As I am preparing for tomorrow's ten minutes sharing for the Good Friday service, I found some interesting things which I did not know before. I realized that to Jesus' Jewish enemies, he seemed to have failed in all possible ways to prove himself as their Messiah. Firstly, he was unable to save himself. Secondly, God did not save him which meant to them the ultimate sign that he was not God's Messiah for Israel. And to put the nail on the coffin, he seemed to them to have called upon someone of a lower rank than him. To them, Jesus had called upon Elijah in a desperate attempt to save himself. His enemies might have told these signs of a failed messianic figure to everyone in Jerusalem or beyond in order to prevent them from believing in the Lord.
I was contemplating. How much of this factor was affecting Matthew's writing of this chapter when he borrowed from the Markan source? That at the second level (refer previous post), how much of echoes of Psalm 22 found in this chapter which had been used to interpret the actions of the perpetrators was used to turn the tables against the accusations that Jesus was not the Messiah? Was Matthew purposefully trying to point his audience to the fact that the very actions of the perpetrators before, during and after Jesus' crucifixion were actually fulfilling the prophetic verses in Psalm 22 that he was indeed the Messiah? Possible, provided that the audience knew about Psalm 22.
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