Even though forgiveness of sin is not explicit throughout Matthew’s Gospel…we can see that it is indeed pervasively implicit through the use of many other metaphors, concepts, and actions. Jesus’s constant healings, cleansings, and blessings should be understood as manifestations of this same rescuing and forgiving.

Forgiveness of Sins Through Death and Resurrection

Several years ago on a trip to Italy, I got to spend a week in the ancient northern city of Ravenna. While my artist wife took a masterclass in mosaics, I wandered around this beautiful walled town that played an important role in Roman and Christian history.¹ Ravenna and its environs are a rare place where you can see both Western and Eastern Christianity set in stone side by side. The city contains several important Eastern-influenced eight-sided basilicas covered in mosaics from the floor up and across the vast vaulted ceilings. You can also enter any number of Western cathedrals remodelled during the Baroque era that are built, as became the custom, in the shape of a cross, with the altar existing at the center point. Both the basilicas and the cathedrals are replete with images of Jesus, of course, but with a noticeable difference—the cathedrals are full of crosses and crucifixes while the basilicas represent Jesus as resurrected and reigning. As in theology, so in architecture: The Western tradition emphasizes Jesus’s suffering while the Eastern highlights Jesus’s victory and activity of blessing the world.

Both Jesus’s suffering/death and his death-defying resurrection are necessary parts of the gospel story, as they should be in our theology. Holding both together is arguably a greater weakness in the Western tradition, perpetuated even more in Protestant theology with its focus on the cross language that the apostle Paul emphasizes, especially in Romans and Galatians. But Matthew, along with all the apostolic writings, holds together cross and resurrection, suffering and joy, in a complex singularity. Without the resurrection, the cross is incomplete and insufficient to describe Jesus’s work. Without the cross and its suffering, the resurrection would be mere triumphalism.

Crucial to understanding Matthew’s Christology is reading the whole bios with the perspective that comes only from the ending. As with a mystery novel, the revelations that occur in the conclusion enable one to understand bits of the story that previously offered hints but that only make full sense once the details are tied together.

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