MetaCatholic

I nearly called this post “Jim West is wrong again”. It’s unlike me to find I need to respond to Jim twice in a row like this I’m not getting at him, but he really is wrong.

He has a strange attack on a commonplace idea today. He dislikes the way in which the Matthean infancy narrative is used to portray Jesus “to make a point about how Christians ought to behave towards aliens” and immigrants today which he finds “totally inappropriate and a misuse indeed”.

Now I agree with Jim that Matthew’s account is fundamentally theological and not historical, and I agree that it can be used simplistically. However, I really cannot agree that it is irrelevant, or indeed a misuse. Matthew’s intent is not simply to point to the fulfilment of prophecy, I think, though that is one of his primary concerns. It is also to show Jesus living out the experience of Israel, and his return from exile leads in the narrative to his symbolic passing through the Jordan at baptism. But Jesus is identified with Israel as the son of God who lives as an exile and foreigner in a strange land – in fact, the same strange land.

Yes, there are OT texts which make the ethical point very well, and the treatment of the alien and stranger there is based on the experience of Israel as alien and stranger, an experience with which Matthew identifies Jesus — the same Jesus who later says: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”. One cannot do away with the relevance of this christological fulfilment of Israel’s past in developing a theology of welcoming the stranger.

I also find it strange that Jim uses the story’s lack of historicity as a way of removing it from consideration. The portrayal of Jesus as a refugee, irrespective of its historicity, offers a powerful identification with those who run from power in fear of their lives.

The story in Matthew has nothing at all to do with an alien crossing a border and finding refuge. At all. Period.”

Saying this, he effectively says it doesn’t matter what the narrative is, it’s only the point that counts. For him the point is prophecy. But to take any story and assume the content of the story doesn’t matter, only the abstract theological point, is, it seems to me, to reject scripture in exactly the same way as those fundamentalists who reduce it to propositions because they find narrative too untidy. When most of our scripture is story, we need a better way of reading it than abstracting principles, points and propositions.

So, Jim West is wrong again. From another planet even!