AS WE approach the new liturgical year, those of us called to preach through the lectionary will be blowing the dust off our biblical-studies lecture notes and getting our minds, once more, around what is distinctive about the Matthaean approach to the Good News of Jesus.

Personally, I’m more inclined to the church Fathers and Mothers than to the latest results of form — or historical — criticism, although there is, of course, a place for both. I find the association, in St Jerome, of each Gospel with one of the four living creatures round the throne particularly helpful, both because it gives me vivid images with which to think and remember what is unique to each Gospel, and also because it reminds me that the Gospels themselves are living, active powers, and not dead texts.

Here’s how Jerome puts it in the preface to his commentary on Matthew: “The book of Ezekiel also proves that these four Gospels had been predicted much earlier. Its first vision is described as follows: ‘And in the midst there was a likeness of four animals. Their countenances were the face of a man and the face of a lion and the face of a calf and the face of an eagle.’

“The first face of a man signifies Matthew, who began his narrative as though about a man: ‘The book of the generation of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ The second [face signifies] Mark in whom the voice of a lion roaring in the wilderness is heard: ‘A voice of one shouting in the desert: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ The third [is the face] of the calf which prefigures that the Evangelist Luke began with Zachariah the priest. The fourth [face signifies] John the Evangelist who, having taken up eagle’s wings and hastening toward higher matters, discusses the Word of God.”

He is absolutely right about St Matthew. The genealogy locates Jesus in the midst of tangled family stories of the Old Testament, and interestingly goes out of its way to mention some of the strong and exceptional women in his family line. Ruth, for example, and Bathsheba (tagged, slyly, as “Uriah’s wife”). Perhaps Jesus heard their stories from Mary, who is, of course, also named in the otherwise mainly male genealogy. Jesus’s humanity, as well as his Jewish heritage and messiahship, are essential to Matthew.

In Sounding the Seasons, I have a sonnet for each Evangelist, exploring the distinctiveness of each of their emblems, and evoking some of the insights and paradoxes unique to their particular telling of the tale. Here’s the one for Matthew:

Matthew

First of the four, Saint Matthew is the Man;
A gospel that begins with generation.
Family lines entwine around the Son;
Born in Judea, born for every nation,
Born under Law that all the Law of Moses
Might be fulfilled and flower into Grace.
A hidden thread of words and deeds discloses
Eternal love within a human face.
This is the gospel of the great reversal:
A wayside weed is Solomon in glory,
The smallest sparrow’s fall is universal
And Christ the heart of every human story —
“I will be with you, though you may not see,
And all you do, you do it unto me.”