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
Gospel of Matthew
READING MATTHEW 2: FAMILY WITH NEW BABY VISITED BY PAGAN PRIESTS, FORCED TO FLEE
Why does Matthew have only bits and pieces of the familiar Christmas story?
The story as we tell it each Christmas is a blend of elements from Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels. It’s possible that each writer had a rather different tradition and simply retold what he knew. But, as we’ve already seen, Matthew has some points to make about the nature of tradition and of God’s work in the world. It’s likely that, in chapter 2, he’s not only repeating what he’s heard, but using these stories to communicate with us about how God accomplishes things in our world.
Who were these “wise men from the East”? And what are they doing in the story?
The people our English translations call “wise men” Matthew calls Magoi. These were not generalized sages, but priests of the Persian religious tradition we call “Zoroastrian.” This religion has taken on a variety of forms, and we can’t be sure precisely what the theology of the Magi was. But since Matthew tells us that they discovered Jesus’ birth by reading the stars. we can assume that they were astronomers and astrologers. The two disciplines were not distinct from each other at the time, and the idea that the heavenly bodies influence events on earth was widely accepted. And Matthew seems quite comfortable here with the possibility that a “science” could bring people to an encounter with Jesus.
The fact that Joseph could claim descent from King David didn’t mean that he was wealthy or prominent; in fact, he and Mary seem to have been people of modest means. There would have been no news reports headed “Heir Born to Davidic Royal Line.” But the Magi saw things in the heavens that, according to their theories, meant a significant change of authority in the Jewish nation. Since most Magi lived in the Persian Empire, their trip meant crossing a heavily fortified border between two mutually hostile powers and poking their noses into the politics of a nation within the rival Roman Empire. They were thus complete strangers—neither Jewish nor Roman—when they came to honor the new child; and they would have been objects of curiosity and probably of some suspicion. But when they reached Judea, they recognized that their astrological knowledge was not sufficient to the task. They had to find out what the local Israelite tradition (yes, tradition again!) said about this new king, and they went to Jerusalem to consult the authorities. But, of course, the existing Jewish king, Herod, had a vested interest in making sure that no new claimant rose to claim his throne. And their visit, as a side-effect, set off a disastrous chain of events leading to the massacre of a large number of young children and forcing Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to become refugees.
Ah, there’s another question. What is a grim story like that doing here?
Well, modern Christians don’t like to dwell on it. Our forebears, however, honored the child victims on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28), also known as Childermass. And perhaps that feast day is newly relevant in an age when so many children are dying of war and hunger. The same applies to the plight of the Holy Family as refugees, fleeing to—or all places—Egypt. The country where there ancestors had been slaves was willing to be the place that saved their lives.
Both raise the question of how God can tolerate, much less work in the context of such evil. Matthew doesn’t try to answer that question. Maybe he even makes it seem worse when he says that Jeremiah foresaw the horror at Bethlehem (2:17-18); this, too, was in the tradition. And he argues that the prophets predicted that the family would Have to live for a time in Egypt (2:15) and then resettle at Nazareth (2:23). Sufferings is a known part of the tradition. The angels who keep stepping in and out of the picture to encourage, warn, or direct make it clear that God is still at work, even in the midst of all this horror. God doesn’t cause human evils, but God refuses to be excluded from human history by them. God can even create something out of human wrongs, if no better way is to b found.
And are the Magi in the tradition?
No, they’re another kind of problem because they’re not in the tradition. No one predicted them. We’re told nothing of their having any divine or angelic inspiration, except at the end of the story where they’re warned in a dream to sneak out of the country without Herod’s knowing. The point seems to be that they are simply and purely the wrong people to have here as principal celebrants of Jesus’ birth. Their only qualification for being present at this holy occasion (aside from their ability to scrutinize the stars) was their complete lack of qualifications. They’re the wrong ethnicity, the wrong religion, the wrong visitors. But, then, we’ve already seen that Jesus’ genealogy included some people who seemed equally out of place. Matthew is making a point here. The tradition can admit people most of us usually think should be quite firmly excluded from it.
The people who, according to the tradition, should have been celebrating are all missing from this occasion. The Jerusalem sages aren’t interested enough to accompany the Magi to Bethlehem. And Herod actually tries to kill the child. The Magi, by contrast, are drawn to Jesus without any advance qualifications.
The wonderful thing about the story is that, whether you see yourself more as an outsider like them or more as a religious insider, Matthew is saying there is room for you. But in some cases, it may be easier for outsiders to grasp the value and importance of Jesus than for insiders. Perhaps we who are insiders have to rediscover our outsiderness in order to be present at the wonder of Jesus’ birth.
Next up: SNEAKING A LOOK AT THE END OF THE STORY
READING MATTHEW 1: THE MONKEY WRENCH OF TRADITION GETS TOSSED INTO THE MACHINE OF TRADITION
Matthew doesn’t mean to be simple or completely clear. He prefers to show us puzzles and tie together things we wouldn’t have thought belonged together. He starts off sounding like a traditionalist—and he is. But of a very unusual sort. He knows the tradition itself is messy. Hre are some problems he raises—and some thoughts about what they point us toward:
Why does Matthew begin with something as boring as a genealogy? The first thing Matthew does here is to anchor his narrative securely in the Scriptures that he and his first readers knew and revered (what Christians now call the “Old Testament”). He wants us to understand that his is not a new or independent story, but continues a very old one. And so he starts out with a traditional sort of Israelite genealogy (1:1-17) like the ones you can find in Genesis. The point of such a genealogy is to tell you something about the person whose name concludes it: Who is he? Who are his family? Why is he significant to us?
Okay. We see Abraham, David and a few other famous names. But why the whole list? And why does he divide it into three equal parts?
He wants every link securely in place, But, yes, he also makes a big point of identifying three eras of equal length, covering the ups and downs of ancient Israel’s history. The first era (1:2-6a) runs from the earliest beginnings of the people of Israel through slavery in Egypt and the Exodus to the time that they emerged into the world as a significant regional power. The second era (1:6b-11) begins with the triumphant reign of King David and traces the ups and (more often) downs of his descendants as kings. The third era (1:12-16) begins with the fall of the kingdom and covers the exile in Babylon and the long era of imperial subjection down to Jesus’ birth. Three ages: rise, glory, after-the-fall. Jesus is connected to them all. And being a descendant of Abraham and of David, he is identified as the continuation of their story.
But why are the exact numbers of generations important to him?
Fourteen may not seem meaningful to us. But think of three fourteens as equalling six sevens and you’ll see that Matthew is playing on the six days of creation in Genesis and the six workdays of the Israelite week while seven recalls God’s rest after creating the world and the Sabbath rest that follows the work week. With Jesus, we enter the seventh seven, an era of sabbath. This gives us a hint that Matthew, for all his deep respect for the tradition and his insistence on continuity, also sees change arriving in the figure of Jesus.
And why do these particular women crop up here? More famous women like Sarah and Rebecca get left out.
Yes, this is quite odd. Genealogies were basically father-to-son lists because this is what the ancient Israelite idea of descent focused on. But Matthew has searched out precisely those women in the family history that are most problematic for the whole business of genealogies.
Matthew’s contemporaries were very concerned about purity of Israelite descent, and one strand of thought, which eventually won out, held that only the child of an Israelite mother could be considered an Israelite. Yet, Matthew points out the presence of two Canaanite women in Jesus’ ancestry—Tamar (1:3; cf. Gen. 38) and Rahab (1:5; cf. Josh. 2 and 6:22-25), one Moabite woman—Ruth (1:5; cf. the Book of Ruth), and one woman whose ancestry is unknown but who had been married to a Hittite—Bathsheba (1:1:6; cf. 2 Sam. 11). What’s more, these women were not only non-Israelites, but each had at least some shadow of sexual impropriety attached to her story. Tamar seduced her father-in-law in a way that led to her being accused of prostitution, though she vindicated herself of that charge. Rahab is said to have had a house of prostitution. Ruth actively initiated sexual relations with Boaz in the field. And Bathsheba was forced into adultery by David himself.
Then, when we look at vs. 16, we see that Matthew doesn’t close the crucial final link of the genealogy. Where tradition expects him to say that Joseph was the father of Jesus, he only says that Joseph was “the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born.” (This is quite deliberate, as we’ll see further on in Matthew 1.)
But why would Matthew construct a traditional genealogy only to underline the problems in it?
Matthew’s traditionalism, it seems, is of a different sort from what we usually mean by the term. We tend to mean a perspective that conceives the tradition as clear, perfect, faultless, and essentially closed. Every thing that’s important is already there in the tradition, and no one is to to question it.. Matthew, however, doesn’t work this way. He doesn’t owe allegiance to a single, organized, sanitized version of the scriptural story. He brings the whole story with all its messiness into play. Traditionalism was becoming a smooth-running machine of religion and life in his time, and he throws a monkey wrench into the works. But his monkey wrench is also traditional—forged out of the most traditional of materials. In Matthew we have a traditionalist who, to use modern terms, is both conservative and liberal: conservative in that he believes the tradition is necessary to knowing who we are, liberal in that he knows the tradition is actually very diverse and has always been open to question and interpretation and even development.
So we can’t expect Matthew to write a comfortable sort of story, one that we can cling to without having to question our presuppositions. Whether you think of yourself as liberal or conservative, there will be things you won’t like. If you insist on things being one way or the other, Matthew will say to you, “No, you’re going to have take both together. You can’t find your way in the presence of God without taking account of the experience and insights of your forebears. But you’ll be just as certain to go astray if you think a pre-packaged tradition will settle all your questions and problems.”
So, is Mary following in the steps of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba?
It seems like a shocking notion, especially given later Christians’ veneration of Mary as a more or less perfect person. But, yes, she is indeed in their company. Nor is it bad company in the genealogical sense. They were all ancestors of greatness. Judah himself had to admit that Tamar was more righteous than he. Rahab saved Israelite lives. Ruth is a supreme model of love and faithfulness. Bathsheba, for all her misfortunes, was the mother of the wise Solomon.
Matthew, remember, doesn’t make Joseph Jesus’ father, and he tells an interesting story about that (1:18-25). Joseph realizes Mary is already pregnant and thinks he should break off their engagement. It goes against his grain, since he’s a kindly person, but the tradition expects it. It takes a special revelation to persuade him that God’s work has never fit securely inside narrow definitions of tradition. The angel that appears to him in a dream knows what’s bothering him and doesn’t so much relieve his anxiety as point him toward a broader perspective on God’s work in the world. Mary’s pregnancy is a gift of the Holy Spirit for the redemption of Israel and a fulfillment of prophecy. However unsettling it is, it, too, is part of the tradition, foretold long before by Isaiah. Joseph obeys the angel. And just to make his non-paternity completely clear, Matthew assures us that he didn’t have intercourse with Mary until she had delivered the child that was not his own biological offspring but was nonetheless being entrusted to him as his son.
Wait a minute! Wasn’t Mary a virgin? Luke’s Gospel says that she was. Matthew says nothing directly on the topic, though we can see it as an implication of the angel’s message. But Matthew’s main point seems to be that we have a genealogy here with a number of irregularities, Jesus’ own birth being the climactic instance.
So what is the spiritual point of all this? Or is Matthew just playing games?
From the perspective of Christian faith and life, Matthew’s message thus far is both liberating and alarming. He takes a fairly tidy version of tradition and breaks it open by insisting that we look at the untidy side of that same tradition. God’s work goes forward not in some ideal world, but in the one we actually inhabit.
Happily, what comes next is in the more accessible mode of narrative. Next up: FAMILY WITH NEW BABY VISITED BY PAGAN PRIESTS, HAS TO FLEE.