Through the Flaming Sword

What Was Matthew trying to say?

RECAP: I’ve been exploring in recent posts the various levels of intention and meaning in Matthew 18:14–20, and especially Jesus’s promise to guarantee the church’s authority in dealing with conflict in the church with his “presence” in verse 20, from which we get the phrase “gathered meeting”. In this and in the previous post, I’m looking at the passage from the perspective of the timeframes in which we could read it: in the time of Jesus, in the time of Matthew, and in our own time.

Matthew writes for a community that believed in Jesus’s resurrection, or at least for a community that he feels should believe, one that perhaps needs reassurance. Matthew’s account of the resurrection, with its posted guards and the chief priests’ cover up of the event with the disinformation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’s body, seems designed to counter rumors to that effect, especially since neither Luke nor John mention this story.

So, like us, Matthew and his readers could have thought that Jesus in 18:20 might have been speaking about gatherings taking place after his death, that he might be promising to appear among them as the resurrected Christ somehow.

However, there’s no hint of such a projection in time in the actual wording of the passage; it seems very present tense. Jesus doesn’t say “there I will be” in your midst; he says “there I am.”

And the passage might be a part of Q, the collection of sayings from which Matthew and Luke drew to add sayings material to their narrative gospels. Furthermore, Matthew 18:14–20 is in the instruction form of Q sayings, like much of the Sermon on the Mount. These instruction sayings formed the original core of Q, according to some scholars. That instruction core may be the earliest look we have at the very early Jesus movement.

On the other hand, Matthew 18:14–20 sits in the middle of a whole chapter on the theme of forgiveness in a tone that might suggest a milieu in which Jesus’s followers are facing the problems of a mature community dealing with managing members’ behavior. Like the 1660s and’70s in the history of the Quaker movement with its beginnings of “gospel order”, rather than the wild and sometimes chaotic 1650s.

I think that this reinforces the conclusion that Matthew is giving us a Q saying that comes out of the living ministry of Jesus and is not necessarily a projection into the future of a promise of a resurrection presence. But he’s put this material together in a way that speaks in a coherent way to the concerns of his own community.

At the same time, Matthew 18:20, with its use of some kind of “name” theology, is hinting at a more mystical, or metaphysical, dimension that reflects the reality of Jesus’s death and the hope of the resurrection.

So we’ll dive into that “name theology” in the next post.

Tagged: bible, faith, Jesus