Sneaking a look! Really!? Isn’t that taboo for serious readers?
If you’re reading a whodunit, it will certainly spoil the surprise. But, face it, in all likelihood you already know the basic story of Matthew’s Gospel and how it ends. So there’s no need for a spoiler alert here. And taking a peek at the end can be useful, especially when we’re reading a book that, for so many of us, is almost too familiar. This way, we can focus not just on the broad outline of the story, but on some details of what Matthew is particularly interested in. So turn to Matthew 28, which starts at dawn on the first Easter Sunday with two women going to the tomb.
Back to the women, eh?
Yes, they were featured in the opening genealogy, and here they are again. This time, two women named Mary: Mary Magdalene who is mentioned in all four of the New Testament gospels as having gone to the tomb and “the other Mary.” It’s impossible to know who Matthew has in mind here. Mark mentions “James’s Mary” as being at the resurrection scene (16:1). Luke mentions “Clopas’s Mary” (24:10). It could be either of them or someone else, since it was a common name.
Matthew may give us a hint, though. At the death of Jesus on the cross, Mary Magdalene is accompanied by “Mary the mother of James and Joseph”—the names of two of Jesus’ brothers (27:56). After the closing of the tomb, it is Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” who sit by it, keeping watch (27:61). The easiest identification here is that she is the same Mary named a few sentences before. And the same person is probably the “other Mary” of the final chapter, too.
But it seems important to him that there are women here, echoing the women who play such an important role at the beginning of Matthew. If Mary Magdalene is mentioned first that is because she was acknowledged by all early Christians as the discoverer of the empty tomb. The “other” Mary is not made the primary witness, perhaps precisely because she was Jesus’ mother and might have been thought less credible. In any case, an angel appears to them just as happened to Joseph and the Magi earlier on—but this time in broad daylight, not in a dream.
The seal of proof is placed on the angel’s message by the appearance of Jesus himself (28:9-10). And not a man in sight in that overwhelmingly patriarchal world except for Jesus himself! In his opening chapter Matthew was questioning the overwhelmingly male orientation of his culture. Here, the greatest treasure of the gospel is imparted to two women. The male disciples will hear of it only secondarily through them.
Wouldn’t this make the whole resurrection story less credible in that culture?
Undoubtedly. He and his readers lived in a world organized in terms of a kind of moral separation of duties between the sexes. Men carried the public face of the family, women guarded the private world. Men could testify in court, women couldn’t. But Matthew, as we’ll see again and again, has no interest in making things easy. He may or may not have been able to imagine radical change in the culture he knew. We are all bound by cultural norms in ways of which we’re often unaware, and perhaps he would find our modern world as hard to understand as we find his ancient one. But he did insist that women were as much a part of God’s work in the world as men.
Isn’t all this sounding awfully modern?
I understand the concern, and I don’t want to “modernize” Matthew’s Gospel. But keep this thought in mind anyway. The test of it will be to see whether it helps us understand more in Matthew’s Gospel than we could otherwise.
But in the meantime, there’s another part of the story here (28:11-15) that’s understandable in both ancient and modern contexts—the self-protective efforts of the authorities to suppress the truth. After the Resurrection, the authorities in charge of both civil and religious affairs paid the guards at the tomb to lie about what had happened. We will find Matthew attacking this kind of thing often: religion is a good and valuable thing, but the authorities, including the religious authorities, are not always to be trusted. When religion gets entangled with status, it betrays itself.
Christians have a long history of taking this passage and others like it attacks on Judaism. Some modern scholars also read them that way. I think this is a mistake. Matthew attacks the authorities not for their doctrines but for their failure to live up to them. It is a problem equally threatening, in Matthew’s thinking, to the emerging Christian leadership.
But doesn’t he go on to have Jesus commission an authoritative Christian leadership?
The closing passage of the Gospel (28:16-20) is often referred to as the “Great Commission.” Some read it as Jesus’ commissioning of the apostles to be the first bishops of the church. Others take it as Jesus’ authorization of world missions. All very upbeat, right?
Not exactly, the key verse here is, as often, the difficult one that gets ignored: “When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.” The women believed the angel even before they saw Jesus; some of the male disciples don’t altogether trust the risen Christ himself. There are two problems with religious leaders, it seems: one is that they will sacrifice principle to expedience, the other that they don’t really quite trust God at all.
Right up to the end, Matthew is still throwing his wrench into the works. What are we to do if we can’t trust the authorities of religion, whether Jewish or Christian? He does give us at least a hint here. The disciples are told to teach people to follow everything Jesus commanded them. It’s Jesus’ teaching that can save us from falling into either the self-interest of the priests and elders or the doubts of the disciples. In the meantime, we are to remember that, while both groups are pre-eminently religious, neither is perfect. Need I say that every religious person is potentially included in this indictment?
And, as to our continued reading of Matthew, it should be clear from this peek at the ending that Matthew’s tendency in chapter 1 to set tradition against tradition is not merely his starting point. We should be looking for how it may show up elsewhere.
Next up: EVENTS TURN A CORNER WITH JOHN THE BAPTIST
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