Bystanders at the Cross
Coventry Cathedral Lent Talks 2012
2 The Place of Hope: the Cross in Matthew’s Gospel
Grunewald Resurrection
Each week we are exploring the particular perspective of a different writer within the New Testament on the cross. Last week we began with Mark’s Gospel, the first account of the life of Jesus to be written, and his vision of the cross as a place of desolation. Next week we shall look at Luke’s Gospel, then John’s, and finally see what Paul the Apostle has to say. But this week we look at Matthew’s Gospel, and how he portrays the cross as a place of hope.
Each week we are also looking at a piece of art which reflects the themes of the text we’re exploring. Last week it was the harrowing image of the crucifixion from the chapel of the Isenheim hospital, painted in about 1515 by Matthias Grunewald, in which we see the body of Jesus afflicted by the same desperate disease from which the patients at the hospital suffered. This week the image is by the same painter, from the same place. It is the Resurrection – Christ bursting forth from the tomb. (Image available at
The Isenheim altarpiece was not just a remarkable piece of art, it was an extraordinary feat of engineering, too. For the altarpiece which you see at first was designed to open out to reveal much more. The wings were unfolded, and that gruesome and desolate crucifixion was replaced by another view, with scenes (from left to right) of annunciation, rejoicing angels, Mary and the baby Jesus, and the resurrection. In this way Grunewald placed the awful experience of the cross in a wider context, of God’s work through Jesus’ life. And by that context he offered a meaning to the cross. Matthew does something similar, as we shall shortly see, juxtaposing the cross as a place of desolation with the cross as a place of hope.
Most merciful God,
who by the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ
delivered and saved the world:
grant that by faith in him who suffered on the cross
we may triumph in the power of his victory;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Matthew came to Mark’s gospel in about 80-85AD, perhaps twenty years after it had been written and he expanded it. Mark’s is a terrific telling of the story of Jesus, short and ideally adapted to reading out loud in not much more than an hour. But Matthew had something more in mind. To keep the story simple, Mark had left out a great deal of material. He often says that Jesus astounded those who heard him with his teaching – but he doesn’t give us much of that teaching so that we can hear it for ourselves (Mark gives us only 9 of Jesus’ parables for instance). So Matthew seems to have decided to ‘fix’ Mark’s Gospel so that it had a wider usage. In particular he added a beginning (the family tree and birth of Jesus, and the visit of the wise men from the east); five blocks of teaching at various points in Mark’s story (so Matthew gives us 21 parables of Jesus, for example); and where Mark’s Gospel ends enigmatically with the women frightened at the empty tomb, speaking to no-one, Matthew tells what happened, how the disciples met the risen Jesus and how he took his leave of them on a mountain, sending them out to make disciples of all nations, to baptise and to teach all that he has told them.
Matthew’s is a teacher’s, an explainer’s Gospel. In general Matthew followed Mark’s order and shape in telling the story, though he is inclined to tidy up Mark’s rather rough and ready way with words and grammar. But he seems above all to have wanted to make sure that the readers or hearers understood the deeper meanings in that story. So, for example, he sometimes makes a connection between the Old Testament and what has happened in Jesus’ story, with the words ‘this was to fulfil…’ (e.g. Matthew 2.15, 17). This has led some scholars to see Matthew’s Gospel as a kind of second edition of Mark’s, (‘Gospel Mark II’ if you’ll excuse the pun!). I prefer to see it as a kind of enhanced version, more akin to a web-page, where Matthew puts in hyper-links at certain points which take us to more information than Mark has given us.
And this is what he does with the story of the crucifixion. To understand Matthew’s distinctive take on the cross, we can look particularly at what he has added to Mark’s narrative. So as you listen to the passage, you’ll hear two voices; one reading what Mark wrote, and Matthew lightly revised; and the other bringing in Matthew’s additions.
Matthew 27.32-66
32As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross. 33And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), 34they offered him wine to drink, mixed withgall (a); but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. 35And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots;*36then they sat down there and kept watch over him. 37(b) Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.’
38Then two bandits were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. 39Those who passed by derided* him, shaking their heads 40and saying, ‘You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.’ 41In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, 42‘He saved others; he cannot save himself.* He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. 43He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, “I am God’s Son.” ’ 44The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way.
The Death of Jesus
45From noon on, darkness came over the whole land* until three in the afternoon. 46And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ 47When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘This man is calling for Elijah.’ 48At once one of them ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink. 49But the others said, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.’*50Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.*51At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. 52The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. 53After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. 54Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’*
55Many women were also there, looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him.55 Many women were also there, looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him.56Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.
57 When it was evening, (c) there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph,(d)who was also a disciple of Jesus. 58He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus;(e)then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. 59So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth60and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away.61Mary Magdalene and the other Marywere there, sitting opposite the tomb.(f)
62 The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate63and said, ‘Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, “After three days I will rise again.”64Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, “He has been raised from the dead”, and the last deception would be worse than the first.’65Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard* of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.’*66So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.
Mark’s portrait of the crucifixion of Jesus is stark, uncompromising and bleak. That is, of course, how crucifixions were and how they were meant to be. The crucifixion according to Mark is engulfed in darkness and that terrible cry of desolation: Eli, Eli, lemasabachthani– ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ We saw last week that this cry is an ambiguous one, that it may refer to Psalm 22 and imply trust in the God who, at the end of the Psalm, rescues the Psalmist. But at face value it’s a cry of desolation and dereliction. As such it might have been a problem for Matthew. For, taken together with the strange ending to Mark’s Gospel, with frightened women at an empty tomb in the grey twilight of early dawn, it was easily open to critics of the fledgling Christian faith to say that the whole story was a load of nonsense, and that Jesus died in disgrace, followed later by deluded women witnesses.
You’ll remember from last week that, besides the ambiguity of the cry of desolation, two other details in Mark’s crucifixion scene were ambiguous: the tearing of the temple curtain and the centurion’s recognition that Jesus was the son of God. The temple curtain because it might mean that the presence of God had left the world; the centurion’s statement because it is defiantly in the past tense, marking very clearly the end of the story of Jesus’ life. Matthew seems to want, not to remove ambiguity (he quite likes to use ambiguity at times), but to draw away from the close-up detail just a fraction to show the wider context, and help us to respond positively to what could be an utterly desolating experience. He wants to introduce hope into the scene.
Matthew takes up the challenge posed by Mark’s stark vision of Jesus apparently forsaken by the Father on the cross. Where Mark speaks of the temple curtain being torn, Matthew makes a telling addition:
The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.
And where Mark then goes straight on to the words of the centurion, Matthew adds:
Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’*
What is Matthew trying to tell us through these additions?
The other gospel writers focus solely on the cross, but Matthew, uniquely, points us forward to what will follow shortly in the story. We are used to ‘flash-backs’ in films, moments when the scene dissolves into what has happened before, which illuminates the present. Matthew here gives us a ‘flash forward’. He doesn’t want us to miss the importance of what has happened in the crucifixion and death of Jesus. He uses poetic language both to remind us of Ezekiel’s great vision of the valley of the dry bones in the past, and the impact of Jesus’ own resurrection in the future. He uses that picture of the resurrection of the saints of the Old Testament from Ezekiel 37 and he says, in effect, to us: this is what they had been waiting for. Deep in the heart of the faith of the Jews lay this vision: that when all is lost, and you find yourself in the waste land, the valley filled with dry bones, a graveyard, still God has more to give. Holding on to hope then is what matters. The God of Israel was not in the business of re-birth or restoration. His work is much deeper than that. It is to do what we think of as impossible: to bring life out of death.
Matthew is pointing to the tension which links cross and resurrection, and in doing so he reminds us that resurrection cannot happen without crucifixion, death, first; but also that crucifixion, death, never has the last word.
Matthew points us to two realities. One is the ordinary everyday reality, which we see and know. In this reality you would look at the scene which Mark had drawn and say ‘here is just a man on a cross’. A solitary, sordid death in a corner of the Roman empire many years ago. But Matthew says there is another, deeper, reality at work here, too. Outwardly God is defeated on the cross. But in the other, deeper, reality, there is the beginning of victory.
Charles Dickens wrote a story once about how on a dark, dank and drab London day, he was seized by a strange feeling when he was confronted with the word ‘MOOREEFFOC’ on a glass door in front of him. He didn’t know what it was, and wondered what world he had stepped into, until he realised he was looking at the word ‘Coffee-Room’ backwards. The point of the story was how he had seen something familiar in a completely new light, and suddenly seen possibilities and opportunities and new perspectives in a word he saw the right way round without even registering any more. Matthew’s earthquakes have the same jolting effect on us. ‘What’ we say, ‘can this be?’ And Matthew is delighted, because he has suddenly made us see the familiar story of the crucifixion in a new light. Not as the end but as a new beginning. Matthew changes the landscape for us. He opens the door on to another reality, and invites us to glimpse with him, for a moment, what God is doing. For Matthew, God has not forsaken Jesus.
Was there an earthquake? And did the risen dead walk about the city on Easter day? I think that Matthew is not deeply concerned with these questions, any more than Ezekiel several centuries before was. He was pointing out that in Jesus’ death something changed in the deep structures of the fabric of reality. Something ‘earth-shattering’ happened. This is prophetic and poetic writing, and what he is pointing us to is something similar to Paul’s great passage on the resurrection 1 Corinthians 15. What most Jews of Jesus’ day hoped for was the great general resurrection, when God would raise up all the faithful dead who had suffered in life. If you go to Jerusalem today you’ll see that the Mount of Olives is full of tombs, because that was where God was expected to come in power on the last day, and people wanted to be as close as possible in readiness. The puzzle about the resurrection of Jesus for the disciples and other followers of Jesus was that only he was raised. A singular resurrection, rather than a general one, was not what they expected. Paul explains this (writing probably three decades before Matthew completed his Gospel) by speaking of Jesus as the ‘first fruits’ of the harvest of the dead (1 Cor. 15.20). So Matthew is perhaps referring to the way in which, following the resurrection of Jesus, some people in Jerusalem realised that this was the first crack in the reality and omnipotence of death – and saw with the eyes of faith that God’s people would rise from the dead too.
Matthew also adds a significant extra section about the guard on the tomb. He wants us to see that there is no question but that Jesus is dead, and the identification of his tomb certain, preparing us for the resurrection story to come.
But Matthew is also challenging us to faith. Faith means seeing the world not by outward appearance, but according to its inward reality; seeing the cross not as the end, but as the necessary prelude to resurrection.
The Victorian poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, expressed the same kind of insight in many of this poems. He wrote of seeking to discover the ‘inscape’ of things, their spiritual reality which was beneath or within the landscape that was available to be seen by the naked eye.
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?