension between prophetic reward-and-punishment language and a
deeper vision of goodness loved for its own sake. That question is substantial
enough that Augustine, Aquinas, Lewis, Benedict, and von Balthasar can all be read
as attempts to answer it. When I read Matthew, I feel the tension.
New
Wine in Old Bottles?
According
to scholars like Ehrman and Martin, Matthew reflects the pressures of a
community of Jewishs-Christians around 80 A.D., after the destruction of the Temple.
Matthew's Gospel is not primarily an attack on Judaism but an argument within
Judaism. That is, it reflects a period in which different Jewish groups were
competing to define the future of Israel. Matthew's community and the emerging
Pharisaic-rabbinic movement both saw themselves as heirs of the biblical
tradition, accepted the authority of the Torah, and awaited God's final
vindication. The sharp criticisms of the Pharisees therefore arise not from a rejection
of Judaism – forgetting this, Matthew later became a source of antisemitism – but
from a dispute among people who shared many of the same assumptions and
concerns.
What Matthew criticizes is a tendency he perceives within the religious practice of his day: the danger that fidelity to the Law can become external, public, and self-regarding rather than inwardly transformative. Again and again Jesus shifts attention from visible conformity to the condition of the heart, from almsgiving, prayer, and fasting performed for recognition to acts done in secret; from avoiding murder to overcoming anger; from avoiding adultery to purity of desire; from meticulous observance to "the weightier matters of the Law," namely justice, mercy, and faithfulness. At the same time, Matthew retains the traditional Jewish language of law, judgment, reward, punishment, kingdom, and Messiah, yet reinterprets these concepts in increasingly radical ways. It like he is on the razor's edge of fulfilling the promise of the Torah or throwing it over for something true. Thus the tension of the so-called antitheses: for example, "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." (5:38-40) Is that fulfilling the Law or overturning it?
This tension is evident in Matthew's
treatment of reward and punishment, which is my theme here. On the one hand,
the Gospel retains the traditional language of heavenly rewards, final
judgment, and eternal consequences. On the other hand, Jesus repeatedly attacks
forms of religious behavior motivated by visible rewards such as prestige,
status, and public approval. The center of gravity shifts from the question,
"What will happen to me?" toward the question, "What kind of
person am I becoming?" Thus Matthew can be read as standing between two
moral visions. One remains rooted in the prophetic and apocalyptic language of
reward, punishment, and divine judgment; the other points toward a deeper ideal
in which goodness, purity, truth, and love are valued for their own sake. Later
Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Lewis would develop this
second strand by arguing that Heaven is not an external reward added to virtue
but the fulfillment of a life already oriented toward God, who is himself the
highest Good and the true source of human happiness. That is the only reading I
can accept.
Many of the central concepts inherited from Judaism are retained by Matthew but given a deeper and more universal significance. The Law is not only commandments but a call to purity of heart and the transformation of desire. The Kingdom of Heaven is no longer simply the future restoration and vindication of Israel but God's hidden and growing reign within human lives and history. The Messiah is not a political liberator or conquering king but the suffering servant who establishes his kingdom through self-sacrifice and love. Reward and punishment are no longer understood chiefly in terms of earthly blessing or retribution but are increasingly connected to one's relationship with God and the orientation of the heart. Even love itself is radicalized, extending beyond family, tribe, and neighbor to include enemies and persecutors. In each case Matthew preserves the traditional Jewish vocabulary while stretching its meaning beyond conventional expectations, transforming concepts rooted in covenant, law, and national hope into expressions of an inward, universal, and ultimately spiritual vision of God's purposes for humanity. Either bringing out the hidden meanings or overturning the concepts into radically new one.
And so back to the tension. Is Matthew pouring new wine in old bottles, or is his gospel, different as it is from Mark, Luke, and John, a new bottle for new wine? The question is whether Matthew's Gospel represents a sufficiently "new wineskin" for the vision of reality that is emerging in Jesus' teaching. This is of course Jesus’ own saying: “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved” (Matthew 9:17; also in Mark)
One way of answering the question would be
historical – Ehrman and Martin. To what extent does Matthew remain dependent
upon inherited Jewish categories such as Law, Messiah, Kingdom, judgment,
reward, punishment, covenant, and Israel? Clearly the dependence is enormous.
Matthew is far more embedded in these categories than John or Luke. If one focuses on language and imagery, one might conclude
that Matthew is indeed trying to express something radically new through
concepts inherited from Second Temple Judaism.
A second approach would be philosophical, which is my approach. Do the inherited concepts adequately express the deeper vision of goodness, purity of heart, enemy-love, and union with God that seems to emerge in the Sermon on the Mount? I am not sure. I would rely on the judgment of people who know more than I do. Still, for me the language of reward and punishment, kingdom and judgment, sit uneasily alongside the vision of goodness loved for its own sake. This is why later thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Lewis, Benedict XVI, and von Balthasar reinterpret these concepts. Their work may be understood as an attempt to reshape the bottles (or wineskins) so that they can better contain the wine.
A third approach – also Ehrman and Martin – would be to compare Matthew with the other Gospels. Mark remains more apocalyptic and paradoxical. Luke often emphasizes mercy, reversal, and the universal scope of salvation. John transforms almost everything into the language of life, light, truth, love, and abiding in Christ. In John's Gospel the movement toward a new conceptual framework is perhaps furthest advanced. Matthew stands in a more intermediate position. He retains the traditional Jewish framework while stretching it toward meanings that transcend it. Thus one possible historical-critical reading.
In any case, the old Jewish concepts are still present, but they are being reinterpreted from within by a vision centered on purity of heart, the inwardness of the Law, enemy-love, the suffering Messiah, and the Kingdom as participation in God's life. From the philosophical perspective of a MacIntyre or a Gadamer, that is exactly what one should expect. Traditions do not simply discard their concepts and invent new ones. They carry inherited language forward into new circumstances, discovering possibilities of meaning that were only partially visible before. The question is not whether Matthew abandons Judaism, but whether he - his portrayal of Christ - succeeds in revealing dimensions of Judaism that its earlier forms had not yet fully grasped. Perhaps because I am so steeped in Greek philosophy, and later theologians, the old concepts remain a barrier of sorts for me.
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