We take out our Sunday lectionary and move the tabs all the way back to the beginning. We say goodbye to the Gospel of Luke which we have been reading, and reacquaint ourselves with Matthew. But before we do, we should ask ourselves some questions. What is the “brand” this Gospel presents us with? What image of Jesus emerges from between the lines? How does it differ from the other Gospels, and what does it tell us about its author?

Many say that Matthew is the most “Jewish” of the Gospels. Certainly a picture of Jesus as the Messiah, the new hope of Israel, the fulfilment of the prophecies in the Hebrew Scripture, shines out loud and clear. Jesus has come to fulfil, rather than reinvent the covenant. No fewer than twenty times, we see Matthew referring to the prophets, introducing a saying with “Do you not read in Scripture”, or “The words of the prophet were fulfilled”, or a similar introduction to a quotation from the Old Testament.

Matthew wants to link the person of Jesus to Abraham, David, the prophecies concerning the coming Messiah in such a way as to leave his readers, well versed in Scripture, in no doubt as to the identity of Jesus. We see this idea mostly at the beginning of the Gospel, not least in the genealogy, which is carefully crafted to show Jesus' descent in an unbroken line from Abraham, through David, and with fourteen generations between them. That Jesus was the Messiah was no coincidence. This is the clear picture of Jesus that Matthew presents us with, and all the rest of the Gospel fits that frame.

Who was Matthew? Was he the old man in Caravaggio's painting, the one pointing to himself when Jesus said “Follow me” with a “who, me?” expression? Was he even a tax collector? Who was he?

Crucially, is the Matthew who wrote this gospel the same man as the Matthew in the gospel? We can not really answer these questions, since the concept of authorship in the first century differed so much from our current understanding of it, but what is likely is that this is the Gospel used and written down by the community of the apostle Matthew. Such a community will have gathered a collection of sayings from the oral tradition, and had available the Gospel of Mark as well as perhaps another source which we call “Q”, and together, the scribes of that community collected and collated this material into the Gospel form we have in front of us.

Whether there was a “Sermon on the Mount” as such, and in the form we see it in the Gospel, or whether it was a way of bundling certain sayings and actions of Jesus into a digestible unit, is a matter of continued research and speculation. The important fact is that these are the sayings and actions that contain the message of Jesus, and Matthew has gathered the various strands together to form stories, sermons, parables and discourses which give a glimpse of the authentic Jesus, and provide us with the message of the Gospel, the coming of the Kingdom of God through the Messiah, the son of David.

What was Matthew's attitude to Jesus, his agenda and his perspective? We can see this well in the way he takes Mark's Gospel and reworks it to suit his own community. He is free with his use of his sources, not sticking to the same sequence of events he found there (unlike Luke). He converts narrative into dialogue, and he highlights Jesus' relationships, both positive and negative, with the Jewish world. For Matthew, Jesus is the observant Jew as well as the Son of God. His run-ins with the authorities all through the Gospel, and especially in the lead-up to his Passion and death, show that observance of the Law of Moses was important not just for Jesus but equally for the community Matthew was writing for. Matthew needed to address the questions his readers were asking, and if they were predominantly questions about how to follow Christ within what they perceived as a Jewish perspective, then this Gospel responds to those questions.

Matthew presents Jesus as a Rabbi, a Jewish teacher, as one who is well versed in the Hebrew Scripture and the Jewish traditions of his time. Matthew's Jesus is a consummate preacher, a pious Jew who follows the Law, and, of course, the Messiah.

The setting of the Gospel was Syria or Palestine, written after the Jewish War and the destruction of the temple. It must be noted that the way of observing the Law, which had been so temple-based during Jesus' own lifetime had changed drastically. This presents another challenge for Matthew and his community. How can they envisage the continuation of their faith after all the death and destruction they have witnessed? How can they practice their religion when the temple is a ruin?

The answer lies in their vision of the Messiah having come among them, the fulfilment of the prophecies of Isaiah and the other prophets, and the realisation that for the righteous, this is not the end, rather the beginning. Salvation is at hand! Matthew crams his Gospel with such quotations to show that from the mouth of Jesus, this was part of the divine plan. Matthew adds to some of Mark's parables, pointing to the end times and to the part played by Israel in the apocalyptic events. This also parallels Jewish apocalyptic literature of the age.

With the destruction of the temple and the end of the cult that was associated with it, the values of Pharisaic Judaism became more popular, including belief in the resurrection from the dead and a less strict interpretation of the Torah. Therefore, Matthew's community would have likely been composed of these people, and the way Matthew presents Jesus allays the fears they may have had that they were abandoning their Jewish faith and their traditions. They were not abandoning it; it was coming to fulfilment. Matthew's readers could identify the “scribes and pharisees” with the Rabbis of post-70 Judaism. They could also see that the way of following Christ was not just not abandoning their faith; rather that staying with their old traditions would be to do that.

Looking at the Gospel according to Matthew from this sociological perspective might make us think that the picture of Jesus we find in it would be tweaked and tailored to suit the community it was composed for, and that by this logic, the other Gospels might present such a different picture of Jesus as to render them irreconcilable. However, this does not appear to be the case. The synoptic Gospels do each give a slightly different aspect to the image of Jesus they portray, because of the audience each Gospel was written for and the attitude of the evangelist. We are given a more multi-dimensional portrayal of Jesus, which brings Jesus and his message into relief, and we are granted a harmony of images of Jesus that allows the reader to delve deeply into the mystery of the person.

Whilst it is true that each of the Gospels does accentuate certain aspects of Jesus, and Matthew's flavour is certainly more Jewish than that of Luke, and more developed than that of Mark, yet by focusing on one Gospel in this liturgical year, we can focus on the person of Jesus which this evangelist brings to life through his pages. Jesus is the Messiah, the one God promised He would send in the fullness of time, the one who would bring the Kingdom of God and the New Jerusalem.

As we begin this year of Matthew, let Christ be with us in the Gospel we read, today, tomorrow and every day. Matthew starts by calling Jesus “Emmanuel”, which means 'God is with us', and he concludes by saying through the lips of Jesus “I am with you always, even to the end of time”.