Of the all the gospels, Matthew is the one most like a transcript of Christ's teachings. To the evangelist, the narrative portions of his gospel must have seemed a necessary but almost regrettable intrusion into the discourses of Christ. Indeed, the gospel ends not with a narration of the Ascension, but instead with the words of the Great Commission, the last instructions being "and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time." Christ entrusted the teaching of His commands to His apostles, and Matthew, in the writing of his dialogue-laden gospel, proved to be a meticulously obedient servant of Christ. With so much "red-letter" text in the gospel, it is difficult to glean from our lengthy reading just one particular point - so many things pop out. I am thankful for our ability to comment in this community since we are able to continue bringing up points for consideration and are not left to just the first post.
Anyhow, Christ is made to endure another three-part trial in Matthew 22:15-40 - this time it is not in the desert with Satan, but in Jerusalem with the civil and religious leaders. The leaders mean to entrap Christ in a misstatement. First they intend for Him to speak against Roman rule, and then they mean to embroil Him in the principal argument which divided the Saducees and Pharisees, the resurrection of the dead, and finally they try Him on His understanding of the Law. In each attempt, they fail to make Christ stumble, and instead Christ succeeds in demonstrating their own lack of understanding by questioning their intrepretation of a messianic psalm.
After silencing his would-be opponents, Christ turns His attention to "the people and his disciples" and begins a harrowing rebuke of those who have tried Him. Christ, in 23:13-32, is very precise in His condemnation of their actions and their authority - His list of "woes" reads almost like a series of inverse beatitudes. I am particularly impressed by Christ's words in verses 27-32:
Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who are like whitewashed tombs that look handsome on the outside, but inside are full of dead men's bones and every kind of corruption. In the same way you appear to people from the outside like good honest men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who build the sepulchers of the prophets and decorate the tombs of holy men, saying, "We would never have joined in shedding the blood of the prophets, had we lived in our father's day." So! Your own evidence tell against you! You are the sons of those who murdered the prophets! Very well, then, finish off the work that your fathers began.
We must remember that "What goes into the mouth does not make a man unclean; it is what comes out of the mouth that makes him unclean. (Matthew 15:10-20)" And we must remember that Christ ends his proclamation of woes with:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks, and you have refused!
Matt. 23:37
And we must remember that Christ called St. Paul, the strictest of Pharisees, away from the side of Stephen's murderers to be His apostle to the Gentiles.
3 comments:
Paul's conversion is an insightful point to raise here. I also like that after the rich man "went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth" (Mt. 19:22), we find "a rich man of Arimathaea, called Joseph" asking for Christ's body from Pilate when many of the others had abandoned Him. In John's account of the burial, the inquisitive and stealthy Pharisee Nicodemus assists the Joseph the rich man in the burial.
The comparison of the Pharisees to their fathers strikes me as the same message I see in a lot of pop culture and interpersonal dynamics even today: people become their parents through reacting to the past--not to say it is not important to know and learn from the past, but it might do to emphasise that we should always be looking Christwards (lovely word, that) rather than trying to model ourselves on or in reaction to those who have come before us.
I'm glad you mentioned Paul; it is hopeful that Christ can call even such a man to do such great works. It's very humbling, too.
As Christians, we strive to be incorporated, through love, into the body and life of Christ our Lord. Those people who have been united to Christ, to His divine life, though they die, are sustained through, with, and in Him. And though Christians presently living may be physically separated from the faithful departed, the shared life of Christ unites all as brothers and sisters, as children of the family of God our Father. The living may be physically separated from the dead, but the Holy Spirit keeps all close in His unity.
If we belong to Christ, we are not spiritually separated from our fellow Christians by the distances of time and space. By giving us a share in His divine life, God also gives us a share in His eternity. Created time cannot contain the One who was, who is, and who is to come. Those who have have become members of His Body the Church have also come to share in His timelessness. And so, when we learn from the lives of our elders in the Faith, their incidental distance from us in time is not so important as their purposeful closeness to the Lord.
If we model ourselves after the example of a people of a particular time and if we consequently neglect our effort to become more like Christ, then we err. But if we learn from the lives of others who have sought after Him, then we simply recognize our familial interdependency, our complimentary membership in the body of Christ. St. Paul says directly and without arrogance,
Join with others in being imitators of me, brothers, and observe those who thus conduct themselves according to the model you have in us.
Philippians 3:17
And apart from the Church and the communion of saints, human tradition can serve a useful purpose. G.K. Chesterton said that "tradition is the democracy of the dead."
Since the Enlightenment, many Westerners have been smugly sure of their constant progress toward some sort of vague humanistic and technological "perfection." Each new generation seems to believe that it is one step closer to achieving this indefinable "perfection" than the last. This strange presumption has produced in each new generation the temptation to be contemptuous of the last; the children are tempted to kick the loins from which they sprang. But Scripture teaches us to reverence our parents and to be charitable and merciful to all.
Christ derides the Pharisees' veneration of tradition because the Pharisees followed their tradions at the expense of following the "weightier things" of God and because they had apparently confused their traditions with the "weightier things."
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. (But) these you should have done, without neglecting the others.
Matthew 23:23
I do like your word "Christwards." :-)
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