■ 43
The Jewish leaders go even further with their ridicule and in so doing use
words of the godless from Ps 21:9 LXX. The words are even more malicious than
those of v. 42. There the Jewish leaders challenged Jesus to save himself; now
they speak of God: “He trusts in God.” God should save him, and he should do it
right away! They thereby expose themselves in their own godlessness. They end
by referring also to Jesus’ divine sonship and state that he claims to be God’s
Son. We probably have echoes here of the mocking words of Wis 2:18: “If the
righteous man is God’s son (υἱὸς θεοῦ) … , he will deliver
him (ῥύσεται αὐτόν).” Matthew is probably thinking of the
way of the suffering righteous man depicted in Wis 2:5. However, for him “God’s
Son” is much more than an exemplary righteous man from the Bible. He is the one
whom God himself has revealed as his only Son (Matt 3:17; 17:5), who is
intimately united with the Father (11:27), whom people confess as their savior
(14:33; cf. 16:16). It is this one
who in the manner of the biblical righteous man goes the way of obedience. Only
when “God’s Son” (θεοῦ υἱός) is invested with
all of the connotations of the Matthean understanding of Son of God, of which
his obedience to God’s will is only one, does it become clear what it means
that the Son of God, Jesus, does not come down from the cross but goes the way
of obedience. Then it also becomes clear how deep the truth is that the Jewish
leaders in their malicious irony unknowingly state. (Ulrich Luz, Matthew
21-28: A Commentary [Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the
Bible; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2005], 539)
In 27:43, Matthew quotes Ps 22:8 with echoes from the Wisdom of
Solomon, where the righteous one “calls himself a child of God” (2:13) and God
“will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries” (2:18). Twice in Matthew
the voice from heaven has said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am
well pleased” (3:17; 17:5). The verb “to deliver” (hryomai, 27:43) links Matthew with both Ps 22:8 and Wis 2:18 while
echoing the Lord’s Prayer (6:13; see also 26:39–42). Not surprisingly, the hope
of deliverance is repeated frequently in the NT (Luke 1:74; Rom 15:31; 2 Thess
3:2; 2 Pet 2:9). (R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary [The
New Testament Library; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021],
558)
