2023-02-23 | Matthew 1-3 | The Jewish Annotated New Testament & Remembering The Historical Jesus

I’m reading from Levine and Brettler’s The Jewish Annotated New Testament, which I received as a Christmas gift from one of my housemates last year. I didn’t think too much about this choice at first – it was clear to me that I wanted some guiding text as I read, and this book is just what I have on hand. But there’s a little more to it; I suspect that reading from the Bible in such a deliberate way would not even have crossed my mind if I did not have this Jewish-annotated version. Bible-reading feels strangely associated with evangelicalism to me; I do not feel particularly comfortable with Bibles as a whole, whereas this book feels much more comfortable.

But that means that I’m reading, well, Jewish annotations while I read the Gospel text. Which is great! There’s lots of context that I’m glad to have. But it’s also more jarring than I was expecting. There’s a first box of additional content entitled “The Virgin Birth” which, after discussing the relevant Hebrew and Greek vocabulary, goes on to say

Traditional Christian readings favor a reference to a miraculous conception. However, some interpreters argue that Matthew was not speaking of a literal conception that took place apart from sexual intercourse. Others propose that Matthew borrowed from pagan traditions, in which a male god engages in intercourse with a human woman (cf. Gen 6.1-4); or that the tradition of miraculous conception arose in order to explain what would otherwise be seen as an illegitimate conception; still others see behind Matthew’s account a midrash similar to Jewish ones concerning the miraculous birth of Moses. (4)

I… woah. I exist in Christian circles where no one is really suggesting that there was a miraculous conception, and also in circles where people are pretty delighted to talk about historical, linguistic, and theological context. But I have not actually ever heard anyone talk about why our tradition describes a miraculous conception, except maybe to gloss over the relationship with Moses. Certainly I have not heard anyone suggest that the alternative was an illegitimate conception!

More generally, I’ve never paid attention to discussions of the Historical Jesus; they seemed uninteresting and more or less pointless to me. I’m Christian because I find that these stories and this tradition capture something important about the world, enough that I feel under-their-claim, somehow, and will be living in dialogue with them. In college in particular I was big into historicity not being truth; indeed, an understanding of poetical truth, truth which is not simply accuracy, was a vital step in my coming to identify myself as a Christian. But damn. Do I then end up believing something like, yes the Messiah has come, but no, uh, it wasn’t really Jesus of Nazareth? Yes, God has become incarnate, and we can think about all the implications of that… but no, no, uh, not in that guy? (at least not any more than in anyone else.) Because those sentences sound really stupid, even to me. Like, shoot, what do I do about the fact that there really was a Jewish dude in early A.D. who was baptized and crucified? Which, yikes, somehow I feel very weak right now, and like I probably have been deceiving myself a long time, but I also feel dissatisfied with my options. Like this is a moment of real naivety; I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Other notes

• I’d love to hear what more people have to say re: the ways in which Jesus is set out as a new Moses, but also as superior to Moses (??)

Matthew 1:

• Jesus as “God saves”; Emmanuel as “God with us”; and the ways in which salvation and God’s presence are the same thing and different things
• I don’t know enough about the destruction of the Temple
• There was an annotation that just explained the Holy Spirit as “God’s creative and enduring presence” and… yes, yes indeed. It was funny to me that the phrase could be explained so bluntly and succinctly.
• “Jews traditionally saw salvation as part of the covenant… and understood continuing divine presence to be part of the ideal future” - I had never actually put these different perspectives on salvation side-by-side before. Feels like there’s a lot more here.
• All this fulfilling-what-had-been-spoken-by-the-prophets stuff is weird to me. An annotation says that in context the references don’t even make sense. This doesn’t feel uncomfortable to me, though, it just makes me want to go back and re-read Armstrong’s The Lost Art of Scripture.

Matthew 2:

• Matthew has a negative view of Jerusalem
• The star really is kind of strange and sweet
• I almost would not have been able to tell you all this about the Magi and King Herod and little Jesus going to Egypt and the Massacre of the Innocents

Matthew 3:

• This chapter, and especially the baptism of Jesus, I found so powerful.
• John the Baptist eating “locusts and wild honey” feels so symbolically rich, it’s beautiful and powerful and kind of wild. Judgement, desolation, promise, abundance, I don’t even know.
• I had a sense of not totally getting what was going on… like, did Pharisees and Sudducees want to get baptized? I looked it up online later (lol) and the uhhh hermeneutics.stackexchange.com answer is no, they were just coming to check out the baptizing, and that John’s invective has almost an edge of sarcasm. But idk about that either. There is, indeed, a lot I feel like I am missing, which is honestly kind of relieving.
• I even love this statement, that John the Baptist baptizes with water for repentance, but that another wil come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. Repentance on the one hand, purification on the other. The drama of that phrasing, burning the chaff with unquenchable fire seems fitting for John here, and it seems grand and high-stakes and helpful. (It doesn’t read to me as too scary, though that’s only because I’ve had enough liberal-progressive-Episcopalians vision through this text for me.)
• Jesus getting baptized is one of the few things historians think actually happened, in part because it is kind of strange for Jesus to be baptized by John for repentance if he’s divine. I don’t really know what to make of this, but I do like it. It feels like it starts him off from this more obviously human place.

2023-02-24 | Matthew 4-6

I guess I was being a little misleading before, in that it isn’t the case that I am particularly unfamiliar with the Gospels. I’ve been hearing these stories my whole life, and in particular in these last years. But I’ve just never put them all together before? And in some ways, it feels like they aren’t meant to be put all together. Like I think as a kid I assumed the Gospels had all sorts of connective text, and that it was only when I started reading the Gospel readings aloud at morning prayer that I really realized how little fluff there is, that it really is one heavy hitting bit after another. But it’s still really strange to see everything linked together as-if-temporally in this way.

But in particular, I had no concept that some things come before other things, in the Gospels. Which in retrospect makes sense… but I think sermons about the Syrophonecian woman were the only time that this progression was ever framed for me.

Matthew 4:

• It’s a little strange to me that immediately after we get Jesus’s baptism, do we get Jesus being tempted by the devil.
• I like it that Jesus gets hungry, that in the midst of all this divine, there also is this humanity.
• All of these responses being from the First Testament makes Jesus seem like a character in a story; again a little grand.
• In the baptism, there was this moment of being before John, and then the heavens breaking open; and here is this tussle with the devil, and then the angels come. It’s so direct.
• Peter and his brother just immediately following Jesus is even more amazing in context.

Matthew 5:

• I’ve heard of The Sermon on the Mount, of course, but I would not have been able to tell you which bits and pieces were actually included in it.
• I was surprised that the Beatitudes are this first bit of preaching we get from Jesus at length, in Matthew.
• My heart always sinks when I read the Beatitudes; there’s the sense that this spells bad news for me.
  • In church, when we get to passages that talk about sin being bad, the preacher will often make this distinction between like, yeah, the sin is bad, it is a way of being far from God, not because you’ll separately be punished for it. And I can sort of read the Beatitudes either way; either e.g. that internal to being meek, somehow, ends you up with inheriting the earth, or that the separate Godly reward for being meek is inheriting the earth. But these are meant to be surprising. And if it was all about the kingdom of heaven, it wouldn’t seem like there was such an internal/external difference. But idk if it works to say that beng comforted just goes along with mourning. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
  • Regardless of all that, though, whenever I read these, I’m like, okay, here I am in all of my privilege and comfort, with probably still some sense of entitlement. I do not find myself on this list. Which maybe means, how far from God I am! But I don’t know what I could do to change that. And this self-thinking seems against the point.
  • So I take the Beatitudes and hold them and try to see the world through them, but I do feel like I don’t know how to respond to them; and I feel maybe frightened and distanced from them, not quite defensive, but maybe just a little spooked.
• I wish that the priest at my current parish had preached about being salt of the earth, or the light of the world. How am I to understand the you here? Still I feel hopeful reading it, that there is something good with us, at least.
• “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”
• Damn is it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven. (“unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”)
• I feel more or less unfazed by the, “if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” rhetoric – in part because I do think the language here is meant to be hyperbolic, and in part because it just seems kind of reasonable. Like, you think your hand is all that important, maybe, but it is not that important compared to sinning vs not sinning? Like I’m not tempted to cut off my hand right now, because I don’t get the sense that it is my right hand that is causing me to sin – but it seems very in keeping at least with the drama that like, yeah, being in right relationship is in fact of utmost importance, and should come before a lot of other things that seem very important to me but that are ultimately less important.
• I LOVE the bit about not swearing, not by God, not by the earth, not by your own head, not by anything at all: because at some level, you cannot alone cause much to happen. One of the things I love most about Christianity is its setting out of our finitude; this commandment not to swear feels like a severe application of that.
• It is strange and lovely to me that the reasoning given for loving your enemies is to be more like God the Father, who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Sun and rain, weather, almost agricultural; I guess it is interesting that, among all this kingdom-of-heaven stuff that is so limited, there are these comments about earthly sustenance just kind of going around.

Matthew 6:

• Praying and almsgiving in secret seems more or less par for the course. Strange to match this to evangelism, though. It also always makes me think of EA, and their calls to talk about charity to encourage others to do the same.
• I always feel kind of called out by the whole, don’t use so many words in your prayers, thing. It is not that I am particularly verbose in prayer…? I guess I don’t just get the prescription here. Definitely don’t say lots of words so that you think you’ll get heard, fine! But are there other reasons you might say lots of words…? Maybe this is just strange to me because it so clearly lays out prayer as communication with God the Father. So like, no there aren’t other reasons, you don’t need lots of words, God already knows what you need, you don’t need to ask.
• Matthew does lay out really clearly, if you forgive others you will be forgiven, and if not, not.
• I would not have been able to tell you that “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” comes from the Bible, nor that the context was so clear, treasures in heaven rather than treasures on earth. I am not sure what role the susceptibility of earthly wealth to rust and thieves is meant to do; surely permanence is not the reason to prefer treasures in heaven?
• This section on wealth is so clear, one and not the other: you cannot serve God and wealth.
• “Are you not of more value than they?” i.e. the birds :( it doesn’t really change the reading of the passage but also maybe I don’t want to say that we are of more value than the birds, you know?
• Paraphrasing: don’t worry about what you will wear or eat or drink; have faith in God to provide, and focus first on the righteousness of God || don’t worry about tomorrow; today’s trouble is enough for today.
• These passages are very clear that God needs to come before wealth; it is less clear whether this precludes accumulation of resources at all? Also it is interesting that these are all in-and-of-themselves spiritual reasons, and not e.g. distributional inequality reasons.

2023-02-26 | Matthew 7-8

I’m very glad that I am conceiving of this project as a quick read through the Gospels to get a baseline sense of how I feel about the holy text of the religion I ostensibly subscribe to… rather than as a bible study itself? Otherwise this pace would be totally unsustainable; there is simply too much here, I would want to be going verse by verse, and with commentaries. I have the sense that there’s so much here I don’t understand. And also that that’s kind of relieving, actually, for scripture! It had better be deep! But this is also strange for Lent; strange to be judging rather than learning, strange because I don’t know the answer to the question of to what degree I am hoping to be moved.

Matthew 7:

• “For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” I will need ot think about whether this seems true to me? About prayer working, even if it doesn’t work the way you expect? (I’m a little worried that perspective will reduce this to tautology or contradiction.)
• Annotation to the golden rule, is that Matthew sees it as a guide for interpreting all other laws, not as substitute for the rest of Torah.
• Right action, right action, right action
• It is striking to me, as well as the crowds, that Jesus teaches on his own authority rather than appeal to precedent.

Matthew 8:

• I can’t tell whether Jesus telling the leper to say nothing to anything is a mindfucky cult leader thing, or a very reasonable God on earth thing, or just a practical we needed to make this make sense thing.
• Weeping and gnashing of teeth sounds so severe and it sort of is but it really sort of isn’t? Sadness and frustration in the outer darkness is a very different vibe than, like, hellfire, and maybe a very fitting one.
• “Go; let it be done for you according to your faith” – I always forget that this is a thing, that more faith is supposed to here mean better (??) results.
• Jesus can control the weather, we are told.
• In the annotation to the herd of pigs perishing (with the demons) in the water, the annotation reads “the story illustrates Jesus’ authority over evil sprits; pigs can swim” and that really tickled me for reasons I do not understand. I think part of it is just that this story is so strange, that part of this showcase of Jesus’s power, sending out the demons, also includes killing lots of pigs? I get it that they aren’t kosher though.

2023-02-28 | Matthew 9-11

I didn’t mean to be writing quite as many notes as I have been, and I hope that soon they continue to get more brief as I get acquainted with this project… unless that’s at odds with the project itself!

Matthew 9:

• I had always been sort of confused about why telling the paralyzed man to stand up, and him standing up, is supposed to show that Jesus has the authority to forgive sins; it seemed like the point was sort of that forgiving sins is a bigger deal than getting paralytics to walk. But ick is it actually linking those things more? Or is something else going on here?
• Pretty sure that at morning prayer we sing an antiphon that is about desiring mercy more than sacrifice, I should go find that – it’s a Hosea text. It’s interesting here; Jesus with the tax collectors, saying that he has come to call the sinners rather than the righteous, saying, "Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I don’t see how it all fits together. Is the Hosea text being used here to be about right relationship, rather than righteous religious motions? Is it Jesus himself showcasing the mercy-not-sacrifice stance? Maybe this is why it does make sense to lead into the question about Jesus’ disciples not fasting?
• New wine put into fresh wineskins so as to not destroy the old wineskins as preserving both biblical law and Jesus’ interpretation of it.
• I’m familiar with most of the passages, but it is strange to see them all stuck together. I also don’t remember reading the last bit, v. 35-38, that has this kind of wider narrative text.

Matthew 10:

• I don’t have many memories of these missionary instructions to the disciples.
• The annotations call out that the mission is restricted to Jews here ar Matthew 10 and only gets expanded to include Gentiles at 28.19
• Oh boy is hospitality necessary and expected!
• All this about family members betraying each other feels like a little much? Apparently this is a Messianic age thing – this is quoted from Micah, more or less – but, yeah, it’s a lot. Also “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
• There are so many biconditionals.

Matthew 11:

• I like what Jesus says to the crowd about John – it feels literary and vivid, although I feel like I don’t know what it says. All the questions, the description of the energy of the people riled up by John and Jesus and then the comparison of the generation to children sitting in the marketplace complaining.
• No idea what’s going on with these three cities… Capernaum is where Jesus made his home? back in 5:13? so uh oops @ them not responding well.
• And then suddenly we get to the my-yoke-is-easy-and-my-burden-is-light passage.

2023-03-01 | Matthew 12-14

So there is Judaism, and there is Christianity, and they are two separate religions, and how did we get here? And reading the Gospels today was was the first time when I felt a sense that like – yeah, I get it, you can feel it here, the energy around Jesus, and I can imagine through time, how this would be divisive. And it was the first day when I imagined what it would be like to choose Christianity? I think, growing up, Judaism always seemed like a better religion than Christianity. I don’t actually want to compare religions against each other in this way, I do think that’s silly. But I had plenty of holy envy for Judaism, and yet had never really considered what parts of Christianity I really do value/believe/feel called to live within; I had never really realized that there could be things I like about Christianity that really are distinctively Christian.

Matthew 12:

• Jesus here framed here as abiding Torah while yet reframing Sabbath law. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” quoted again.
• I love the way the stretching out of the hand, and it being restored, punctuates this passage. It’s narratively powerful.
• Curing, curing, so much healing.
• Another charge that it is by Beelzebul that Jesus drives out demons; Jesus says, no, if he’s driving out the demons, he definitely has to be against Satan.
• And then there’s the passage on blaspheming the Holy Spirit, that that will not be forgiven. I have always felt confused at this point, and perhaps more than a little spooked. I want so much to believe that everything is forgivable. But returning to this passage now, I feel less afraid, and more sad. I need to think more about what a collapsed sense of causality means for God’s forgiveness. But taking up the collapsed-causality forgiveness, this sense that whatever the results were were somehow in the action itself, this feels less like God refusing to forgive Holy-Spirit-blasphemers, and more like it opens up the possibility that there is a point of no return; that it is possible to be so hard-hearted to the divine as to close yourself off completely. I don’t think that’s common. But is it possible? I feel more sad than afraid at the possibility. There are still questions then though, why we were created this way, or if we have co-created ourselves in this way. I don’t know. But I am imagine engaging with that question, rather than raging against it.
• The passage about knowing the tree by its fruit made me laugh; I thought the very different but structurally similar case about epistemic practices that would lead one to quite a different conclusion, where it’s so clearly possible to arrive to a right conclusion by terrible epistemic practices. (and you don’t want to reject someone’s conclusions just because you reject their methodology! it isn’t biconditional that way!) – but uh yeah this is maybe one place where I am departing in style and mood from Biblical text. What would it look like to take this more seriously?
• Jesus disavowing his mother and brothers, pointing to the disciples, saying that whoever does the will of God is his family - made me kind of sad.

Sometimes in church, we talk about Jesus as being wry, or we talk about the jokes or exaggerations that are harder to pick up 2000 years later. I’m having a little trouble squaring that as I read through Matthew; I think it is probably right, and also, Jesus’s personality just does seem kind of big and grand so far?

Matthew 13:

• Parables! Always make me think of being a kindergartener in Catholic school, they LOVED the imagery of the mustard seed, and also had a station where we could make bread dough bc yeast.
• I had never imagined Jesus sitting in a boat while telling parables to a crowd on the beach, that’s kind of funny.
• Parable of the sower seems actually strangely apt.
• The exaggeration of the parables of mustard seed and yeast always surprise me. The annotation here actually suggests that these parables are parodies; I don’t know what it would mean to understand them as parodies. I do think that the mustard plant becoming a tree (“greatest of the shrubs”) is ironic, that this is heavyhanded and exaggerated. But I don’t know how to take it. Also I did not realize that three measures of flour was quite that much flour (~60 pounds). Something strange and confusing and surprising? I guess that’s the case with several of these.
• And then to his hometown, where people are like, woah dude, we know you, and he does not do many deeds of power, because of their unbelief. I wonder why this was included? How did this make its way into the Gospels? I almost wanted to ask about historical accuracy, if that was why, although I almost don’t know how to formulate that question; though the annotations remind me that Jeremiah was also rejected by his own people, so maybe this is just a callback to that. I love it though, that this is an element included, this strangeness of returning to one’s hometown.

Matthew 14:

• I did go and search the lectionary to see if it includes the beheading of John the Baptist. (I think it does not, not on a Sunday, but may on a weekday.) I knew vaguely that this was a biblical thing, did not know the details, but was also like, I absolutely do not remember ever talking about this in church. So, that’s one thing.
• After the feeding of the 5000, I didn’t realize that he made the disciples go off on the boat while he dispersed the crowds, such that he had time alone to pray on the mountain, and that that was why he had to pull the whole walking-on-water thing. I like this vision of Jesus having some time alone in that moment.

2023-03-02 | Matthew 15-17

A friend of mine is in Jerusalem this year studying Jewish texts; and she told me of her discomfort with a conversation that had edged around suggesting that Christianity is idolatrous. But it was almost relieving to hear. How many times have I heard Christians edge around suggesting awful things about Judaism? Anti-semitism runs deep, and Christian hegemony runs deep, and it is impossible to hear those conversations without that context. And still, there is some sense in which, the perspectives are just different, and almost (though possibly not quite actually) at odds; and that there’s something dear and worth holding gently, in that. I would like to have an understanding of Jesus that is all the more nuanced for this concern of idolatry - and likewise, I wonder about perspectives on e.g. religious law that are developed also in dialogue with, yeah, what Jesus is talking about? (Apart from literally just the Second Testament itself, funnily enough.)

Also, I feel kind of silly writing all of this down, I almost feel mortified, because these thoughts are so basic. And yet that’s also the point, a little bit? A first introduction. Sometimes I google things I don’t understand, and there are always so many people trying to explain. People really care about this text. It is worth engaging with, it is worth being a beginner with, it is worth getting a sense of. Sometimes I have been worried too that as a Lenten practice this is leaning far too much into thinking, rather than praying; and yet it does seem like the right thing to be doing, it seems like exactly what I need to be doing, and it is different than anything I have done before. I guess it does feel like preparation; and a different kind of preparation than I would have been able to anticipate.

Matthew 15:

• In Matthew, once again, Jesus upholds dietary laws while ceasing to follow some “traditions of the elders”
• Peter asks for an explanation of the parable, and Jesus is like, do you still not get it?
• The story of the Caananite woman makes so much more sense in context, as a turning point from Jesus-is-concerned-with-Jews to Jesus-is-concerned-with-everyone. I remember a sermon on this story, where the implication was that Jesus learned something from her. And honestly, that does really fit here.
• And then the feeding of the 4000, which the annotations say, given the prior context might suggest a feeding of Gentiles.

Matthew 16:

• Ohhhh sign of Jonah (again) is about death, burial, and resurrection.
• Disciples forgetting to bring bread?? I don’t even know where to start. The warning about the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees calls back to the parable of the yeast? And you get a sense of Jesus frustrated here, “‘How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread?’”
• And then there’s this first conversation about Jesus being the Messiah, I think - I might go back and check. Like other people have been saying it, and Jesus has said it, but here’s actual back and forth, and Simon Peter declares his faith.
• God reveals, not flesh and blood – it is revelation not argument that gets us here. I don’t know how I feel about that but I think I like it? But I will need to think about what this means to me.
• And here Jesus starts saying more explictly in conversation also, that he will be killed and raised on the third day.
• The echoes of prior prophets etc make him seem bigger in this, like a person with all the nested outlines.
• “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?” – I nod my head to this, and I also wonder what action believing it would call up from me.

The drama keeps building.

Matthew 17:

• I didn’t learn of the transfiguration till college; it was so surprising and so strange, then.
• I had never connected this to the shared vision of God in a cloud. (I guess the third-grader who imagined this when I was in first-grade really actually was onto something.)
• Peter and James and John are afraid, and Jesus touches them and tells them to not be afraid, and when they look up, it is just Jesus standing there alone. That moment of calm –
• I had forgotten about the whole, Elijah came as John the Baptist thing.
• Jesus almost-frustrated here, or almost-impatient, after the disciples can’t cure the epileptic boy, asking how much longer he has to stick around.
• The disciples have “little faith” – not even the size of a mustard seed, Jesus suggests, for even if they had that much, they would have been able to cure the boy, they would be able to do a great many things. (Explains the parable of the mustard seed a little better, somehow.)
• If the disciples have little faith, not even the size of a mustard seed – how small is the faith I have! ah!
• Jesus brings up the temple tax without Simon telling him that he had been asked about it. And he’s like, no we don’t have to pay it, but we’re going to anyways, so as not to offend. And that’s so — practical? And then he tells Peter to go fish, and that he’ll find a coin that will cover the tax for both of them in the fish’s mouth. And in some sense, maybe that is also practical, lol. I just like it.

I am getting excited also to see how the different Gospels differ.

2023-03-03 | Matthew 18 - 21

Last night, I prayed more genuinely than I have in years. And I listened to my Lent playlist from the days I experimented with not listening to secular music during Lent, I chose to, I wanted to. And I listened to some songs about the love that Jesus has for us, and then I wondered why we insist so much that Jesus loves us. So maybe that is something to be attentive to, also: what does it mean that Jesus loves us? And where do I see that, in the Gospels?

Matthew 18:

• I’ve generally liked the calls to be more like children, in the Bible. It always reminds me of church growing up, where the children started in the normal service, and then there was a moment maybe a third of the way in, when all the children were called up to the front of the church, and the pastor would sit on the steps with us for a special “Time with Children,” before we all headed up to Sunday School. But I guess, in general we are talking about humility, powerlessness, dependence (and not simply wonder etc). In some ways, it feels right to be asked to be more like that. And on the other hand, that is much the opposite of calls to be agentic, to take your own autonomy seriously and move yourself through the world well.
• Another passage about, if your hand or food causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. Does the repetition indicate that he really means it? lol.
• Who are the little ones in verse 10? I am not sure what to make of the phrase “their angels” but I love this connection, to love and respect each other here, because of this connection to God.
• I remember it had to be pointed out to me that, no, a shepherd who has lost 1 of 100 sheep typically does not pursue it, jeopardizing the other 99. But here it is again, the logic of heaven is different than economic earthly logic. Each community member is important, the annotation parses. May it be so.
• This passage about what to do if one member of the church sins against another seems like it makes a lot of sense in some contexts… but also not that much sense in others. In my intentional community, we started off a conversation about how to deal with conflict by referencing this verse, and we… sort of got to something similar to this by the end? But there are all of these cases (in my community and elsewhere) where a dynamic between two people echoes other dynamics, or is a reaction to other dynamics, and it makes sense to address it at the community level much earlier. Perhaps we say these are not cases of one sinning against the other? But that doesn’t seem right, either.
• Binding/loosing on earth having that effect in heaven - this is repeated from earlier, I didn’t want to comment on it then - but the annotations on 16.19 suggest that bound/loose indicates “‘forbid and permit’ (in a legal sense), according to rabbinic teachings”… the internet also suggests that in context this is talking about convicting and acquitting; that it is about how we stand in relation to one another in these cases of persistent sin. That seems like a lot of power for people? But the next verse talks about needing two people to agree, for this earth/heaven thing – because when gathered in Jesus’ name, he is there among them. I still feel dissatisfied and confused? But there’s something strangely empowering in this, and something strangely practical. I am reminded a little bit too of structures like Quaker Clearness Committees.
• “For when two of three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” – at morning prayer, we often say the Prayer of St Chrysostom, which includes a line based on this verse, and I always love it (typically there are two or three of us at prayer).
• As God forgives us again and again, so must we forgive one another again and again – I love this.

Also the language “Jesus of Nazareth” and “Jesus Christ” will probably be helpful to me as I continue to think about what it means for an actual human being guy to be the Messiah.

Matthew 19:

• Okay I think I used to think that the modern Christian obsession with sexual ethics was kind of bizarre? And I still do mostly think that, but I also get it a little bit; Jesus had notably conservative sexual ethics.
• No idea what to make of the eunuch passage, but I do think it is interesting that there is a sense that there are some teachings that not everyone has been given, that not everyone has been given.
• See the bit on the little children above :)
• The rich young man comes to Jesus and asks what good deed he must do to have eternal life. The annotation suggests that this question is illegitimate: “eternal life was regarded as part of the covenant with Israel; living within the covenant is a response to this gift.” Jesus is like, why are you asking me what’s good? It’s only God above who is good. If you want eternal life, keep the commandments, and the man asks which, and Jesus spells some of them out, and the man is like, I’ve kept those, that else do I need to do? And Jesus says, “‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’” But the man ran away. And Jesus is like, it’s really hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of possible; and impossible for man. But for God all things are possible. We talked about this story in church last during a stewardship season. And the priest took from it this, that yes, wealth gets in the way of following Jesus. And so what are we to do? That this is a hard question, that all of this is hard, but that at least the thing that is clear is that we should not run off; that we can at least stay in dialogue with Jesus, that we can be in process. That seems exactly right to me, as a first step; continue to walk with Jesus. Understanding our dependence on God for salvation is so important, especially when having material possession obscures our dependence. But it seems like there’s so much more here. There’s something about that question, what good deed must I do to have eternal life? - that I feel like I don’t understand; it seems like a bad question, but I’m not sure how Jesus is responding to it, or how it would have sounded then. Pray and pray and pray to discover that, you know. But Jesus still answers it, kind of? Idk. It is almost a question I ask but I think it is the wrong question.

Matthew 20:

• The parable of the workers in the vineyard kind of relieved me? I think it is far to think of eschatological reversals as actual reversals; but in this parable, there’s this temporal reversal, but also a financial leveling. And so this switching of the first and last reads differently to me than it did before.
• “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant… just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many”: all these reversals actually also do something that seems quite helpful, which is encouraging this servant behavior?
• Also I used to think it was bizarre that so many Christians think so so many non-Christians are going to hell. And I still don’t think that’s quite right, but also that’s not far from the biblical vibe.
• I love that phrase about Jesus being “moved with compassion” opening the eyes of the blind who asked him to.

Matthew 21:

• I was surprised at the triumphal entry to Jerusalem happening here. I also have some confusion about the triumphal entry: is the crowd here treating him as a prophet only, or as the Messiah? And is this about a political saving (from Rome), or religious saving? And is there just the one crowd?
• I hadn’t realized either that Jesus causing some chaos in the temple happened immediately upon entering Jerusalem.
• If you know a tree by the fruit it produces… for this fig tree, not much. (I don’t know how to explain the sense in which I mean this as a joke.) It wasn’t fig season? Yet here we are, withered fruit tree, kinda scary.
• It’s okay to have to come around to it, just follow Jesus.
• Parable of the vineyard, the leaders condemn themselves, generally not so pretty.

2023-03-04 | Matthew 22 - 23

I have taken up reading Mark Johnston’s Surviving Death again. I wasn’t expecting to; I thought I might return to Saving God this Lent, but not Surviving Death. But all these Jesus thoughts have me wanting ways to reconcile Jesus-as-Christ and Jesus-of-Nazareth a little better, even if I think of the question not-so-historically. I hope that Surviving Death will give me some fodder as how to think about resurrection in general, and I also wonder if its way of thinking about what a person is might help with that “wait wait wait if I believe that God came down to be human, then I have to believe there was just some human guy who also was God??”. Because - as was perhaps the only think I really learned from my undergrad philosophy studies - nothing is ever very simple or very clear, and this world is strange no matter how you see it. I’m wondering if my “just some human guy” intuition is failing at that; if actually understanding the weirdness that is people will help me imagine Jesus as the Son of God a little better.

Matthew 22:

• Honestly I love the “render … unto Caesar” comment, enigmatic as it is; it just seems like a masterful level of discretion.
• Some of the kinda-crazy theological concerns from the middle ages seem very at home actually.
• Where did the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead come from? What does it actually comprise?
• Once again, loving God and loving your neighbor are not the only laws, but the anchors for how to interpret the other laws. (Which: in church sometimes, the priest explicitly uses the methodology of whether things are aligned with love to figure out how to orient around them… and that’s actually kind of borne out here.)
• “nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.” – kind of severe!

Matthew 23:

• I do usually take the shitting-on-the-Pharisees to be a little bit tinged with narcissism of small differences, or this kind of inside-baseball charging-against-each-other; I should double-check that that’s a reasonable way to be taking it. Still interesting to have that purportedly coming out of the mouth of Jesus, though. I do have some additional question here about how to think about the Gospels, though. I take them to be historical texts as well as religious ones, and deeply formed by the times and moments of their compositions; I don’t think that this is the pure word of God in some special sense. But if I do think that there is some truth in the Jesus-picture, where does that come from, if I also am insisting that it doesn’t come from historical-Jesus himself?
• It is not clear to me how applicable this criticism of the Pharisees actually is to the Pharisees; but these do all seem like good things to be careful about in my own practice.
• The language here is really forceful. “Woe to you!” indeed. So many exclamation points, so much emphasis. The stakes are high.

2023-03-05 | Matthew 24-28

Matthew 24:

• All this apocalypse stuff feels kind of beyond me.
• There’s the basic chaos that is but the beginning of the birth pangs; there’s the actually very striking “the love of many will grow cold”; and then there’s this more acute bit about the “desolating sacrilege” and fleeing and those days being very bad, and the striking description, “for as the lightning comes from the easy and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” and then the Sone of Man coming on the clods of heaven, with power and great glory, and then there’s the reference to the fig tree, that it will be clear when these things are happening the Christ is near.
• But then there’s this whole other section about, no one will actually know the time, not even the Son, only the Father; that it will happen in a more usual time, and then these calls to be ready for the unexpected coming of the Son of Man.
• I sort of feel like it would be good for me to think about what the second coming of Christ might mean, or might mean to me; I am after all glad that we talk about apocalypse at the start of Advent, like I think there is something in some of this; but I feel so completely disconnected from it. In Matthew, the disciples ask about the destruction of the Second Temple, and then they ask about the sign of Jesus’ coming and the end of the age, and maybe this is just also a lot of disambiguating that those are all different questions, but also what are these predictions? What am I to do with them? I guess, there is an action item here, and it is to be ready always. So.

Matthew 25:

• The parable of the talents also feels kind of beyond me. Like am I to take Jesus as the master and we are the slaves, and we are stewarding – what? probably something good, idk if this is supposed to be about goodness or abilities or grace or what – and we’re supposed to use them well and multiply them? and if you don’t – if you just hide the talent in the ground – that’s bad? because there are actually just straightforward low-risk ways to get a return/increase the good? and then God’s response to this is just to take the original good thing away and give it to someone better? what! or is it like the opposite of what I described? “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid” - and this is God? like I guess so. There’s a lot that’s up to us. But also what is it for God to be reaping and gathering? I feel like I do have something to learn from this parable and also I want to vomit.
• Very clear imagery about separating people, the blessed to the right who showed compassion to the least, and then the accursed to the left.

Matthew 26:

• The anointing woman passage is one of the kinds of passages that I just love in the Gospels; it is surprising and strange and beautiful, even as it leaves me with a mix of feelings.
• The annotations point out that Matthew suggests greed as motivation for Judas; Luke and John link Judas to Satan. I am not sure what to think of the betrayal.
• I hear these pieces of the Last Supper every week at communion. My church now says that the blood of the covenant is poured out “for you and for many” for the forgiveness of sins; I have stuck in my head an “for all” there, and I wonder if a church I went to said this at some point; in this is translation of Matthew it is “for many.”
• I had never thought about how that body/blood passage is sandwiched between Jesus being like, one of you will betray me, and, all of you will desert me.
• The disciples not being able to stay awake; Jesus praying to the Father; he seems so human here, and yet so large, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” to “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.” – what a prayer, and with Jesus grieved and agitated.
• And then the crows with the elders and chief priests comes to arrest Jesus. I did not know that one of Jesus’ companions cut off the ear of the slave of the high priest? woah. But Jesus is like, no, that’s not the point.
• Jesus says here that it must happen this way for the scriptures to be fulfilled, but Matthew (who has been quoting prophets generously) does not quote anything here, and the annotations say that’s because there’s really nothing to quote – no pre-Christian sources predict the arrest, suffering, and crucifixion of the Messiah. Before this, I had thought that the point of quoting all that Isaiah was to make the point that the prophets had predicted this, that Jesus is the Messiah as had been layed out, etc etc. But now I wonder if beyond trying to tie in Jesus to the older tradition, there’s also just the crystallization of – it had to happen this way. Not because anyone in particular that the reader might care about predicted it, but just because it has to. – ? (and per the end of Saving God, Johnston does sort of think that this is the exact point, doesn’t he?)
• The annotation notes that the historicity of the Sanhedrin trial is highly questionable – it would have been illegal to have a hearing then, being the first night of Passover. In any case – being that I don’t know that to make of historicity writ large – in Matthew, we have Caiaphas the high priest asking if Jesus is the Messiah, and he’s like, yep (“You have said so.”) and then going further. Caiaphas claims he has blasphemed; the annotations say “technically, Jesus does not blaspheme” (blaspheming involves uttering the divine name) which probably shouldn’t be funny but kind of is. And we get from here to a death sentence.
• I didn’t realize it was servant-girls to whom Peter did that first denying.

Matthew 27:

• I did not know that Judas committed suicide.
• Indeed, bizarrely, most of my clearest knowledge of Matthew 27 comes from trying to read The Master and Margarita a year or two ago and being confused and having to look up everything with Pilate on Wikipedia.
• This whole chapter was painful to read.
• “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.” – I knew about quoting Psalm 22, but I had never actually encountered this sentence, of death.
• But in Matthew it barely even has a chance to hit before we get the earthquake and the tombs being opened and the resurrection of holy ones – which, I know this only happens in Matthew, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention this?? Except Mark Johnston in Surviving Death. To be clear, I go to Good Friday services! Not sure if I managed to miss Year A Good Fridays? (It was last Year A in 2020, and then before that in 2016 – and I guess I did miss both of those.) But it’s just this immediate, oh, oh, oh.

Matthew 28:

• Love Mary Magdalene and the other Mary
• Of the resurrection I am prepared to say almost nothing. I do not just need the Gospels now, I need the whole history and tradition of Christian thought, I am just overwhelmed.
• “Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’” --! greetings!
• And the rest of this was just weird, Jesus even higher, the evangelical mission expanding, Jesus with us, end. Kind of a whirlwind.

I feel kind of sick.

Reflections, 1

Here is something I may have to let go of: an unreflective sense that it will all turn out okay for us all.

God will forgive again, and again, and again, and again; God will forgive however much you need God to forgive, it doesn’t matter how much you need God to forgive. But at some point, maybe you do actually have to come around. The prodigal son returns, the late-to-working workers work. I don’t like the biconditionals. But maybe they are kind of necessary.

Necessary why? Necessary at some level because I don’t have some supernatural understanding that could right all the wrongs. Necessary because, if you actually are hard-hearted all the way through, maybe that is not a redeemed life. (I do think it is helpful to think in terms of degrees here.) – if it was about some supernatural heaven and some supernatural hell, I would find the idea repellent. But just as there’s no reward over and above the good, in some sense, there’s no punishment over and above the bad. And in that sense, I do think it is just sad.

Sometimes, when I am feeling at my worst, I tell myself that God still loves me, that there is nothing I have the power to do that would make God stop loving me. And I do think that’s true. But the parsing that I am coming to, there, is that God’s arms are open to me, that God would hope that I would return. You can always return. But that is still at some point something that you have to do.

I am typically scared of calls to evangelism, of evangelism itself. Conversion is tricky business, and most of the proselytization that I am familiar with just seems icky. In part I think that’s because I see proselytization from contemporary evangelical Christians, and I think that they are misguided. This whole you-have-to-be-Christian-to-go-to-heaven, and the way it has crystallized, this need to profess something so hard, speaking of your faith in Jesus Christ and the literal word of God – puts so much pressure on the whole endeavor, and it makes you want to count people, and it is so flat, and it is so easy to flatten others. So when I hear calls to evangelize in the Bible, I flinch. But coming out of Jesus’ mouth, that’s probably just not what that means.

The early Christians - Jew and gentile - had quite a lot of zeal. (Probably you need that, for Christianity to branch off as its own religion at all!) But why? Mark Johnston says: because something in Christianity was a genuine religious innovation. For Girard (according to Johnston), the innovation is that the crucifixion of Christ unmasks the cycles of mimetically-driven all-against-all tension being released with the destruction of a scapegoat, via sacrifice, or otherwise in seemingly-legitimate violence – and it gives a new resolution for that mimetic tension, imitation of Christ’s self-sacrificing love. Johnston names the innovation differently; he sees the violence as upholding a common, commoditized conception of how to live, a conception of righteousness that we grasp brittely instead of encountering the abyss, that we have no idea how to live – and Christ calls us to open love and compassion, rather than this ready-to-wear righteousness – if we are to not simply forget the crucifixion, we have to give up on the idea of possessing the knowledge of how to live. And that’s crazy, that’s amazing.

If something like that is right, I get it. I want to be transformed by that; I want everyone to have the chance to be transformed by that. It’s not that we all have to talk about Jesus Christ in particular – that is already too calcified, Christ is everywhere now, under all our names, Christ doesn’t have to care about being Jesus of Nazareth, or whatever. I think there can be many paths to a redeemed life. But insofar as there is important religious innovation happening here, I understand the calls to evangelism much better – not as religion as something calcified, but about direction towards a redeemed life. (I will need to think about this more seriously from an interfaith perspective; is the Christian innovation already there? does it need to be there? does it not need to be there?)

I used to pair the crucifixion inextricably with the resurrection. And okay, there’s still something sort of in that; imagining the crucifixion without resurrection starts to feel a little like defeat. I don’t normally linger on the threat that death poses to the importance of the good – but in this story, it does kind of come to light. So paired, it is all the better: the open outpouring of love is not only incompatible with ready-to-wear righteousness, it is still important in the face of death, it still overcomes death. But it does feel now more like they are two stories which accompany one another importantly, rather than two parts of one story.

All this has helped somewhat with my historicity angst, also. I can imagine a human being preaching love for neighbor and love for God, I can imagine them riling up the authorities and criticizing the compromised structures of religious life with vehemence, I can imagine that ending with crucifixion, and I can imagine in the wake of that, a kind of turning. And of course Christianity itself gets compromised almost from the start – there’s plenty in Paul’s epistles we can worry about. But insofar as Jesus was Christlike enough, I can start to imagine him as the Son of God; as we are children of God, but perhaps somewhat more concentrated. And yes - would that not be Jesus as Messiah?

Jesus is pretty outrageous at points. He bashes the Pharisees, for example, in Matthew. It made me uncomfortable to be like, this is God? Like even if that’s right, can we maybe be a little nicer? Not that being nice is the point. It made me uncomfortable; and the kind of tough love it almost suggests made me uncomfortable. But it was a relief to read Johnston address it head-on. If Jesus is exposing the falseness, the danger and the sin of these commoditized conceptions of the righteous life – it makes sense that it might get kind of outrageous.

I feel like I’ve ended up at Jesus who is 100% human and about 85% divine, but that’s not bad for a first stab. And I can see how, with enough Gospel light, we could get up to 100/100 – how we might need to, for these stories to pack the full punch. And it’s good – the parts of the first half of the Gospel where the text seems to really sing, was Jesus opening a way to being drawn on by mercy, and that seems properly picked up by the second half, here. I still don’t know what to make of all the prophecy / second coming stuff, though.

The angels appear and say, Do not be afraid. How strange it is, that we can handle any sort of revelation.

I certainly have ended this first week and a half in a little bit of a different place than I started.