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Matthew’s Gospel revels in linking the Old Testament
to the New. A biblical scholar provides keys to
unlock this Gospel, which will be read on most
Sundays in year A.
A
Catholic ‘Key’
The
Biblical 'Type'
The
New Hidden in the Old
The
Promised Son
New
Moses, New Exodus
David's
Kingdom Comes (Again)
The
Kingdom's Keys
A
King's Reception
Written Text, Living Word
I was flush with the pride of discovery.
The paper I’d just presented to a doctoral seminar
on the Gospel of Matthew was important and original.
I was convinced of it.
Even the
grueling, two-and-a-half-hour session of questioning
by my professor and fellow students had left me—and
my thesis—unscathed.
I argued that Matthew’s account of Jesus giving
Peter the “keys to the kingdom” cites an obscure oracle of Isaiah about the
transfer of “the key of the House of David.”
What Jesus confers
upon Peter—namely, authority over his
Church—corresponds to what Isaiah’s king confers
upon Eliakim in making him prime minister of the
Davidic kingdom.
Earlier scholars, both Protestant and Catholic,
had noticed the Isaiah citation. And you don’t have to be a scholar to notice
that Matthew is filled with quotations, citations, allusions and echoes from the
Old Testament.
I felt I had a fresh insight, however, in seeing
how the citation helps us understand
Matthew’s meaning and Jesus’ intention. As I saw it,
the passage depicts Jesus as the new Davidic king
and the Church as the restored
kingdom of
David.
A
Catholic 'Key'
It was this conclusion
and others like it that eventually led me to become
a Catholic.
It wasn’t long after I entered the Church that I
encountered these biblical passages again—in a setting I was hardly expecting.
It happened one day at
Mass. The first reading was taken from Isaiah 22, the
same obscure oracle I’d studied in such detail for my paper. Now,
that’s an interesting coincidence, I thought. A few minutes later, the
priest proclaimed the Gospel: Matthew 16—Jesus giving the keys to Peter!
What were the odds of those two Scriptures being read at the same Mass? I
asked myself. At the time, I was learning a lot of things about being a
Catholic, including how the Church’s liturgy worked. I felt as if I’d hit some
kind of lectionary lottery.
Only later did I discover that the readings we
hear at Mass aren’t chosen by holy happenstance. My innovative interpretation of
Matthew 16 was one that Catholics had been hearing in the liturgy for years.
The
Biblical 'Type'
In the nearly 20 years since I became a Catholic,
I’ve had this experience again and again in the liturgy.
Sunday after Sunday, the Church gives us a pattern
of biblical interpretation, showing us how the promises of the Old Testament are
fulfilled in the New Testament. It’s no wonder the Church does it this way. The
Church learned this from the New Testament writers, who learned it from Jesus.
The evangelists understood the Old Testament as salvation
history, the patient unfolding of
God’s gracious and merciful plan to fashion the human race into a family of God
that worships and dwells with him.
Some early believers wanted to throw out the Old
Testament as irrelevant. But those people were quickly branded as heretics. For
the early Church,
Israel’s story was their family story.
The words and deeds, historical figures and events
in the Old Testament concealed deeper layers of meaning, meanings only fully
revealed with the coming of Jesus.
The
flood and Noah’s ark were “types” or signs to
prepare us to understand the saving work of Baptism
and the Church. The manna God gave the Israelites in
the desert was also a “type” of the true bread from
heaven that God would give us in the Eucharist.
The Catechism
of the Catholic Church calls
this way of reading “typology” (see #128-130; 1094-1095). Typology is the
guiding principle the Church uses in selecting the readings we hear at
Mass.
As the
Pontifical Biblical Commission said in its important
1993 document, The
Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, “By
regularly associating a text of the Old Testament
with the text of the Gospel, the cycle often
suggests a scriptural interpretation moving in the
direction of typology.”
The New Hidden in the Old
All this is important to keep in mind as we now
begin to read Matthew’s Gospel Sunday by Sunday over the course of the new
Liturgical Year (Cycle A).
With Matthew, we have a master of typology.
Matthew’s Gospel is a prime example of what
St. Augustine was talking about when he said that the New
Testament is concealed in the Old and the Old Testament is revealed in the New.
You can’t read Matthew without having your ear
tuned to the Old Testament, from which he quotes or to which he alludes four or
five times per chapter, more than 100 times in his Gospel.
Matthew writes this way because he wants his
fellow Israelites to see that their covenant with God has been fulfilled in
Jesus. Get used to words like “fulfill” and “fulfillment”! You’re going to hear
them repeatedly in Matthew’s Gospel.
On the Fourth Sunday of Advent, for instance,
Matthew explains how Mary is found with child: “All this took place to fulfill what
the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall be with child
and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel”
(Matthew
1:22-23).
(All
citations in this article are from Matthew, unless
otherwise noted.)
Again, on Palm Sunday, when Jesus is arrested in
the garden, he says: “But all this has come to pass that the writings of the
prophets may be fulfilled” (26:56).
The
Promised Son
The numerous fulfillments Matthew tells us about
are intended to signal one thing: In Jesus, God is finally delivering on the
promises he made throughout salvation history.
Matthew announces this in his very first line,
which we hear in the Christmas Vigil Mass: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus
Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (1:1).
In this one sentence, Matthew drops four critical
Old Testament references and he expects his readers—including you and me—to get
them.
First, the word we translate as “genealogy” is genesis, the
Greek word for “creation” and, of course, the name of the Bible’s first book.
Matthew also evokes God’s covenants with Abraham and David, both of which
involved a promise of divinely given sons.
At the dawn of salvation history, God made his
covenant with Abraham, promising him an heir whose descendants would be as
countless as the stars in the sky, a chosen people through whom God would bestow
his blessings on all the earth
(see
Genesis 22:16-18).
Centuries later, when the
descendants of Abraham had become a mighty kingdom,
God made a climactic covenant with David, his
handpicked and anointed king.
By an “eternal
covenant,” God promised that David’s son would be
his own son and that he would reign forever, not
only over
Israel,
but also over all the nations.
(To read more about the
Davidic covenant, see
2 Samuel 7:8-16;
23:5;
Psalms 2:7-8 and
72:8,
11.)
In effect, God’s covenant
with David is a promise to finally fulfill his
covenant with Abraham—making Abraham’s descendants,
gathered into the kingdom ruled by David’s son, the
everlasting source of blessings for all the world.
Unfortunately,
David’s kingdom crumbled and the people were swept
away into exile about 400 years after David died.
This “Babylonian exile” is the turning point in
Matthew’s genealogy. He repeats the phrase four
times so we don’t miss it (1:11 and 12, and twice in
verse 17).
This is his way
of showing us that Jesus is the Christ (Messiah in
Hebrew) the prophets had hoped for, the new son of
David who would liberate Israel from its enemies,
restore the lost sheep to the house of Israel and
establish a new covenant that would embrace all
nations.
(For background on
some of these prophecies, see
Isaiah 2:2-3;
7:14;
9:1-7;
11:1-5,10;
42:6;
55:3-5;
Jeremiah 23:5-6;
31:31-34;
32:36-41;
Ezekiel 16:59-63;
34:24-30;
37:23-28.)
[Also see notes from NAB]
In that first sentence,
Matthew gives us a summary of his Gospel and the
entire New Testament. It is a book about the new
world created by Jesus; the Christ sent to fulfill
God’s ancient covenant promises to David and
Abraham.
.
New
Moses, New Exodus
In showing us how Jesus fulfills God’s promises,
Matthew wants us to see the connections between his life and that of the first
great deliverer of Israel,
Moses.
Especially in his early
chapters, Matthew wants you to hear lots of familiar
echoes: What figure before Jesus is born under
threat of death, facing a tyrannical ruler who has
decreed that all firstborn Hebrew males are to be
killed? What other figure in salvation history is
saved by family members and remains in exile until
those seeking his life are dead?
(To compare the stories,
read
Matthew 2:13-20 and
Exodus 1:15-16;
2:1-10;
4:19.) Not once in all this does Matthew say,
“Jesus’ early life looks a lot like Moses’.” He
doesn’t have to.
This understanding of Jesus
as a “new Moses” continues throughout Matthew’s
Gospel.
As
Israel
passed through the waters of the
Red Sea as God’s beloved son, Jesus too
passes through water in his Baptism and is also
called God’s Son. (Compare
Matthew 3:17 with
Exodus 4:22.) As
Israel
left the waters to be tested in the desert for 40
years, following his Baptism Jesus was immediately
driven into the wilderness to be tested for 40 days
and 40 nights.
When you hear the story of
Jesus’ testing by the devil on the First Sunday of
Lent, be sure to notice how his temptations
correspond to
Israel’s in the
wilderness (see
Matthew 4:1-11).
First, Jesus is tempted by
hunger, which had caused
Israel
to grumble against God. Then he is dared to put God
to the test, to question God’s care for him. This
recalls the Israelites’ testing of God at Meribah
and Massah.
Finally, he is tempted to
worship a false god, which
Israel
actually did in creating the golden calf. (To read
about
Israel’s
temptations, see
Exodus 16:1-13;
17:1-6;
32:1-35.)
Notice also that each time
Jesus rebukes the devil, he quotes Moses. Each quote
is carefully chosen from a key section in the Book
of Deuteronomy in which Moses warns the people to
learn a lesson from their unfaithfulness in the
desert. (Compare Jesus’ words to
Deuteronomy 6:12-16;
8:3.)
As Moses climbed a mountain
to bring the people the Law of God and the covenant,
Jesus climbs a “mount” and delivers a new Law and a
new covenant. Moses commanded the Israelites to
commemorate God’s covenant in the Passover
celebration (see Exodus 12).
Jesus institutes a new
Passover, the Eucharist. As Moses sealed the Old
Covenant with the blood of sacrificial animals,
Jesus seals the New Covenant with his own blood, and
even quotes Moses’ words: “This is the blood of my
covenant.” (Compare
Matthew 26:28 and
Exodus 24:8.)
Matthew sees Jesus leading a
new Exodus: this time, not from a political tyrant
whose armies are drowned in the sea, but from sin
and death, which are destroyed in the waters of
Baptism.
It can’t be stressed enough
that, for Matthew, this is salvation history, not
literary allusion. Matthew isn’t writing a clever
story designed to evoke memories of Moses and the
Exodus. Matthew, like all devout Jews of the time,
believed that God’s saving words and deeds in the
past formed a kind of template for what God would
say and do to save
Israel
in the future.
Moses himself had promised
that a prophet like him would one day arise (see
Deuteronomy 18:15). And the prophets
increasingly talked about a “new exodus” that would
return the scattered Israelites and bring them to
Zion for a great festal gathering with all the
nations (see
Isaiah 10:25-27;
11:15-16;
43:2,16-19;
51:9-11;
Jeremiah 23:7-8;
31:31-33).
Matthew sees Jesus doing the
same things that Mark and Luke saw him doing. But in
writing his account, he wants us to see how in doing
these things, Jesus is fulfilling God’s promises.
David's Kingdom Comes (Again)
As Jesus moves closer to
Jerusalem, Matthew shows us a different Old Testament
pattern emerging in the life of Jesus. Actually, from the very start, he has
told us that he believes Jesus to be the new Son of David and restorer of the
Davidic kingdom.
On the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Jesus
announces “the kingdom” for the first time. Matthew adds a curious detail—that
Jesus is in Galilee, in the region of Zebulun
and Naphtali (4:13).
Why do we need to know that? Because that’s where David’s
kingdom started to crumble, when Assyria
invaded this very region some 700 years earlier (see 2 Kings 15:29).
Isaiah predicted God
would begin restoring the fallen kingdom precisely
where its disintegration began. And Matthew sees
Jesus fulfilling this prophecy (see Matthew 4:12-17
and Isaiah 9:1-2, 7).
That’s why, when we hear this
Gospel on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, we’ll
also hear the reading from Isaiah.
The Kingdom's Keys
Perhaps the pivot of the Gospel is Matthew 16—the
scene that kept me up nights as a doctoral student—the giving of “the keys” to
Peter. As Catholics, we’ve all heard the story. But we need to listen to it
again in a “Davidic key.”
Simon’s confession that Jesus is “the Christ, the
Son of the Living God” brings together the most important titles the prophets
and psalmists had used to describe the promised son of David. He was to be the
“anointed one” (“the Christ”) and “the Son of God” (see Psalm 2:2, 7; 89:27; 2
Samuel 7:14).
Jesus changes Simon’s
name to Peter (Greek for “rock”), and tells him:
“Upon this rock I will build my Church” (16:18).
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had spoken of “a
wise man who built his house on rock” (7:24). This was a subtle reference to
Solomon, who was revered for his wisdom (see 1 Kings 3:10-12) and who built the
Temple on a rock (see 1 Kings 5:31; 7:10). Matthew sees
Jesus as the new Solomon, the new Son of David, building a new spiritual
temple—his Church—on the “rock” of Peter’s faith.
As Isaiah had foretold, the keys of David’s
kingdom would be given to a new royal steward or prime minister. Isaiah promised
that this prime minister would be a father over
Jerusalem and would have full authority: What “he opens,
no one shall shut.” So Jesus gives Peter the keys and the power to “bind” and
“loose.” (For Isaiah’s prophecy, see Isaiah 22:20-24).
A
King's Reception
When Jesus finally
reaches
Jerusalem, Matthew paints us
a picture that looks a lot like the Old Testament
scene of the anointing and crowning of David’s son
Solomon. (Compare Matthew 21:1-11 and 1 Kings
1:38-45.)
In case we don’t get
the subtle allusions he makes, Matthew depicts the
crowd crying out to Jesus as the “Son of David.”
And the drama in Matthew’s final pages turns on
whether Jesus is in fact the Davidic Messiah. Note how often the Davidic
phrases—“Son of David,” “Son of God” and “King of the Jews”—appear in these
pages.
Matthew leaves no doubt where he stands. In the
last scene of his Gospel he depicts Jesus as the king’s heir. As God had
promised to David, Jesus is the Son of God, given “all power” over “all nations”
until the “end of the age” (28:18-20).
Matthew’s Gospel of fulfillment is complete: Jesus
is the long-awaited Son of David and Son of God. His Church is the restored
Kingdom of David,
which will be the font of blessing for all nations—fulfilling the covenant that
God made with Abraham at the dawn of salvation history.
Written
Text, Living Word
With Jesus’ parting words, “I am with you always,”
Matthew points us back to the first of his Old Testament fulfillments—that the
Messiah’s name would be Emmanuel or
“God is with us.”
The divine mission has been accomplished, he is
telling us. God’s plan for history has been realized. Jesus has taught us to
pray to God as our Father and has given us the means of becoming beloved sons
and daughters in Baptism. And in the Eucharist and the Church, he is with us
always.
This is what God desired from the first pages of
the Old Testament, when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day—to
dwell with his people that all might share in the divine presence.
We hear God’s desire
in one of the most beautiful Davidic prophecies:
Ezekiel’s promise of a new King David to rule the
nations by an “everlasting covenant” in which God
would dwell with his people forever (see Ezekiel
37:24-28).
This is the promise Matthew sees fulfilled in the
paschal mystery of Christ. But this divine fulfillment is not one of termination
but of continuation.
Salvation history continues in the liturgy, which
we celebrate at Christ’s command. In this sacred memorial, the sacred words of
Scripture perform a sacred deed—changing bread and wine into his Body and Blood.
“Written text thus
becomes living Word,” as the Pontifical Biblical
Commission has said so well. By this living Word
proclaimed in the liturgy, your life story and mine
are joined to the story of salvation begun in the
Scriptures.
I learned this by surprise as a new Catholic. You
can relive my “discovery” on the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time when the Liturgy
of the Word again pairs the reading of Isaiah 22 with Matthew 16.
But we
can all share in this dynamic experience every
Sunday, as we hear the Old Testament revealed in the
New, as the written text is once more made living
Word.
Dr. Scott Hahn
is the author of more than a dozen books, including
A Father Who Keeps His
Promise: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture;
Swear to God: The
Power and Promise of Sacraments (Doubleday).
He is founder and
president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical
Theology, (www.SalvationHistory.com).
Additionally, consider the notes
below from NAB
[ Notes from NAB:
“* [Isaiah 7:14] Isaiah’s sign seeks to
reassure Ahaz that he need not fear the invading
armies of Syria and Israel in the light of God’s
promise to David (2 Sm 7:12–16). The oracle follows
a traditional announcement formula by which the
birth and sometimes naming of a child is promised to
particular individuals (Gn 16:11; Jgs 13:3).
“The young woman: Hebrew ‘almah designates
a young woman of marriageable age without specific
reference to virginity. The Septuagint translated
the Hebrew term as parthenos, which normally does
mean virgin, and this translation underlies Mt 1:23.
“Emmanuel: the name means “with us is
God.” Since for the Christian the incarnation is the
ultimate expression of God’s willingness to “be with
us,” it is understandable that this text was
interpreted to refer to the birth of Christ.
“* [Mt 27:9–10] Cf. Mt 26:15. Matthew’s
attributing this text to Jeremiah is puzzling, for
there is no such text in that book, and the thirty
pieces of silver thrown by Judas “into the temple”
(Mt 27:5) recall rather Zec 11:12–13.
“It is usually said that the attribution
of the text to Jeremiah is due to Matthew’s
combining the Zechariah text with texts from
Jeremiah that speak of a potter (Jer 18:2–3), the
buying of a field (Jer 32:6–9), or the breaking of a
potter’s flask at Topheth in the valley of Ben-Hinnom
with the prediction that it will become a burial
place (Jer 19:1–13).]
“*
[Mt 2:13] Flee to Egypt: Egypt was a traditional
place of refuge for those fleeing from danger in
Palestine (see 1 Kgs 11:40; Jer 26:21), but the main
reason why the child is to be taken to Egypt is that
he may relive the Exodus experience of Israel.
“*
[Mt 2:15] The fulfillment citation is taken from Hos
11:1. Israel, God’s son, was called out of Egypt at
the time of the Exodus; Jesus, the Son of God, will
similarly be called out of that land in a new
exodus.
The father-son relationship between God and the
nation is set in a higher key. Here the son is not a
group adopted as “son of God,” but the child who, as
conceived by the holy Spirit, stands in unique
relation to God. He is son of David and of Abraham,
of Mary and of Joseph, but, above all, of God.]
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Prophecies Fulfilled by
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