MetaCatholic

The irony in tomorrow’s gospel reading (Matthew 9:9-13, 18-25) comes from the way in which the Revised Common Lectionary so often lengthens the Roman Catholic one on which it is based. The first half (which is the RC reading) centres on the focus on God’s love meeting human need: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” The second half is Matthew’s bowdlerisation of the story sandwich of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with a haemorrhage. Matthew’s drastic cutting down of Mark’s story loses virtually all the elements of human drama.

The (now unnamed) leader’s daughter is already dead, so there is no urgency. (What has Jesus done at this point to make anyone think he could raise the dead?) The woman’s episode is dealt with summarily; Jesus shows no ignorance about who touched him, and so there’s no need for a dialogue forcing the woman into the open. The resurrection / healing happens with no direct address from Jesus to the girl. It feels like Matthew needs to say human compassion is important, but actually he isn’t remotely interested in portraying it. Unfortunately that has been and is a far from an uncommon stance among us Christians. “God loves you” is a doctrine far more than an active attitude towards others.

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!

Today, in the old Roman calendar, was the feast of the Chair of St Peter. In some modern Anglican calendars (and I think some Lutheran ones also) the day is celebrated as the Confession of St Peter. Either way it looks back to the Matthean account of Peter’s confession of Jesus at Caesarea Philippi (Matt 16:16-19). It seems to make it an appropriate day to look at this tradition again.

There is a broad scholarly consensus that the story as we have it is a creative Matthean redaction. One of the few dissenters from this position was Ben Meyer in his book The Aims of Jesus. I doubt that it is possible to be precise about exactly what is Matthean redaction and what is not, but I offer the following two considerations.

There seems to be unanimous testimony that Jesus gave Simon the name Cephas / Peter: the Rock. Mark refers to it in passing (”So he appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter)” Mark 3:16) and Luke follows this almost word for word (Luke 6:14). John relates the naming in a dialogue: ” He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter).” (John 1:42). Paul on occasion in 1 Corinthians and Galatians refers to him as Cephas (and twice in Galatians as Peter) showing that this is not a case of being known by a Greek name, but goes back to an Aramaic original. What no-one but Matthew does is give a reason behind this naming, and while the wording of Matthew may well be in dispute, the reason Matthew’s Jesus gives certainly fits the leadership role ascribed to Peter elsewhere. There is a congruence between Jesus naming Peter, and the overwhelming tradition that Jesus gave Peter a special role.

Matthew’s gospel is unusual in the way it puts the word “church” on the lips of Jesus, something that happens nowhere else in the Jesus tradition. One of the scarcely noticed oddities of the New Testament is the universality of this language in the post-resurrection era, and the way in which it can be used for the whole of the Jesus community and for a particular instance of the community. No other term comes close to competing. Obviously the word has a respectable and meaningful LXX pedigree, which clearly informs its use. Whether that pedigree is enough to explain its origin is, to me at least, unclear – even doubtful. Equally, it has a clear socio-political context among the Pauline communities of the Mediterranean world. The inclusion of women and slaves in an ecclesia is deeply subversive of the social order, and suggests that the use of the word would not have been the most instinctive. Indeed, some of the problems Paul addresses at Corinth can only have been encouraged by the implications of the language, yet Paul continues to use it freely. It is, it seems to me, at least historically plausible that Matthew is right to show the term originating on the lips of Jesus. That is perhaps the simplest explanation for the universality of the word “church” as the name for the Jesus community, as a given name from the beginning, rather than the fruit of a theological reflection on a renewed or new Israel.

Neither of these points are conclusive, and they certainly don’t address the whole question of Matthew’s narrative of Caesarea Philippi. Yet perhaps they are good reasons for considering a larger historical core to the Matthean account than is normally credited.