We had a high absentee rate this Sunday due to illnesses and folks out of town, so we put off the next lesson on Matthew's Gospel for a week. We'll be back around on our regular schedule next Sunday, I promise! Meanwhile, those of us who were there shared what was going on in our own lives -- and that was very good, too! See you next week!
Matthew 2:1-6 Today we begin our study of Matthew’s gospel - the second of the four gospels to be written. Matthew was the name of one of Jesus’ disciples and for centuries it was taken for granted that this gospel account was written by the disciple Matthew. But this gospel is now pretty well accepted as having been written between ten and twenty years after Mark’s account – which was written in the early 70's, 40 years after Jesus. This puts the writing of Matthew somewhere between 80 and 90 AD, making it highly unlikely that was written by an actual eye witness – one who knew Jesus. There is also the fact that the writer lifted about 90 percent of Mark’s earlier gospel straight into this newer version. Why, Borg asks, would a real eye-witness use so much of the account of one who was not a contemporary of Jesus?
As with Mark, this gospel writer never identifies him- or herself. The name of Matthew was given to this gospel sometime in the 2nd century. We will however continue to refer to the writer as Matthew – just for convenience’ sake. Besides using so much material from Mark, this writer also pulled a large amount from the Q Source as well as a sizeable chunk that is unique to Matthew and known to scholars as “special Matthew.” Included in this last bit is much of the Sermon on the Mount, and various parables like the Workers in the Vineyard and the Pearl of Great Price. But the key to the whole of Matthew’s gospel is that he is a seemingly educated and passionate Jew who believes, heart and soul, that Jesus is the fulfillment of every Old Testament prophecy. For Matthew, Jesus is the one the Old Testament is pointing toward. I don’t have the time or space for details in this message but Borg makes an extremely convincing argument that the internal structure – the way Matthew’s gospel is put together – mirrors the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures – not only in its story but in its structure. The story of the Pentateuch is the story of Moses - the story of a people enslaved in Egypt and the great leader sent by God to set them free and lead them to their own homeland forevermore. It is also the story of The Law given to Moses for the people - the Law that shows them how they must live to truly inhabit that promised home. Jesus, too, came to lead people to freedom and to give them a new Law which will allow them to live into their new kingdom. Matthew quotes the Hebrew Scriptures constantly using the phrase “it is written” over and over. For Matthew, Jesus is clearly the fulfillment of what “is written.” In everything he writes here, Matthew is making the point that Jesus’ story is Moses’ story, and Moses’ story is Jesus’ story. From the slaughtering of innocent baby boys at the beginning of both men’s lives to the refusal of authorities to listen when both Moses and Jesus spoke God’s word, the similarities would have been recognized and noted by the Jews of Matthew’s time. The story of Jesus is the story of a new exodus and Jesus is the new Moses. Furthermore, while the other gospels show Jesus growing and evolving into an expanded understanding of his own mission, Matthew’s gospel remains uncompromising in its assertion that Jesus has come only for the Jewish people – the Chosen People. It isn’t until after the resurrection that Jesus finally sends the disciples out to talk to the wider world. For all that Matthew is a devout Jew himself there is a certain strain of hostility running throughout this gospel – one that has unfortunately been taken out of context and used against the Jewish people down through the centuries. When Matthew speaks of “the Jews” he never means anything nice. But it is important to point out that Matthew, when he uses “the Jews,” is referring to a particular sub-set of Jews -- not all of the Jewish people but those in authority who try to balk Jesus at every turn. Those who will eventually demand his crucifixion. Much of Matthew’s hostility has to do also with current events in the writer of Matthew’s own time. The earliest Jewish followers of Jesus never saw themselves as anything new and separate from Judaism. They viewed their faith as simply the next step in Judaism. That’s why they didn’t originally refer to themselves as “Christians.” Those in Jerusalem still gathered at the temple daily for prayer and to teach from the temple steps. In Matthew’s time, the purists among the Jews began to agitate against them and eventually they were labeled apostate and expelled from the temple and synagogues. They were expelled not only from the worship centers but from Jewish community life – expelled, as Matthew and those around him saw it, from their own home. God sent Jesus to save the Jews and they rejected him - just as they had long ago originally rejected Moses. There is much more to Matthew’s gospel than this, and we’ll get to that next week, but it is imperative that when we read this particular gospel we keep in mind its particular relationship with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. Matthew was not writing to a broader early Christian world. His evangelizing was strictly for those whose people had been God’s own chosen people for well over a thousand years – those who were risking missing out on the natural evolution of Judaism in the person and teachings of Jesus. It is especially important that we, reading today, don’t let ourselves get carried away with Matthew’s diatribes against “the Jews” and remember this gospel was never intended to be a blanket condemnation of an entire people – only of those who “having ears, do not hear.” Next week we’ll pick up some of the elements – such as the nativity stories – that appear only in this gospel account. Mark 1:35-39 Last week we began looking at Mark’s gospel – the first written gospel (that we know of) – and we started out by looking at what isn’t there. We talked of which of the familiar (to us) gospel stories have no place in Mark. It was quite an impressive list if you’ll recall. So much of what we today take for granted as part of our Christian heritage apparently didn’t exist for many in the earliest Christian communities – not before Mark and still not for another ten or twenty years after this gospel was written – not until Matthew’s gospel account was written down. They apparently existed somewhere because Matthew had access to them but in Mark’s time it would seem they only existed in isolated pockets of the rapidly expanding Christian world – unknown to many, including Mark.
So today we are going to talk about what is found in Mark’s account. Again, it’s important to remember that Marks’ is the first narrative account of Jesus’ life among us. A narrative is a story. It is not just a collection of sayings or events thrown together into a random list. A narrative has flow – it starts here and it goes to here. It may meander a lot along the way but it follows a pattern – it has a direction. This is the story - as Jesus is quoted as explaining in our reading today - of what Jesus came out to do. In Mark’s story we begin with a fully adult Jesus going out to the wilderness to hear John the Baptist and it ends with an empty tomb. Marcus Borg points out that this narrative follows a threefold pattern – a pattern that will later be adopted and followed by both Matthew and Luke. Part One takes place in Galilee. This is where most of Jesus’ public ministry took place. I think I pointed out a couple of weeks ago that Jesus only went into Jerusalem at the end. The vast bulk of his ministry took place in the countryside and small villages. Roughly half of this gospel is devoted to the Galilean years. By the standards of the more sophisticated world this was truly a back-woods ministry, which makes it even more extraordinary when we think that it eventually spread throughout the world as it has done. Part Two covers the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, and Part Three takes place in Jerusalem and tells of the last few days of Jesus’ life, his struggles with authority and his death. So what stories do make up Mark’s larger narrative? We begin with Jesus baptized by John and going out for 40 days in the wilderness and being tempted by Satan – not much detail in these stories – just the bare statements of fact. When he comes out of the wilderness he begins to call his disciples. His first recorded healing is the expulsion of an unclean spirit from a possessed man. As Matthew and Luke will later do, Mark’s story of Jesus consists of many physical healings and expulsions of evil spirits, with teaching, in the form of parables, scattered throughout. Some of the particular events are recounted in the other gospels as well - a few are only found here. The first of the parables to be retold in Mark is that of the Sower and the Seeds: some seed falls onto the pathway and is eaten by birds; next, seed lands on rocky ground where it sprouts but immediately withers because there is no soil for roots to grow; then seed fall among thorns and weeds and the new shoots are choked out. Finally the seed falls on good soil where it increases a hundredfold. For several chapters, healing and parables are shared as Jesus and his followers move from village to small town to village – always on the move – teaching of the Kingdom of God everywhere he can reach. There is even a journey across the Sea of Galilee into pagan country and the casting out of a multitude of demons from the man named Legion into a herd of pigs. That herd of pigs emphasizes to us that Jesus has, for the moment at least, gone outside his home territory, since no good Jew would be raising pigs. Later, there would be a trip to Tyre, on the Mediterranean, and an interaction with the “unclean” Syro-Phoenician woman – another trip away from home country and known customs. Oddly enough we actually have the Loaves and Fishes story twice in Mark - once with 5000 hungry and once with 4000 – most likely an example of dubious editing with one story coming from two different sources. Then somewhere toward the end of chapter eight, the traveling continues but we enter Part Two and the wandering begins to arc toward Jerusalem and the topic matter between Jesus and his disciples becomes darker. Peter answers the question “Who do you say I am?” with “You are the Messiah” - a huge leap in identification. Three separate times Jesus tries to tell his followers that he will die in Jerusalem while the disciples squabble among themselves about who among them will be the most important in Jesus’ kingdom, proving, yet again, just how little they understand. Then with Chapter 11 and the “Triumphal Entry” into the city we begin Part Three – Jesus’ final days. Besides the actual events of Holy Week, Mark manages to squeeze in a lot more teaching into this final section. Among others, there is the fig tree cursed for not bearing fruit; the parable of the wicked tenants who murdered the landlord’s son; the “render unto Caesar” teaching on taxes and government authority; and the foretelling of the destruction of the Temple. Like the other gospels Part Three of Mark’s gospel has the procession with palms and the cleansing of the temple, but then it’s back out to Bethany and the anointing of Jesus’ head and feet by the weeping woman, followed by Judas’ decision to betray Jesus. Interspersed through all this are more teachings and more questions: who is David’s son? Is there a resurrection? Back in Jerusalem for Passover Mark tells us of the Last Supper, the prayers in the garden, the arrest and the trial before Pilate. Condemned, Jesus is taken out, crucified and buried. This part of the story is standard for one of the synoptic gospels – largely because Matthew and Luke would later follow Mark’s storyline fairly closely. As we discussed earlier, this is pretty much where Mark’s gospel ends. When the Sabbath passed the women went out to the grave site to finish preparing the body for a proper burial since there hadn’t been time before sunset on the eve of Passover. The women met an angelic presence and were told that Jesus had risen and was no longer there - but they saw no one else. The angel told them they would see Jesus again in Galilee. And here Mark’s gospel ends. Although we miss certain of the most familiar parables and stories, the basic story of Jesus’ public years and his ministry among the people is all here. Whether this version of things was fairly widespread knowledge throughout much of the ever-widening Christian world or more limited to the area around Galilee we don’t know. And just because Mark’s was written first does not make it any more correct not does it mean it is wrong when some stories are left out. It simply means that the gospels were written in different times in different locations with the writers having access to different pools of community memory. Remember – no tape recorders, no steno pads. The Gospel – the Good News – was a living, growing entity emerging out of a community that not only knew Jesus in the past but continued to experience him in their present – and so his story continued to grow – as it still does today. Next week we will begin looking into Matthew’s gospel, the second to make it into written form. Mark 1:1-8 Today, after the introductions and background information, we are finally ready to start with the first of the gospel accounts to be put into written form. As I will be doing for most of this series, I’m relying heavily on Marcus Borg’s Evolution of the Word for my information. Sometime around 70 AD, a full forty years after the life and death of Jesus someone put down in writing the first narrative account of Jesus’ life and dying. The author never identifies him- or herself by name. None of the gospel authors ever do. By the 2nd century there were apparently quite a few gospel accounts floating around and names were assigned to them just to help keep them straight. As far as we can tell it was a matter of entirely arbitrary choice, but there may have been some community memory involved. We just don’t know. Since the 2nd century this particular account has been known as the Gospel According to Mark. Mark, by the way, is a Latin name, not Hebrew, even though this gospel originated in the Jesus community located in northern Galilee There’s a bit of irony in the fact that the name Mark means dedicated to Mars, the Roman god of war. There may have been some written works before this first gospel account – remember the Q Source I mentioned last week – but they were likely just collections of Jesus saying or teachings. This piece we call Mark’s gospel was the first narrative – the first to be written in forty years – the first story of Jesus – not just what he said, but what he did and how he did it. To begin, I’m going to ask you to try to put aside all that you think you know about the gospels. I understand that this is really impossible - we cannot un-know what is in our minds - but give it a try. Most of us have heard these gospels all our lives. They probably tend to run into one big gospel in our minds and except for a very few particular stories, without having our bibles in hand to check right then and there, we’d most likely be hard put to say which gospel account what story comes from. And then, for those of us who were children in a church, there is Sunday School. Now remember, before coming to ordained ministry I spent long years directing religious education programs. I have immense respect for all those volunteers who step up to teach children’s classes in church. BUT – over the years in that job I came to realize that many published Sunday School curricula are severely biased to reinforce a pre-chosen cultural philosophy and simply either written on the assumption that this is “what we all believe anyway” or deliberately slanted to push a particular view of Christian thought. Even the best curriculum is broken down into the obvious big-story points to make it easy for children to understand and in which they are stripped of all nuance. In short, a lot of what you probably heard in Sunday School was just plain wrong. And it’s almost impossible to get people to let go of that early indoctrination. But please try. Let’s look first at what Mark’s gospel doesn’t say. When we first began this series I quoted something that Borg said to the effect that communities remembered the things that mattered to them, and therefore each community’s memory contained different things. We can learn as much about Mark’s community from what isn’t included as from what is actually written down. • First, there are no infancy or childhood stories. No miraculous hero’s birth. Mark begins straight off with Jesus -- a fully adult man -- going out into the wilderness to hear the wild-man preacher, John. Now, try if you can, to imagine what and how we would feel about Jesus if we took Christmas entirely out of our story. We have so many warm, cuddly emotions tied up in Christmas – the sweet little baby, the loving parents, the shepherds and the angels in the sky – even the carols and glittery trees and colored lights play a role. All these things have a subliminal influence on how we view the human Jesus. What image would we have of Jesus if we could somehow delete all that from our memory banks? Who would be left in there? Our idea of Jesus is simply light-years away from that held by Mark’s community. • The Lord’s Prayer is nowhere in Mark - in fact the whole Sermon on the Mount is missing. This one sermon that fills three full chapters in Matthew – none of these stories or parables – not the Beatitudes – none of this is found in Mark’s narrative. Now, it is possible that the author of Mark was aware of the Q Source and didn’t include all this stuff because he or she knew it was written down elsewhere – but that is only a vague “maybe.” It is equally possible that these things were simply not within the memory of Mark’s community. • Many of our favorite parables aren’t here – the Good Samaritan; the Prodigal Son; the Workers in the Vineyard; the Sheep and the Goats; and lots of others. If Mark were the only gospel to have survived, we would not know any of these stories. • And most puzzling, there is no Post-Easter resurrection appearance by Jesus in Mark’s gospel. This gospel ends when the women go to the tomb early Easter morning and find it empty except for a “young man” – usually assumed to be an angel – who tells them that Jesus is risen and will see them in Galilee. The women are so terrified they run home and say nothing about this to anyone. The End. There are two extra "endings" tacked onto this, but one was written no earlier than the end of the 2nd century and the other wasn’t written until sometime in the 4th century. It clear to those who parse out such things that they were written in a different time by different authors. Even to the untrained eye they are clearly written with a different syntax and a different style. They are unquestionably attempts by later generations of Christians to make Mark’s account match the other gospels. But even there they are interesting in that they show us how thinking had changed in a couple of hundred years so that what was never stated in Mark’s account now has become “common, accepted knowledge.” So this the gospel according to Mark – the one that grew out of Mark’s community. There is a lot that we’d expect to be here that isn’t, but there is a whole lot that is here. And for ten years or so this would be the only gospel. Next week we will give a brief look into what Mark’s gospel does record – what is there – what Mark’s community apparently felt was important enough to write down so it wouldn’t get lost. You might want to take a quick read through Mark this week. Since it is the shortest of the gospels at only 16 chapters, it’s a quick read. And then we’ll continue next week. |
Rev. Cherie MarckxArchives
January 2025
|
RSS Feed