The very first verse suggests the nature of the Gospel—"The book of the generation" (i.e. the genealogical tree) "of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." This "book" includes the first 17 verses of the Gospel. While St. Luke traces the genealogy of our Lord back to Adam, the head of the human race, St. Matthew desires to show that our Lord, as the son of Abraham, is the child of promise in whom all the families of the earth shall be blessed, and, as the son of David, {43} is heir to the kingdom of spiritual Israel. The genealogy is partly based on that of the Greek version of 1 Chron. i.-iii., and is intended to teach certain special truths. It is arranged so as to be a kind of summary of the history of the people of God, each group of 14 names ending with a crisis. Jesus is the flower and fulfilment of that history. It furnishes a reply to Jewish critics. They would say that Jesus could not be Messiah unless Joseph, his supposed father, was descended from David. St. Matthew shows that St. Joseph was of Davidic descent. Again, the Jews would say that in any case the Messiah would not be likely to be connected with a humble carpenter and his folk. The evangelist's reply is that David himself was descended from comparatively undistinguished men and from women who were despised. Thus St. Matthew meets both points raised by the Jews.
Of recent years another criticism has been passed on this pedigree of our Lord. A copy of the Old Syriac version of the Gospels, discovered at Sinai and published in 1894, says that Joseph begat Jesus, and in this way denies that Jesus was born of a pure virgin. Some writers who wish to believe that our Lord was brought into the world in the same manner as ourselves, have said that this Syriac version represents what was actually the fact. There is, however, no reason for believing anything of the kind. There is no ground for the notion that the Syriac genealogy was taken from a primitive Jewish register. It is merely a translation of the Greek, probably from some Western Greek manuscript which had "Joseph begat Jesus." When the evangelist wrote the genealogy, he can only have meant that Joseph was by Jewish law regarded as the father of Jesus; for his whole narrative of our Lord's infancy assumes that He was born of a virgin mother. The truth that our Lord was born miraculously is asserted by St. Luke as well as by St. Matthew. It is assumed by St. Paul, when he argues that the second Adam was free from the taint of sin which affected the rest of the first Adam's descendants. It {44} was also cherished from the earliest times in every part of the Christian world where the teaching of the apostles was retained, and was only denied by a few heretics who had openly rejected the teaching of the New Testament on other subjects.
Connected with the representation of Jesus as the Messiah is the record of His continual teaching about the "kingdom of heaven." The "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" signifies the reign and influence of God. The meaning of it is best expressed by the words in the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth" (Matt. vi. 10). The second petition explains the first. The kingdom comes in proportion as the righteous will of our loving Father is done among men. The kingdom therefore includes the influence of God in the heart of the believer, or in great movements in the world, or in the organization and growth of His Church (xvi. 18; xviii. 17). The kingdom has both a present and a future aspect. In xii. 28 our Lord says to His hearers that it "is come upon you," and in xxi. 31 He speaks of people who were entering into it at the time. But the night before He died He spoke of it as still future (xxvi. 29). It is plain that He taught that it was already present, though its consummation is yet to come. The kingdom is spiritual, "not of this world," it is universal, for though the Jews were "the sons of the kingdom" (viii. 12) by privilege, it is free to others. The worst sinner might come in (xxi. 31), if he came with repentance, humility, and purity of heart. The teaching of Christ with regard to the kingdom was based upon an idea of God's personal rule, which runs through nearly all the Old Testament, beginning with the Books of Samuel and revealing itself in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel. But our Lord's teaching is original and distinctive. And it is more distant from the popular Jewish idea of a Hebrew counterpart to the Roman empire than the east is distant from the west.
Nowhere else is our Lord shown to have given such an unmistakable sanction to the Law. It is here only that we {45} read, "Think not that I came to destroy the Law, or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil" (v. 17).[10] Here, too, we find an allusion to the observance of the sabbath after the Ascension (xxiv. 20), a temporary prohibition of preaching to the Gentiles and Samaritans (x. 5), and the statement of our Lord, "I was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (xv. 24). Most remarkable of all is the direction to obey the scribes and Pharisees (xxiii. 3). On the other hand, there is a rigorous denunciation of the rabbinical additions to the Jewish Law. Mercy is preferable to sacrifice (xii. 7), the Son of man is Lord of the sabbath (xii. 8), moral defilement does not come from a failure to observe ceremonial (xv. 11), the kingdom will be transferred to a more faithful nation (xxi. 43), even the strangers from the east and the west (viii. 11), the Gospel will be for all people (xxiv. 14), and the scribes and Pharisees are specially denounced (xxiii. 13).
It has been said that there is an absolute opposition between these two classes of sayings; that either Jesus contradicted Himself, or the evangelist drew from one source which was of a Judaizing character, and from another source which taught St. Paul's principle of justification by faith versus justification by the Law. But the same divine paradox of truth which we find in Matt. runs through most of the New Testament, and is found plainly in St. Paul. In the Epistle where he exposes the failure of contemporary Judaism most remorselessly, he asserts that "we establish the Law." The true inner meaning of the divine revelation granted in the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ. Not only so, but Christ Himself was "the servant of the circumcision," living "under the Law." The limits which He imposed upon His own ministry (xv. 24) and that of His apostles (x. 5) were entirely fitting until Christ at His resurrection laid aside all that was peculiarly Jewish with its limits and humiliations.
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ANALYSIS[11]
The infancy of our Lord: i. 1-ii. 23.—Genealogy from Abraham, announcement to Joseph, birth, visit of Magi, flight into Egypt, massacre of innocents, settlement at Nazareth.
A.
Winter A.D. 26 till after Pentecost 27.