1. Emmanuel at his Birth (Matt 1.23)

Matthew emphatically identifies the Messiah's role and origin from the start. His opening phrase ‘book of origin’ (βίβλος γɛνέσɛως, Matt 1.1) occurs only two other times in the Greek Bible, designating in the first case the story of creation (Gen 2.4) and in the other the account of human civilisation (Gen 5.1). This suggests that for Matthew too this expression does not signify merely the genealogy or birth narrative of a hero or sage, but rather introduces his own definitive book of origins. The ‘genesis’ of redemption through this descendant of David and Abraham is not merely the object of his achievement or a feature of his story, but turns out to be vital for the man's identity. This striking opening gambit already seems patently relevant to the potential challenge that an absent Jesus might in due course represent.

Matthew wastes no time in establishing the identity of Jesus as emphatically that of a present Messiah. First and most programmatically, Matt 1.23 foregrounds our topic even before Jesus is born. He is identified not only as the promised Messiah who represents or channels God's presence, but as bearing the very name which personifies that presence: Emmanuel. The angel's instruction, implemented by Mary and Joseph, is for the child to be named Jesus – ‘because he will save his people from their sins’ (1.21). And yet, as readers invariably note, Matthew specifically asserts that this birth and naming of the child fulfil a prophecy that ‘they shall call his name Emmanuel’.Footnote ¹

Commentators ever since antiquity have reflected on the seeming contradiction that nobody in this narrative ever names Jesus ‘Emmanuel’ – either at his birth or at any time thereafter. In fact, Matthew never uses the word again!

Only the most hostile or inattentive of readers would attribute this ostensible contradiction between the story and its first fulfilment quotation to the evangelist's editorial sloppiness. Two incompatible claims are quite plainly placed side by side, and the only plausible explanation must be that this is deliberate. Evidently it matters to Matthew that Jesus is ‘Emmanuel – God with us’ and yet he does not seem to mind that the angel's instruction about that name is at once roundly ignored by every one of the dramatis personae.

We will see that Emmanuel represents for Matthew not primarily a characterisation of the Messiah's birth – though it is that as well. Instead, it marks the abiding identity of Jesus, both before and after the resurrection, even if the narrative never formally makes it his name. As an early reader already observed in this text, the event occasions the name just as the name occasions the event: ‘Therefore to say “they shall call him ‘Emmanuel’” means nothing other than that “they shall see God among us”. To be sure, God has always been among us; but never before so openly.’Footnote ²

That opening paradox about what it might mean to say ‘God with us’ is matched by several others. Elsewhere in the same birth and infancy narrative, readers discover that ‘God with us’ is an infant king – present to the worship and the royal gifts of the magi, but nevertheless about to flee the country to become a migrant in Egypt. A further well-known enigma arises when Matthew insists that it is precisely the infant Jesus’ flight to refuge in Egypt which fulfils the prophecy, ‘out of Egypt have I called my son’ (Matt 2.14–15). Even Jesus’ eventual long-term presence in Nazareth leaves a famous exegetical conundrum with its appeal to a ‘word of the prophets’ (plural but mysteriously unnamed!) that ‘he shall be called a Nazorean’ (Ναζωραῖος, 2.23).Footnote ³ As we will see, the paradoxes of Jesus’ presence do not end here.

2. Emmanuel Risen (Matt 28.19–20)

Despite such unexpected challenges, ‘Emmanuel’ characterises Matthew's understanding of Jesus throughout this Gospel, as has long been recognised.Footnote ⁴ This affirmation of the Messiah's abiding presence with his people constitutes a deliberate editorial clasp around the Gospel as a whole. It finds its counterpart and matching inclusio in his post-resurrection promise that ‘I am with you to the end of the age’ (Matt 28.20). In other words, he whom the disciples see in Galilee is one and the same as their teacher, continuous with the earthly Jesus in person and by name (28.16, 18).Footnote ⁵ By the time of this definitive encounter in Galilee, Matthew's Jesus has already appeared in Jerusalem to the two Marys on their way back from the empty tomb (28.9) – an encounter that interestingly parallels the very first verse of Mark's Longer Ending (Mark 16.9).

Matthew reports no disappearance of Jesus, let alone an ascension to heaven. This is because his risen Jesus is already exalted to the divine exercise of ‘all power in heaven and on earth’ – at God's right hand (cf. 26.64). He does not leave the disciples but remains emphatically ‘with you’ – present rather than absent. For that reason alone, it seems as if for Matthew no narrative of ascension is even possible.Footnote ⁶ Instead, the abiding presence of Jesus explicitly encompasses both heaven and earth (28.18) – and is perhaps for that reason set on an unnamed but specified mountain (ɛἰς τὸ ὄρος οὗ ἐτάξατο αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς, 28.16), between heaven and earth. Commentators sometimes imagine this to designate the Mount of the Sermon (5.1).Footnote ⁷ But it must be at least equally likely to evoke the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17, another unnamed mountain between heaven and earth that hosted a proleptic experience of exalted presence: on his descent from that mountain Jesus ‘ordered’ (ἐνɛτɛίλατο) his disciples not to speak about this vision again until after the resurrection (17.9).Footnote ⁸

Matthew thus localises the risen and exalted Jesus’ presence on the Galilean mountain as heavenly and earthly at once. Matthew's interest in geographic as well as symbolic space has repeatedly been noted, not least by Christian Blumenthal in drawing out the spatial realisation of God's presence as Emmanuel and of the realisation of the kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’.Footnote ⁹ Patrick Schreiner has attempted to articulate an approach to this intrinsic ambivalence through the post-modern geographical theory of ‘critical spatiality’, arguing that the body of Jesus is itself the space (‘thirdspace’) in which his presence, and indeed the kingdom of heaven, become ‘spatially’ manifest on earth.Footnote ¹⁰ This theory of socially constructed space, originally pioneered by Edward Soja,Footnote ¹¹ was previously adopted to good effect by Matthew Sleeman in relation to the ascension in the Book of Acts.Footnote ¹² It holds evocative potential for Matthew too, even if there are reasons to be cautious about Schreiner's implementation of the theory.

Schreiner's application of the theory turns out to be rather forceful. He removes the body of Jesus – and indeed the incarnation itself – from the realm of the particular and experienced to an unlocated place which with Foucault he labels heterotopia, an imaginary place ‘outside all places’, ‘neither here nor there’.Footnote ¹³ Equally questionable in Matthean exegetical terms is Schreiner's corollary of a comprehensive replacement theology that does away with the temple, Roman Empire and all other literal, sacred and ideological space (‘firstspace’, ‘secondspace’), ostensibly in order to unite heaven and earth. We may here leave aside the problematic question of whether even in a qualified sense the kingdom of God is ever properly an ‘imagined’ space for either the Gospels or their ancient reception.Footnote ¹⁴ It seems in any case ironic that Schreiner's complex post-modern theoretical scaffolding in the end reinforces a strikingly old-fashioned set of binary theological premises, extensively drawing in support on analogously tired supersessionist readings of John and Paul. On a related note, some readers have taken exception to the ‘colonising’ dimensions of Schreiner's findings: one reviewer worries that this ‘thirdspace’ body of Jesus ‘conquers, contests, infringes upon, declares victory over, pierces, world-builds, overhauls, and establishes’.Footnote ¹⁵

The post-Easter presence of Jesus on the unidentified Galilean ‘high mountain’ of Matthew 28 does indeed attest a kind of ‘thirdspace’, being neither quite heavenly nor quite earthly, but rather in between and both at once. In Matthew that space is, however, ‘constructed’ (if this is the right word) not ‘socially’ so much as theologically – that is to say, eschatologically and messianically. This is quite powerfully expressed in the interpretation given in later icons of this mountain and also of the Mount of Transfiguration.Footnote ¹⁶

The specific context of the presence of Jesus in Matthew 28 is more particularly located in the exercise of discipleship and worldwide mission resulting in baptism and the keeping of his commandments – the Torah of Jesus, as it were. Jesus is present above all in the mission of his followers, especially through his teaching.Footnote ¹⁷ That is a point which is strikingly similar in Mark 16.19–20, perhaps reflecting intertextual influence on the Longer Ending.

Once again, Jesus’ name is his identity: Jesus-Joshua, the ‘Saviour’ of his people, is also ‘God-with-his-people’, Emmanuel (1.23; 28.20). So also baptism in these closing verses is in the ‘name’ of the triune God who is present (28.19): the Father opens access to the presence of the Son and the Son to that of the Father (cf. already 11.27), just as Father and Spirit were present in the birth and baptism of the Son (1.18, 20; 3.16).Footnote ¹⁸

Further in relation to Matthew 28, some have discerned important typological links in the Pentateuch underlying the threefold nexus of commandments, presence and community-formation that continues from the pre-Easter to the post-Easter Jesus. At Sinai, the giving of the Law similarly connects both with the covenantal constitution of the qahal/ἐκκλησία of Israel and with the presence of YHWH on the mountain and in the tabernacle.Footnote ¹⁹ Matthew turned out to be the evangelist who most nourished the powerful patristic and medieval idea of Christ as the new lawgiver.

3. Being Emmanuel: An Abiding Presence (Matt 18.20)

This theme of Emmanuel's presence, sustained by the bracket of Matthew 1 and 28, comes to expression in several passages, beginning with his opening message about the approaching kingdom (4.17; cf. 3.1), and, just as emphatically, as a light shining in the dark lands of the lost northern tribes of Zebulon and Naphtali (4.13–16). For Matthew as for some later Jewish Christians, the Messiah's outreach to these ‘lost’ tribes became a significant feature of his Galilean mission.

Above all, however, it is in the discourse about the Messianic assembly in chapter 18 that we encounter a permanent ecclesial locus for the presence of Jesus: wherever two or three gather in his name, there he is among them (18.20).Footnote ²⁰ In context, this promise focuses on Jesus’ ratification of the community's disciplinary decision-making – in other words, it reflects his presence specifically as judge, perhaps in a scenario anticipating the image of the juridical throne among twelve thrones in 19.28. The community's function of ‘binding and loosing’ (18.18), which was in chapter 16 distinctively vested in Simon Peter (16.19), seems in numerous Jewish parallels to denote the teaching authority to declare what is permitted and what is not permitted, including specifically the exercising of discipline and excommunication.Footnote ²¹ By being equally vested in Peter and in the church as a whole, the presence of Jesus in the exercising of his authority both as teacher and as judge makes Peter's role both unique and at the same time paradigmatic for the church.Footnote ²²

Recent studies, however, have rightly questioned attempts to restrict the saying's reach to a narrowly juridical context without reference to Jesus’ presence more generally – and especially in the church.Footnote ²³ Such ratification by Jesus similarly underwrites his more encompassing presence promised for the mission of the church in Matt 28.20.Footnote ²⁴ (Perhaps 23.10 makes a related affirmation about the continual presence of the Messiah as the church's teacher.)

Matt 18.20 is often thought to evoke a saying attributed in the Mishnah to the early second-century Rabbi Ḥananyah ben Teradion, according to whom God's presence (Shekhinah) dwells wherever at least two are gathered over words of the Torah.Footnote ²⁵ The Mishnaic text goes on to speak of God himself standing in the midst of those who occupy themselves with the Torah, whether they are ten or even just down to one.Footnote ²⁶ Although in its extant form that rabbinic passage postdates Matthew by well over a century, parallels like these nevertheless suggest that Matthew's Jesus promises his presence to more than just ‘the regulation of disputatious church members’.Footnote ²⁷ In our passage, then, Jesus assures his followers of divine ratification and ἐκκλησία-constituting presence.

To this extent the Mishnah's perspective offers a particularly useful foil for comparison and contrast with Matthew, as Akiva Cohen has demonstrated.Footnote ²⁸ Although separated in time by a little over a century, both documents could be seen as reflecting in cognate but different ways on questions of presence and absence posed by the temple's destruction. (The comparison arguably remains somewhat relevant even if Matthew 24 is dated not long before 70, reflecting not on a past destruction but on the gathering threat, its dark apprehension compounded by the memory of Caligula's narrowly averted sacrilege and reappropriated predictions of destruction prompted by Jeremiah.)

Matt 18.20 thus constitutes together with 1.23 and 28.20 the core trio of passages that define and energise this evangelist's theme of the presence of Jesus.Footnote ²⁹

4. Emmanuel Absent?

But does Matthew intend to posit the abiding presence of Jesus as somehow compensating more specifically for a permanent absence of God from the temple and, by extension, Jerusalem? Is there a deliberate contrast with its state of ‘desolation’ in 23.38 as systematic and permanent, rather than punitive but potentially temporary?Footnote ³⁰ The answer to that question may be less clear than Matthean interpreters typically like to imagine. True, Matthew's Jesus does not explicitly predict his rebuilding of the temple in three days as John's Jesus does (John 2.19, evidently requiring somewhat laboured reinterpretation). But neither does Jesus in Matthew deny such a prediction on either of the two occasions when he is accused of having made it (in front of Caiaphas and in public on the cross: Matt 26.61; 27.40). And despite the Sanhedrin's best efforts to the contrary (26.59), Matthew, unlike Mark,Footnote ³¹ does not label these accusers ‘false’.

A familiar, lazy Christian hermeneutic of ‘fulfilment-as-replacement’ has long dominated the interpretation of Matt 18.20, and in some quarters continues to do so: if Jesus is present in his church even while the temple is to be destroyed, then this must mean that Jesus effects not just the spiritual and typological fulfilment but the categorical replacement of temple, Jerusalem, Zion and quite possibly Israel itself.Footnote ³² The reasoning appears to be that once the temple is destroyed, then if Jesus remains present in the church's worship, God must be permanently absent from the Temple, Jerusalem and (by extension?) the synagogue. Contrary to such assumptions, however, Matthew shows no wholesale rejection of Jerusalem, let alone of Israel: the destruction of Jerusalem in no way entails for him the end of Israel.Footnote ³³

Matthias Konradt nevertheless suggests that when the Emmanuel departs from the temple for the last time and predicts its destruction, this does in some sense signify the presence of God leaving the temple.Footnote ³⁴ This note of divine departure and absence, foreshadowed of course in Ezek 10–11 and in Jeremiah, is notably also foregrounded by Josephus.Footnote ³⁵ Konradt shares the widespread view that for Matthew, in contrast to Josephus, the temple is not just temporarily but permanently ‘obsolete’.Footnote ³⁶

Although this is a trope widely repeated in New Testament scholarship since late antiquity, as an interpretation of our text it seems at least prima facie incompatible with Matthew's Mishnah-like perpetuation of Temple-related ‘commandments’ for the disciples written at a time after (or shortly before?) its destruction. Among these are rules about sacrifices (5.23–4) and tithing, but perhaps also more implicitly concerning the didrachma temple tax (17.24–7), the force of swearing by the altar or the temple in which God dwells (23.16–21) or the present-tense Sabbath labour of priests in the temple (12.5), whose intended function as ‘a house of prayer’ (21.13) is also never in principle abrogated.

To be sure, none of these passages are self-interpreting. All, however, raise worthwhile questions about what, if anything, Matthew assumes to be the future role of the House now ‘left desolate’ – for example on the day when Jerusalem welcomes Jesus in the name of the Lord (23.38–9).

It is of course true that by the third and especially the fourth century, the replacement trope had indeed come into its own in Christian polemic. Nevertheless, the use of the temple's Roman destruction to justify a triumphal narrative of replacement is in fact strikingly absent from the New Testament and appears to surface for the first time after the second-century defeat of another potential attempt to rebuild it: that of Bar Kokhba.Footnote ³⁷ (This may not be accidental, if we take seriously the reapplication by Jesus and others of Jeremiah's prophecies about the destruction of the First Temple: the scriptural promise of reconstruction after 70 years raises tantalising questions about expectations in the second quarter of the second century, as Roland Deines has suggested.)Footnote ³⁸

Ḥananyah ben Teradion's saying may in fact promise analogous de facto compensation for the Shekhinah's catastrophic absence from the temple – without of course any implications of categorical ‘replacement’.Footnote ³⁹ An almost eucharistic dimension of presence is offered in the very next paragraph of that Mishnaic passage, where three who share words of Torah over their meal are presented as if they ate from the table of the Omnipresent Lord himself.Footnote ⁴⁰

Aside from these questions, Matthew also reprises certain wider Markan themes of Jesus’ absence. We may include here his retention of Mark's forward-looking sentiment about fasting in the bridegroom's absence (Matt 9.15; cf. Mark 2.19), although chapter 25 suggests that for Matthew the theme of a bridegroom's absence may signal his imminent arrival more prominently than his departure.

Matthew's explanation of his distinctive parable of the weeds appears to insert a more sustained sense of the Son of Man's timeless presence into a story describing at most qualified and temporary absence. This is the one who now, perhaps constantly, sows the good seed (Matt 13.37); and this is the one who in the eschaton will send out his angels to select the weeds for destruction in fire (13.41–2). Nevertheless, like the absent Master in the parable of the talents,Footnote ⁴¹ the Sower's temporary inattention does give the adversary his disruptive – if ultimately futile – opportunity.

In sending out his disciples on their mission to Israel, Jesus powerfully assures the missionaries both that the sending authority is his own, and indeed that to welcome them is to welcome him by proxy in his absence (Matt 10.16, 40).

Elsewhere, significantly, the one who is present to accompany the disciples’ witness before councils and synagogues is not Jesus but the Spirit of God (Matt 10.20). The mission to Israel will continue until the coming of the Son of Man (10.23) – who is now approaching but certainly still absent (cf. 16.27–8; see also 24.30–1, 36–44 and passim). The possibility of his timeless presence as the teacher of his disciples (23.10) must be balanced against his evident absence in the face of false messiahs appearing in days to come (24.23–4, 35).

It is unclear whether residual Markan elements of absence could be due to what some synoptic critics like to call ‘editorial fatigue’:Footnote ⁴² not all the texts just cited are straightforwardly Markan. Nevertheless, they do somewhat complicate Matthew's assurance of Jesus’ abiding presence in chapter 28 – and certainly cast doubt on occasional popularising attempts to read Matthew as concerned exclusively with the theme of his presence.Footnote ⁴³ Despite its emphatic affirmation, Matthew evidently retains a ‘rhetorical sense of ambiguity’Footnote ⁴⁴ about how precisely that presence works.

This ambiguity or paradox of presence and absence proves to be surprisingly complex and diffuse throughout the Gospel. One cluster of questions surrounds assertions about Jesus during his ministry that entail a historically unbounded presence apparently beyond his life on earth. Where, for example, is the location of Jesus’ voice that offers unexpectedly timeless and transcendentally comforting instruction about rest and relief from burdens in his presence (11.28–30)?Footnote ⁴⁵ From what vantage point does he utter his curiously diachronic lament for the population of Jerusalem whose treatment of the prophets shows they have always been resistant to his attempts to ‘gather’ them as a mother bird gathers her chicks (23.37)? The meaning of this latter statement is not of course exhausted by events in Jesus’ lifetime: it speaks rather of the Emmanuel who ministered through the prophets of the past but also now appears as the Exalted One lamenting the imminent or perhaps recent devastation of Jerusalem's ‘house’ (23.38–9).Footnote ⁴⁶

Aspects of puzzle and paradox persist even in Matthew's repeated theme of a timeless presence. A few verses before the vital affirmation of Matt 18.20, Jesus has assured the disciples that ‘whoever receives one such child in my name receives me’ (18.5). The reception of the child in some sense makes up for the absence of Jesus. But is it the child or the act of reception that mediates his presence, perhaps by some analogy?Footnote ⁴⁷ Significantly, Matthew disrupts any straightforward correlation in the very next verse by identifying those children not with Jesus but with his followers – ‘these little ones who believe in me’ (18.6).Footnote ⁴⁸

More emphatically still, in the famous eschatological scenario of Matthew 25 one of the key criteria of judgement is failure to care for the king's needs when he was hungry, thirsty, a foreigner, destitute, ill or in prison (25.35–6). ‘Finding Jesus in the poor’ is a laudably popular and well-loved trope of historic Christian homiletics and praxis, which might seem to hold considerable promise for our topic. Nevertheless there are telling uncertainties and paradoxes about the logic of this Matthean identification, not least because those who truly encounter Jesus in this way are unaware of it.Footnote ⁴⁹ Matthew 25 does affirm a clear bond between Jesus and those deprived of clothes, food, health, friendship or freedom, even if commentators rightly note that the ‘least’ among Jesus’ brothers and sisters are here in the first instance the poor among his disciples (25.40, 45).

In some sense, then, to serve the ‘least’ is indeed to serve Jesus himself. However, as with the child in 18.5, we may wonder if this is for Matthew an ontological or more of a relational equivalence. In other words, does the presence of Jesus attach intrinsically and sacramentally to the poor themselves? This of course is often asserted. And yet, strikingly, Matthew's Jesus seems in the very next chapter to deny any intrinsic identity: ‘you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me’ (26.11) – implying at least the possibility of his definitive absence. Evidently there is no ontological equation in the sense that the poor person as such concretely personifies or mediates the presence of Jesus. Relational and analogical puzzles remain, therefore, about how Jesus is present in the act of serving and welcoming the poor or children.

All these are difficult questions, and yet Matthew is clearly less troubled by them than are his modern interpreters. In the power of the Father, Jesus is the abidingly gentle one whose burden is light and who refreshes the weary (Matt 11.27–30) – a statement that strongly anticipates the authority given to the ever-present Jesus in 28.18. Jesus does exercise a powerful salvific and seemingly timeless presence in the gospel narrative as the one who stills the storm (8.23–7), who steadies the hand of the believer to walk on the turbulent waves (14.28–31), who heals ‘all’ of those who even touch the hem of his garment (14.36).

In these and other passages, it does seem that Matthew in fact happily projects the Jesus of his narrative forward into the life of post-resurrection faith. So too the voice of the exalted Jesus speaks with power to the reader's own experience in Matt 23.34–6, as we have already seen: he is the one who has sought in vain maternally to gather Jerusalem's children together until her house was left desolate; he is the one who now sends them (ἀποστέλλω πρὸς ὑμᾶς, v. 34: present tense! but cf. 10.16) the prophets, sages and scribes persecuted by their enemies. And he is the one who will return to be greeted by those who anticipate him in Jerusalem.

5. Sacramental Presence and a Cry of Absence

Matthew's Last Supper, finally, formulates a richer liturgical setting than Mark, presenting the Passover's bread and wine as the broken body and shed covenant blood of Jesus, here specifically ‘for the forgiveness of sins’ (26.26–8).

Is this in fact relevant for our question of presence and absence? Unlike Paul (1 Cor 11.25) and perhaps Luke (22.19), Matthew like Mark makes no suggestion that this meal and its interpretation are to be repeated in their own right. Its elements are here not yet self-evidently detachable from that paschal setting, as somehow intrinsically conveying a continuing presence of Jesus.Footnote ⁵⁰ This being said, Matthew's Last Supper does signify and anticipate Jesus’ presence with the disciples at a renewed future supper of bread and wine in the kingdom of God (26.29) – even if, notably, the evangelist does not link this future meal to the church's daily or weekly liturgical praxis.

In taking on a Nazirite vow of abstaining from wine,Footnote ⁵¹ Jesus himself clearly envisages a period of withdrawal and absence after the Last Supper (27.46). Aside perhaps from the triduum between cross and resurrection, however, Matthew does not particularly develop that theme, suggesting that any absence is confined to this brief and temporary interlude.Footnote ⁵² Here, as elsewhere, Matthew is not systematic.

In some ways the question of an abiding and permanent presence finds its most challenging counterpoint in the question of what ‘God with us’ might mean at the cross, where the Emmanuel himself cries out that God has forsaken him (Matt 27.46).Footnote ⁵³ Matthew leaves this question largely undeveloped, and at one level that cry is more problematic for the issue of where God is now than where Jesus is now. One way to address it would be to affirm that Matthew does not regard even this experience as taking away from his unwavering affirmation of Jesus himself as Emmanuel. This is true whether as a crucified victim Jesus pours out his blood ‘as a ransom’ and ‘for the forgiveness’ of many (20.28; 26.27) or as risen Messiah, with all authority in heaven and earth, commissions the disciples to go to all nations (28.18–20). In Matthew (and by extension perhaps in Mark) it is Jesus’ cry of dereliction, rather than (say) his baptism or his exorcisms, that marks the point at which the experience of Jesus is most completely present as Immanu, ‘with us’. By entirely encompassing the depth of the human condition, the ‘Jesus’ who ‘saves his people’ (1.21) does so precisely by being radically Immanu El (1.23). This ‘embracing’ presence of his death on the cross did not escape early commentators, who routinely spoke of Jesus ‘stretching out his hands’ in constant care and intercession.Footnote ⁵⁴ Something of this may also be implicit in Matthew's expanded testimony of the centurion who, together with his men, takes the accompanying portents to mean that one who died in such a manner must truly be God's son (27.54).

6. Conclusion: The Risen Presence

Matthew is the most unwavering of the evangelists in affirming the personal presence of the living Jesus after Easter in and with the church in its life and mission. That affirmation is for this evangelist not posed with Markan question marks, nor sublimated by Lukan or Johannine narrative themes of Jesus’ departure and substitution by the Spirit as ‘another Comforter’.

We have seen that Matthew is aware of a dialectic of absence, but also that he remains content to affirm Jesus as ever-present with his messianic people. This conviction radiates for him both backwards and forwards. Its promise in the birth narrative, like its implementation in Jesus’ ministry to the fledgling messianic ἐκκλησία, confirms a conception of the risen Jesus that at no point is somehow less than or inferior to the identity of Emmanuel. Conversely, the emphatic resurrection promise of his presence with ‘all power’, ‘always’ and ‘to the end of the age’ inevitably reframes the narrative gospel parameters in their entirety for readers who return to reread its beginning in the light of its ending.

At the same time, it is quite true that Matthew never articulates precisely how Jesus’ presence works. He either neglects or refuses to localise that presence with any specifically sacramental focus, or indeed to reserve its spatial location straightforwardly either in heaven or on earth. It is instead both, coming and gaining space ‘on earth as it is in heaven’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Nevertheless, between the two end points of his great inclusio of ‘God with us’ (Matt 1.23 and 28.20), the cumulative effect of Matthew's narrative description delivers an affirmation of presence that is far stronger and richer than religious commonplaces of anonymous divine providence or assistance.Footnote ⁵⁶ The same Jesus who was Emmanuel as Mary's child promises his own abiding presence in the church's mission. That mission includes both outreach to the world and internal discernment, and it is manifest especially in the welcome and service of the least of his brothers and sisters. ‘Emmanuel’ is how he is ‘Jesus’: ‘saving his people’ (1.21) is what it means to be ‘God with us’ (1.23).