As we step into a new lectionary year, we’re invited to see the world through Matthew’s eyes. Each Gospel writer has a theological “lens,” and Matthew’s is one we need to wrap our heads around before Advent begins. Otherwise, we risk hearing his texts through Mark’s urgency, Luke’s expansiveness, or John’s mysticism. Matthew has his own heartbeat, his own anxieties, his own hopes, his own vision of what it looks like for God to break into the world.
Matthew is writing for a mixed community, Jewish followers of Jesus who fear losing the tradition that shaped them, and Gentile believers who are being grafted into that very story. The tension is real. Matthew’s solution is not to abandon the tradition but to lean into it. His Jesus speaks in the cadences of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, not by accident, but by design. He uses the language, images, and imagination of the Hebrew Scriptures because that is the world his community knows best. It’s their theological home.
This means that judgment language, apocalyptic imagery, and a strong concern for the law show up often. Not because Matthew is trying to frighten anyone. And not because he wants us to imagine God as eager to punish. Matthew uses this language because, in the prophetic tradition, judgment is a wake-up call. It’s what you say to a community drifting from God’s ways. Matthew’s people would recognize the tone instantly. This is how prophets speak when the community has lost its bearings.
And the heart of that prophetic voice is this:
The world becomes chaotic when we stop caring for one another.
When people tell me, “I hate Matthew! He’s so harsh and violent,” I get it. If you read Matthew outside the tradition he’s drawing from, he can sound severe. But Matthew is not describing what God will do to people. Matthew is naming what the world does to itself when it abandons God’s justice. It’s the consistent trajectory of the Hebrew Scriptures:
“If you all do not get it together, if you keep ignoring God, exploiting the vulnerable, worshiping power, this world will collapse around you.”
And history bears it out. Over and over again, prophets call the people back, and over and over again the community drifts away from God’s vision of righteousness, mercy, and community.
Matthew is standing squarely inside that tradition. So when he speaks of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” he’s not indulging in hellfire rhetoric. He’s naming the natural consequence of injustice. That’s what happens when the hungry go unfed, when the stranger is unwelcome, when the powerful exploit the powerless, when the community drifts from God’s ways and from each other. Chaos. Collapse. Pain. Grief.
At the same time, Matthew is not a closed, insular Gospel. Yes, he is deeply rooted in Israel’s story. Yes, Jesus appears as a new Moses for God’s people and a fulfillment of the law and prophets. But the narrative moves outward. Quietly at first, then boldly. The Gospel opens with women from outside Israel in Jesus’ genealogy and Gentile magi kneeling at the manger. It continues with healings that cross purity lines, boundary-defying acts of mercy, and teachings that imagine a kingdom large enough to hold all people.
By the end, that trajectory is unmistakable:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (28:19).
Matthew holds this tension without resolving it neatly. The underlying question persists throughout. “Do we cling to our roots, or do we fling the doors wide open?”
His answer seems to be: yes.
Hold the prophetic tradition fiercely and let the kingdom expand fearlessly. Keep the grounding in God’s promises, and don’t limit the reach of God’s grace. Stay anchored to the story of Israel, and watch as that story becomes good news for the entire world.
As we begin this new year together, this is the lens Matthew gives us:
A story rooted and expanding.
A tradition treasured and transformed.
A Gospel that wakes us up and then sends us out.
Micah Krey 