Why does Luke portray Jesus as a “new Moses?”

The Good Law

How has the Jewish scribe who penned Matthew’s Gospel re-shaped Mark’s portrait of Jesus? One of the ways is by exploring the relationship between the Messiah’s work and the Jewish law, the Torah of Moses. For many of us today this makes Matthew a difficult book to read well. In the religious sphere we usually think that “laws” are a bad idea. Whether it is through a church tradition or through the pervasive influence of European culture, many of us have grown up to assume that “legalism” is a bad thing, that we should get rid of “rules” and instead work with “guidelines” or “principles.” In fact, many Christians define their faith in terms of an overall opposition between law and grace. Yet in Matthew’s Gospel we hear Jesus declare up front “I have not come to do away with the law!” (5:17).

To understand Matthew’s perspective on Jesus and the law it might be helpful to start by thinking about our own attitudes toward laws in other spheres of life. How often do we say “there should be a law against that!” A father who has worked on the factory line for thirty years sees everything he has scraped together disappear when his financial advisor skips town. A girl walking home from the school dance is raped. We know that these things happen. Just as human beings are capable of tremendous compassion, we are also capable of unspeakable brutality and viciousness. We are, in the words of Bruce Cockburn, the “angel beast.” So we rest more peacefully knowing that a framework of laws envelopes us in its protection. Hence our love affair with crime dramas and murder mysteries. Our anxieties about life in a violent world are soothed when we watch the law and its agents protect us over and over again.