Odd Jobs (44 page)

Those of us who call ourselves Christians, then, look
through
the Gospels that did emerge from the first century as through a cloudy glass toward a brilliant light. But the Gospel writers, whether rememberers or editors of others’ memories, themselves were looking through accretions of written and oral history toward events as distant from them as World War II is from us. Their thumbprints, as it were, cannot be rubbed off the glass; at the outset of this century Albert Schweitzer demonstrated in his book
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
that no pleasingly liberal Jesus—no purely political revolutionary stripped of superstitious accretions, no sweet Jesus who is all beatitude—can be extracted from the Gospel record, which is supernatural to its core. Yet Mark, by itself, is a rather cryptic storm of parable and miracle, which begins when Jesus appears, fully grown, “coming from Nazareth in Galilee,” to be baptized, and which ends at the point where three of his female followers come to the tomb in search of his crucified body and are greeted by “a young man in a white robe” who tells them that Jesus “has risen: he is not here.” Though he also tells the women, “Do not be afraid,” the text of Mark judged to be authentic ends with the sentence “They said not a word to anyone, because they feared.” The triumphant and redeeming end of the story, Christ’s miraculous resurrection, is mysteriously muted in this ending, and a writer of the second century, in a style of Greek plainly not Mark’s, appended twelve verses outlining some of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances to the apostles and containing his charge to them to “Go into every part of the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.” These added verses, included in all Bibles, are canonical but not Marcan; in what survives of
echt
Mark, Jesus disappears from the tomb as casually as he appears at the Jordan to be baptized by John. There is no nativity story, and no follow-up of the empty tomb. Nor is there much explanation of Jesus’s announcement, “The time has come, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and put your trust in the Good News.” The news we are given concerns a young man, a paragon of vitality and poetic assertion, who after an indeterminate period of itinerant preaching and miraculous healing in Palestine is taken prisoner
in Jerusalem by the Roman authorities at the request of the Jewish priesthood and ignominiously put to death, crying out on the cross, in his language of Aramaic, “
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani
—My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Matthew takes up the task of giving these events a cosmic context, by knitting them tight to the sacred texts of the Jewish people collected in what is now called the Old Testament. Matthew is viewed by tradition as the most specifically Jewish of the Gospel writers: Eusebius in his fourth-century
Historica Ecclesiastica
quotes Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis around 130, as saying that “Matthew compiled the oracles (or ‘sayings’) in the Hebrew language, but everyone translated them as he was able,” and Eusebius cites Irenaeus as claiming that “Matthew published a gospel in writing also, among the Hebrews in their own language.” The contemporary Biblical scholars who edited the Anchor Bible edition of Matthew, W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann, propose that the disciple Matthew, a former tax-collector identified elsewhere as Levi, in fact was Matthew the Levite, who as a Levite would have been “a Pharisee, educated, and from an orthodox … background.” The author of the Gospel of Matthew, whatever his actual name, was, they believe, “a conservative-minded Jew” especially interested in the Law and aware of “Messianic titles (the Prophet, the Righteous One) already archaic in the time of Jesus.” Without wishing to present Jesus as the new Moses, Matthew shows a “consuming interest in the spiritual history of Israel as a chosen people” and “in carefully preserving sayings of Jesus which re-establish the true principles of the Mosaic Law.”

Certainly Matthew can be wearisomely legalistic, beginning with the badly stretched genealogy from David to Jesus that opens his Gospel. Ten times—and each time dampening credibility rather than, as in the original cultural context, creating it—he claims that something occurred in order to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophets: the virgin birth, Bethlehem as the birth site, Herod’s massacre of children under the age of two, the flight of Joseph and Mary with their infant son to Egypt, their eventual settling in Nazareth, Galilee as the site of Jesus’s ministry, his healing of the sick, his modesty, his speaking in parables, his curious choice of both a donkey and a colt to enter Jerusalem upon, and Judas’s acceptance of thirty pieces of silver all take their significance from having been foreshadowed by texts in Isaiah or Jeremiah. For the sake of a verse of the Psalms, “They gave me gall for food, and for thirst they gave me vinegar to drink” (Psalm 69:21), Matthew altered Mark’s
“They offered him wine mingled with myrrh” to “mingled with gall.” It would appear that Jesus himself came to see his life in terms of Israel’s hopes of a Messiah. In Mark 14:27, he quotes Zechariah, “I shall strike the shepherd and his sheep shall be scattered,” to give the dignity of foreordainment to his disciples’ coming abandonment of him. But it is hard not to feel that words are being put in Christ’s mouth when Matthew has him, in 26:53–54, say to a disciple who has drawn a sword, “Do you suppose that I could not call upon my Father and that he would not in a moment have a greater force than fifty thousand Angels at my side? But then, how could the Scriptures be fulfilled which say, it shall be thus?” And a few verses farther on, Matthew’s Jesus rebukes the crowd that has gathered at his arrest, “I see that you have come out with swords and sticks to capture me as though I were a brigand. Day after day I sat in the Temple, teaching, and you did not arrest me. But all this has happened so that what the Prophets wrote may be fulfilled.” This appeal to the prophets has a parallel in Mark (14:49) and in Luke, but in Luke assumes a quite different quality: “When I was with you in the Temple day after day, you did not raise a hand against me. But this is your hour. Night takes command” (22:53). In John, which names Peter as the disciple who took the sword and cut off the right ear of the high priest’s servant, there is no parallel.

A legal passion peculiar to Matthew insists that “while heaven and earth remain, the Law shall not be docked of one letter or one comma
^†
till its purpose is achieved” (5:18). Jesus assures his auditors, “Do not imagine that I came to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I came, not to annul them, but to bring them to perfection” (5:17). The parallel passage in Luke has no such assurance, nor does it contain Matthew’s strictures on oath-taking or his stress upon inwardness and secrecy in performing acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving: “But when you practise charity, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your charity may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will render you your due” (6:3–4). And only Matthew’s list of beatitudes ends with “Happy those that have been persecuted for righteousness; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”; the young church was already suffering persecution, and hence Matthew speaks through Jesus to the imperiled
faithful of 80
A.D
. The threat of hell seems especially vivid in Matthew, and ready to hand, to brandish as a menace: in two separate places (5:29–30; 18:8–9) he repeats the ferocious admonishment found in Mark 9:43–48:

These are among the hardest of the not unnumerous hard sayings of Jesus, and Matthew brings them to the fore; his presentation delights in a moral perfectionism. “You then must be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect” (5:48). The Kingdom of Heaven is very precarious of entrance, a matter of jots and tittles of the ancient Law: “The man who abolishes one of these little rules and teaches people to forget it shall count for little in the Kingdom of Heaven” (5:19).

What is this Kingdom of Heaven? At times it seems to be a revolutionized earth, an earth brought under the rule of God; at others a realm of an otherworldly afterlife, the opposite of hell and outer darkness. And yet again it seems a new state of inner being, a state of moral perfection that is not so much the ticket to the Kingdom but the Kingdom itself. In Luke, Jesus tells his disciples, “Watch as you may, you will not see it come. People will not be saying ‘Here it is!’ or ‘There!’ And the reason why is this—this Kingdom of God is within you” (17:20–21). The most extended statement concerning the Kingdom, and the longest compilation of Christ’s instruction, comes in Matthew, Chapters 5 through 7, and it is this so-called Sermon on the Mount, or Great Instruction, that would be the sorest loss if Matthew’s Gospel, in that precarious welter of first-century Christian testimony, had vanished along with Q and Matthew’s supposed version in Hebrew. Luke’s shorter version of the Sermon, delivered not on a mountain but on a plain, in 6:17–49, is less than half as long, and strikes a merry note peculiar to itself: “Happy, you that weep now; for you shall laugh.” Matthew does not mention laughing, but his extended collection of the sayings of Jesus holds many touches of that sublime gallantry, that cosmic carefreeness which emanates from the Son of Man:

These commands do not form a prescription for life in this world. The auditors are described as “filled with amazement at his teaching; for he taught them like one with authority and not like the Doctors who usually taught them.” The concept of amazement recurs in this part of Matthew. In the next chapter, the disciples are, in Rieu’s translation, “amazed” at Jesus’s stilling the wind and sea, and Jesus is “amazed” at the faith of the centurion who comes to Jesus to heal his paralyzed son.

Two worlds are colliding; amazement prevails. Jesus’s healing and
preaching go together in the Gospel accounts, and his preaching is healing of a sort, for it banishes worldly anxiety; it overthrows the common-sense and materially verifiable rules that, like the money-changers in the Temple, dominate the world with their practicality. Jesus declares an inversion of the world’s order, whereby the first shall be last and the last first, the meek shall inherit the earth, the hungry and thirsty shall be satisfied, and the poor in spirit shall possess the Kingdom of Heaven. This Kingdom is the hope and pain of Christianity; it is attained against the grain, through the denial of instinctive and social wisdom and through faith in the unseen. Using natural metaphors as effortlessly as an author quoting his own works, Jesus disclaims nature and its rules of survival. Nature’s way, obvious and broad, leads to death; this other way is narrow and difficult: “Come in by the narrow gate, for the way to destruction is a broad and open road which is trodden by many; whereas the way to life is by a narrow gate and a difficult road, and few are those that find it” (7:13–14).

Life is not what we think and feel it is. True life (sometimes capitalized “Life” in the Rieu translation, as in the quotation from Mark above) is something different from the life of the body: “He that wins his life will lose it, and he that loses his life for my sake shall win it” (10:39). Christ’s preaching threatens men, the virtuous even more than the wicked, with a radical transformation of value whereby the rich and pious are damned and harlots and tax-collectors are rather more acceptable. The poor, ignorant, and childish are more acceptable yet: Jesus thanks God “for hiding these things from wise and clever men and revealing them to simple folk” (11:25). Even ordinary altruism is challenged, and decent frugality, in the incident of the woman who poured precious ointment over Jesus, to the amazement and indignation of the apostles. They object, “That might have fetched a good price, and so been given to the poor.” The blithe, deathless answer is given: “You have the poor among you always; but me you have not always” (26:11). Over against human perspective stands God’s perspective, from which even sparrows sold two for a farthing have value. Just so, each human soul, including those of women and slaves and gentiles, has value. From our perspective, the path of righteousness is narrow; but the strait gate leads to infinite consolation: “Put on my yoke and learn from me, who am gentle and humble in heart—and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light” (11:28–30). Fulfillment of the old Law turns out to be close to lawlessness: circumcision, dietary restrictions, strict observance of the Sabbath, familial piety, Pharisaical scruples are all swept away by
the new dispensation. Said John the Baptist: “He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing-floor and gather the grain into his barn” (3:11–12). Said Jesus: “The blind see once more; the lame walk; lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; dead men are brought back to life, and beggars are proclaiming the Good News. Happy the man who finds no fault in me” (11:5–6).