Not by Accident

‘This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet …’ Matthew 2:15

At Advent we shall have completed the three-year cycle of readings and will be back with Gospel readings from Matthew. As his feast day falls this month, it might be worth thinking for a moment about this, the first of the Gospels in our Bibles, though probably the second in date of authorship.

It’s worth asking why Matthew’s was put first, because the answer to that explains much else. Matthew links the New Testament with the Hebrew Scriptures (what we call the ‘Old’ Testament). Right from the start, this Gospel wants to set the whole story of Jesus in the context of the history of Israel and the purposes of God in that history. So whereas Luke traces the family tree of Jesus back to Adam, to emphasise that the Saviour is for the whole human race, Matthew traces it back to Abraham, the father of Israel. This does not make Matthew into a racial or religious bigot – after all, the last words of Jesus in his Gospel command the disciples to go to ‘all the nations’ with the message of Jesus. But it does set Jesus firmly in the unfolding purpose of God – and every time Matthew cites an Old Testament prophecy, or alludes obliquely to one, he is nudging the reader and saying ‘See, this didn’t happen by accident. God is at work in history - and was at work in the history of the people of Abraham’.

That is, of course, a common theme of the whole Bible. Unlike many of the world’s other holy texts, this one is rooted in the history of our planet and its inhabitants. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it is always a precise chronological record of actual events, nor deny that much of it is cast in poetic, allegorical or visionary language. But it is about real people in a real world, and that world has a Creator, and the Creator has a purpose - not always clear to us, nor even sometimes to the biblical writers, until long after the event. ‘This didn’t happen by accident’: no, it happened within God’s world, to God’s creation and God’s creatures. ‘This was to fulfil what was spoken by the Lord . . .'