Matthew Annual Bible Study
Living as Disciples of Jesus

Imagine how impoverished our understanding of Jesus Christ and the mission of his church would be without the Gospel of Matthew. We would not have roughly half of our cherished Christmas stories; we would not know about Joseph’s adopting Jesus as his own son, or that Jesus was—is—“Emmanuel, God with us” (Matt 1:20-25). We would not have the enchanting story of the mysterious wise men’s journey from a faraway land to Bethlehem (2:1-12).

Without Matthew, we would miss that towering summary of Jesus’ teachings, the “Sermon on the Mount,” which characterizes the church as “the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and a city set on a hill” (5:13-16); calls us to build our lives on the solid foundation of hearing and doing the “words of Jesus” (Matt 7:24-27); and gives us the version of the Lord’s Prayer we most often say in worship (6:9-13). We would not have Jesus’ firm but gentle challenge for us not to “worry about our lives, what we will eat or drink or about our bodies, what we will wear” (6:25), but instead to “strive first for God’s kingdom and righteousness,” confident that all the things we most need will be “given to us as well” (6:33).

Matthew is the only Gospel in which the word church appears. Following Peter’s surprising confession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus says, “You are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (16:18). Only in Matthew does Jesus spell out guidelines for reconciliation among “members of the church” (18:15-20), promising his presence as we do that often hard but holy work: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

It is in Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus tells us that “whatever we do to the least of these” we do also to him (25:31-46), and only in Matthew do we have a fully formed statement of the “Great Commission” to “make disciples of all nations” (28:18-20). Our understanding of Jesus and the Christian life would be greatly diminished without Matthew’s Gospel.

For centuries, the church has known that we need all four Gospels in order to have an accurate image of Jesus and an adequate perception of the mission and ministry of the church. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a “Gospel quartet”: they all sing the song of good news, but none of them sings the same notes. Without all of them, the song would be jarring and incomplete. The Gospel of Matthew, like each of the other three Gospels, bears an indispensably unique witness to the person of Jesus and the purposes of his church.

The Gospel of Matthew has one overarching purpose: to present Jesus to us so vividly that we feel ourselves compellingly called to live as his disciples and are led to confess him to be “Messiah, Son of God.” This Gospel intends to shape its readers into devoted followers of Jesus, who “hear his words and act on them” (7:24-27) and who respond obediently to his commission to “go and make disciples of all nations” (28:18-20). With both artistic skill and spiritual wisdom, Matthew’s story of Jesus challenges our minds, inspires our imaginations, and stirs our hearts. If we will read this Gospel receptively and ponder it prayerfully, we will find ourselves seized by the same amazement that grasped many of the people who encountered Jesus in the first century. We will be “astounded at his teaching” (7:28), touched by his compassion (9:36), convinced that he was and is “God’s Son” (27:54), and summoned into the community of his followers (4:18-22).

Like the other three New Testament Gospels, Matthew is not, strictly speaking, a “biography” of Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel does more than assiduously collect and artlessly recount historical events in a strict chronological sequence with no higher purpose than offering “the facts” about Jesus. Instead, Matthew invites us into an interpretive reflection on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, a reflection that claims that while Jesus is a historical figure, Jesus ultimately transcends, judges, and redeems history. In other words, what Matthew gives us is not biography but Christology—an exploration and interpretation of the significance of Jesus Christ.

Jack Dean Kingsbury says, “For Matthew, Jesus is preeminently the Messiah, the Son of God.”1 The opening chapter of Matthew patiently unfolds the story of how Jesus becomes, by means of Joseph’s adoption (1:20), “a son of Abraham and a son of David” (1:1) and how Jesus was also the “son of God,” having been conceived “by the Holy Spirit” in Mary’s womb. Then, near the midpoint of the Gospel, in a statement that summarizes Matthew’s understanding of Jesus, Peter boldly confesses, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (16:16). And toward the end of the Gospel, as Jesus dies on the cross, the centurion who oversaw the crucifixion confesses, “Truly, this man was God’s Son” ( 27:54).

Matthew also wanted to support the leadership of the Apostle Peter among those who confessed Jesus as God’s Messiah and Son. From Galatians, we know of a conflict between the Apostles Paul and Peter (see Gal 2, especially v. 11) over the conditions that would govern the inclusion of Gentiles in the church. The flashpoint of the tension between Paul and Peter was at Antioch, where Peter had emerged as the church’s central leader. (Eventually, second-century Christians referred to Peter as the “bishop of Antioch.”) When Matthew listed the names of the “twelve apostles,” he said, “These are the names of the twelve apostles: first Simon, also known as Peter” (Matt 10:3). Matthew added first to Mark’s account (see Mark 3:16), and the addition highlights Matthew’s affirmation of Peter’s leadership in the early church, especially Antioch.

Rudolf Schnackenburg believes that Matthew’s story of Jesus’ walking across stormy waters toward his frightened disciples in a wave-tossed boat (14:28-31) presents Peter as “the paradigm of faith and doubt.”2 On the one hand, Peter risked stepping out of the boat to move toward Jesus; on the other, he was distracted from Jesus by the upheaval and chaos that raged around him. Sinking in the water, Peter’s cry for help is also the continuing prayer of the church: “Lord, save me!” (14:30). Throughout his Gospel, Matthew unhesitatingly describes Peter’s capacity for bluster (26:33-35) and denial (26:69-75).3 Nonetheless, Peter was the disciple to whom God first revealed Jesus’ identity as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (16:16). Matthew records (though Mark and Luke do not) Jesus’ affirmation of Peter’s confession: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (16:17). Jesus also identified Peter as “the rock” on which he would build his church (16:18) and as the bearer of unique authority (“the keys,” 16:19) in the Christian community. The nature and extent of Peter’s authority became (and continues to be) a cause of debate, controversy, and schism between Catholics and Protestants; however, to acknowledge the vital importance of Peter in the early church, especially Matthew’s church in Antioch, is not to take sides in that irresolvable debate. At least until the ascendancy of the Apostle Paul among Gentile Christians, Peter was the pivotal leader of the first-century Christian movement. Whatever the later uses and misuses of Matthew’s presentation of Peter, Matthew underscored his important early leadership in the community of Jesus’ disciples.

Matthew, then, intended to shape members of his community into devoted disciples of Jesus—people like Peter, who, in spite of their doubts and denials, kept following Jesus. In the Great Commission (28:16-20), the primary work Jesus assigned his followers was to “make disciples of all nations” by “baptizing them” (leading people to the kind of faith in Jesus Christ which baptism seals and symbolizes) and “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” A concern for the formation of faithful disciples pervades Matthew’s Gospel. Though the crowds overheard and were astonished by the wisdom and authority Jesus displayed in the Sermon on the Mount (7:28-29), the disciples were the primary audience for it (5:1). Jesus sought to shape his followers into people who were like “the wise man” he described at the end of Sermon on the Mount: “Everyone, then, who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on the house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock” (7:24-25). A mature disciple of Jesus is one who listens receptively to his words and then puts them into practice in the conduct of everyday life.

In Matthew 10, Jesus prepares his disciples for a brief “mission trip,” an opportunity for them to do the kinds of things they have seen him doing (narrated in Matt 8–9). At the heart of that training session, Jesus offered this brief and compelling description of discipleship: “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master. It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master” (10:24-25). To be a disciple of Jesus is to be engaged in a process of becoming progressively more like him.

In Matthew 16, following Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus spelled out the terms of discipleship: “If any want to become my followers [disciples], let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (16:24-25). Disciples of Jesus lose their lives—they set aside the definitions and images that have given them their identity—in favor of the authentic life Jesus offers—a life defined by the will and way of God and shaped in the image of Jesus.

In summary: Matthew’s dominant purpose was to shape a community of people who would live their lives as faithful disciples of Jesus—guided by the words and deeds of Jesus, led by people like Peter—and confess Jesus to be “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God” (16:16).

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