This article was first published in Jan 2009

What an amazing story! The gospel of Matthew ends with these three chapters – I’ve read them hundreds of times before but I feel alive with excitement having dived in again. These are the twists and turns of a master-novel. Only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows compares to this!

I read the last in the Harry Potter series in a twelve-hour epic (from 7:45pm to 7:45am on 21–22 July 07). No interruptions, no pestering children, just me, Harry, and the silent night. For this devoted Potter fan the climax to the story brought together years of previous readings; the background to the ending making its meaning all the more spine-tingling. With Matthew, however, I feel robbed of that first read; the story – engrained in my mind since childhood – is too familiar.

Most readers like me, with years of Christian tradition in the bag, read these crucifixion stories with some very particular theological glasses on. Ideas about atonement for sin and substitution for punishment colour the vision of Matthew’s Jesus and blind us to the real power of the story. We might find those things in Paul’s letters, but Matthew is all about the Passover. Only if we read these last three chapters on their own would we miss the glaring conclusion: the exodus from Egypt is being repeated in a stage-managed drama about exodus from Rome.

Matthew’s story has been steamrolling inexorably towards this conclusion, though we couldn’t see it till these final chapters. Chapters 1–3 set Jesus apart as a Galilean revolutionary Messiah, but we were thrown into disarray by chapters 4–7 and Jesus mountainside sermon on a new kind of Jew who would love their enemies and not plot to kill them. Chapters 8–16 continued to confound expectations by suggesting that the gentiles would have as much a part in the kingdom of heaven as the Jews while chapters 16–20 assured us that the twin mountains of violent revolution and religious oppression could be overthrown, with just a little faith. By chapters 21–25 and Jesus’ assurances that the coming kingdom would soon set right all injustice Matthew’s first readers – in all the turmoil of their threatened community life – must have been desperate for the second coming of the Son of Man.

But chapter 26 begins with a very simple statement from Jesus: ‘It’s Passover time and I’m about to be killed.’ (v.2) This doesn’t come as a shock because Jesus had already made that clear in 16:21. But his abruptness, after all that he has said about his glorious return as heavenly judge, snaps fingers in front our dreaming eyes: we must wake up to the immediate. It is time to celebrate the ancient meal, and from there watch the end of the Messiah.

We must remember the nervous first readers of Matthew as we hear of Judas the traitor; being sold to the Romans (or their powerful Jewish friends) was a familiar and deeply sensitive theme for these first-century fugitives. Living under an oppressive regime was hard. Freedoms were reduced, tax was heavy and any whiff of revolution was punished mercilessly. When Jesus sits down with the twelve to remember the day their ancestors escaped a violent empire the similarities are glaring. The Exodus from Egypt was the defining event of Jewish history. But there’s a change. The original Passover meal was eaten while protective blood marked the doorposts of the Israelites; their children saved while the Egyptians’ murdered. My blood is for a new covenant, says Jesus, poured out not for judgement, but for forgiveness (26:28).

At this moment Matthew pulls our eyes to the overlords; the Sanhedrin had power for sure, but they ultimately need Rome to deal with this blasphemer. Yet Jesus does not answer the Sanhedrin and neither does he answer Pilate. In this daring revolutionary moment, the Son of God suffers at the hands of the empire, without resistance. There is no authority on earth to which the kingdom of heaven will bow. For Jesus does not answer to Jerusalem and he does not answer to Rome. But he will not play their game, either. The horror of the Egyptian massacre is undone as God himself loses his firstborn son. That vengeful way to political liberation is to die, and out of the grave will rise the new hope of the kingdom of heaven: non-violent political non-cooperation, an exodus from Roman oppression.

Matthew’s story of Jesus challenged the first-century Jewish-Christian communities to face up to the self-destruction of their history and tradition. And I think we are challenged as well. The stories of our world have kept us trapped in violence and devoted to the pursuit of wealth. But these two forms of power only lead us to destruction. How do we unchain ourselves from the oppression of the ‘empire’? Only through sacrifice. For in this way all empires are the same, as all human beings share something deeply in common. We all love ourselves; but to love our neighbour that much is a dream. Jesus bids us to boldly live the dream.

Where are you in this story? Are you the oppressed revolutionary, or the tax collector? Are you the fisherman, or the Pharisee? I realise, much to my own stomach-churning discomfort, that I am right there with the rich and the powerful and so, according to this story, on a path to a living hell. I’m well into the richest 10 per cent of the world’s population, just by an accident of birth. But I’m not accustomed to sacrifice. If I met Jesus and he asked me to sell all I have and give it to the poor I wouldn’t want to; I don’t love my neighbour that much.

This is the heart-splitting message of the gospel of Matthew. When the world you live in has gone wrong, and people are oppressed and treated unjustly, refuse to play by the rules of that world! For the oppressed the new game plan is forgiveness. For the oppressor the new game plan is powerlessness. For both the path is sacrifice.

Go make disciples, says Jesus, to his. Don’t fear Rome. There is nothing the great power can do to force you into submission. They can take your dignity; they can take your life. But in the cool spring morning it is the resurrected Christ who dances ahead to Galilee. What belongs to Caesar can remain with Caesar; what is God’s must be offered to God.

Question for reflection:

Whose are you: God’s or Caesar’s?