This article was first published in Jan 2009

The Jews had been dreaming for a long time, about six hundred years in fact. Since Jerusalem was razed by the Babylonians and her elite carried off into exile, the imagination of the children of Israel had been reaching far beyond her continual oppression into the hope of a glorious future. An empire with its centre in Jerusalem; the Temple as a beacon to which all the nations would journey to bow in submission to Yahweh. The Babylonians (and then the Persians, and then Greeks, then Syrians, then Romans) would be overthrown by the Lord’s Messiah. The kingdom of heaven would reign.

It was Passover festival in Jerusalem and Jews from all over the Empire had travelled to the holy city for the occasion. There’s a commotion. Out goes the cry ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ The heir to the throne is here to take his rightful place; a king has come to herald this new dawn. The crowds heave to see the Messiah; eyes and ears strain to detect the sound of his army. And they hear the cheers, and the ‘clip clop’ of hooves. The chosen one has come, riding on a baby donkey!

This is genuine comedy. Proper comedy. Subversive comedy. The city is taken up in the rumours of a revolution. But the one ‘like a child’ enters not the palace of the Roman governor to overthrow his rule, but the Temple to overthrow its oppression. People line the streets to welcome a ruler and the children cheer their hero. In the temple courts they dance and sing as injustice is undone and liberation comes to the lowly. But Rome is still intact; Pilate has not even been disturbed. It is the Jewish obsession with division, with power, with control, with men, old men, old educated men with wealth and ‘moral authority,’ which gets overturned by the laughing Jesus, and his entourage of little people.

Back down the bottom of the Temple mount, Jesus turns once again to his disciples. You can tell this mountain where to go, he assures them.

Inside the Temple courts Jesus takes on the Sadducees and Pharisees and their testing questions. But he also develops a key theme for Matthew’s gospel: the time for weeding the community clean is not now. The Son of Man will return and do his ‘triumphal entry’ properly and then the King will judge the sheep from the goats, throw the unclothed wedding guests outside, ignore the distracted virgins, and punish those vineyard workers who attacked his son; Caesar will be able to keep what is Caesar’s but God will save what truly belongs to God.

Matthew is falling over himself to get his readers to understand what his Jesus is saying. The communities to which he wrote were living in the midst of a political and religious turmoil not seen since the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. Rome had finally crushed Jewish rebellion and burned down the great second Temple, the majestic monument Jerusalem had boasted for almost five hundred years. Repressive persecution was rife and Jewish-Christian communities lived in fear of their lives. The temptation to witch-hunt possible traitors and to withdraw in closed cells must have been overwhelming. But Matthew’s Jesus urges patience; those who follow Jesus can trust him to make good on his judgement. The Jews will shout ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ again (23:39). And next time it will be for real. For now, however, they must wait, vigilant.

It’s at this point in Matthew’s gospel that I find myself slowly stroking my chin and peering suspiciously at the text. Because I’m starting to see a disconnect between Matthew’s account and the older gospel to which I think he responds: Mark. My take on this – and I should say that it’s not a very conventional view – is that Mathew read Mark’s gospel and couldn’t accept his conclusion (or lack of it – more of that in a few weeks) and so attempted to write a similar version with some crucial factors altered. This ‘coming of the Son of Man’ is the most fundamental, because it betrays Matthew’s true belief about what the Kingdom of Heaven is really like, and indeed what God is like.

It’s all about the end; where is this headed? It’s much easier to be radically sacrificial when you believe that there’s a 'power' out there who will come and right everything soon. It’s easier to be powerless when the God of ‘shock and awe’ is there right behind with his big guns. That’s not to say that Matthew’s Jesus isn’t radical; he is. His gospel calls for a new way of being Jewish that doesn’t play to revolutionary violence or religious oppression. But he doesn’t give up the dream for a Son of David on the throne of Israel. Matthew’s kingdom of heaven is a future kingdom, albeit a near-future one, established during ‘this generation’ (24:34 – note also the nod to the reader in 24:15, the unmistakable reference to the Roman destruction of the Temple). It is the last who will enter first and the rich who will find the door too small, but it is a real and tangible kingdom that will be established by the coming of the Son of Man, in power (24:30).

Apart from the fact that Matthew’s promise of Jesus’ return on the clouds for those tested by Roman oppression never materialised (I find it a bit weird that we never like to mention that), it asks a fundamental question of all those who talk about justice. Because the message of Matthew – as I read it – is to wait for justice, as it is God’s and he will judge, making all things fair in his time. But what of us humans, made in his image? Do we not shape our lives to emulate the God we worship? Does it really work to praise a judge on the one hand but live like a prisoner? If we follow a Jesus who will soon get to banish some to hell will we not find ourselves in his footsteps?

Matthew has drawn us into a story of profound questions. Questions to ask of our society and of our own lives, of power and control and wealth and religion. But he also provokes big questions of God: who is the king of the kingdom of heaven and when will it come into being? In the courtyard with the dancing children, it's hard not to believe that laughter could save us.