Paying Attention To The Sky

Back in 2001, Time magazine called Stanley Hauerwas, the Duke University Divinity School professor, “America’s Best Theologian.” Needless to say he earned the praise for his maverick writings on pacifism, homosexuality, American patriotism, etc., etc. That would hardly be the sort of recommendation that would earn his inclusion to a traditional Catholic weblog.  Further, Hauerwas is not a member of the Church but belongs to the United Methodist denomination.

(As an aside, here’s something I learned: note that we don’t define the Catholic Church as a ‘denomination’. The term ‘denomination’ rose out of a need to distinguish between different Protestant groups. The Catholic Church is the only group we refer to as a ‘church’. The Catholic Church recognizes most Protestant groups as ‘ecclesial communities’, the reason being that although they are not in full communion, they (at least the ones who accept the majority of defined dogma) are, in fact, part of the Catholic Church by virtue of their history (having been broken away from the Catholic Church) and all the teachings they believe based on Catholic Tradition, i.e. the Bible).

The reason Professor Hauerwas came onto my radar was thanks to a new series of theological commentaries on the Bible, published by Brazos press. The general editor of the project is R. R. Reno, a professor of theological ethics at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska and (more importantly) the features editor for First Things. The latter is the creation of the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and who for the longest time has been an object of my devoted fandom.

As I write there are now four volumes published and six new ones in the offing for Brazos’s projected forty-volume series of theological commentaries on the Bible. Jaroslav Pelikan led the series with a study of the book of Acts (2005), Peter Leithart studied 1-2 Kings (2006), Matthew Levering wrote on Ezra and Nehemiah (2007). Stanley Hauerwas wrote the commentary on the gospel of Matthew. The Brazos series stresses theological reflection rather than linguistically oriented biblical exegetics following the early church’s tradition of having theologians, rather than professional biblical scholars, interpret scripture.

One reader on Amazon wrote: “Matthew’s gospel, Hauerwas reminds us, is not intended to provide mere theological information (although it does do that). Rather, it’s a manual to train and transform us into disciples of Jesus, for “Jesus the Son of God is what Matthew is all about.” In contrast to the many ways that we sentimentalize the gospel, the kingdom that Jesus announced is nothing less than a radically subversive and alternative way of life. The Jesus way unmasks our own deep anxieties, our denials of our dependency, the “legitimating stories” of our modern world, and our doomed attempts to secure our own (illusory) salvation on our own terms by work, politics, money, sex, power, reputation, etc. ‘There is a kind of madness,’ says Hauerwas, ‘with being a disciple of Jesus’”

The reader continues, “Hauerwas takes a simple approach to organization, devoting one chapter to each chapter of Matthew. There are heavy doses of Augustine, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Yoder. Hauerwas is at his prophetic best in pointing us to the disruption and offense provoked by the Gospel. On the third page of his book he observes that ‘after Jesus there is no ‘normal,’’ or, put differently, after Jesus we are able to live ‘normally’’ only because of his extraordinary work.’ And then on the next-to-the last page: ‘The problem, after all, is not belief in the resurrection, but whether we live lives that would make sense if in fact Jesus has not been raised from the dead.’ The way of discipleship, then, is difficult, but it’s not dismal. Rather, it’s the only true way of genuine human joy.” Cautionary words to the Diabolists among us who view Jesus as an “important moral teacher.”

Perhaps the best recommendation for the book comes from Hauerwas himself in the introduction: “I have tried to write the commentary in the hope that those reading the commentary will want to read it as a book. In other words, I hope that the reader will read the commentary the way they read a novel….The reader may wish to read what I have to say about this or that passage, but the intelligibility of the commentary depends upon its being read in sequence.”

So I decided to read the commentary as Hauerwas suggested, and found it to be a wonderfully compelling and helpful book. Hauerwas’ insights deepen the appreciation and knowledge of Matthew’s Gospel. Here are selections from the opening chapters:

Doing Justice To The Gospel
Too often the emphasis on the incarnation leads some to focus on the birth or the crucifixion and resurrection as the defining events of Jesus’ life. To emphasize the birth as the central event of Jesus’ life is often associated with Eastern Christianity; whereas the West is thought to have focused on the death and resurrection. Whatever the truth may be in these characterizations of Eastern and Western theology; what is clearly the case in the light of the gospel of Matthew is that either emphasis fails to do justice to the gospel. Both ways of locating the significance of Jesus fail to account for the significance of his calling the disciples, his teachings, his miracles, his controversies with the leaders of Israel, his call to obey the law and the prophets. Too narrow a focus on either his birth or death can become one of the ways that Jesus is depoliticized. Incarnation rightly reminds us that Jesus is very God and very man, but that formula does not mean we do not have to attend to Jesus’ whole life.

An Attention To The Whole Life Of Jesus
Matthew’s narration of the salvation wrought in Jesus requires a full disclosure of Jesus’ life, including his birth, his relation to the disciples, his teaching and controversies, his miracles, his crucifixion and resurrection. The shape of the gospel, the narrative of this life, is an indication of the kind of politics required for the kingdom that Jesus proclaims. For example, too often those in the Christian tradition who represent quite orthodox theologies of the incarnation ignore or provide tendentious readings of the Sermon on the Mount in order to justify Christian participation in war. Yet the one who surely is very God and very man is also, as is clear from Matthew’s gospel, the one who heals, teaches, calls disciples, and was crucified and raised. A high Christology is but a correlative of a community that has learned what it means to forgive enemies. Moreover, attention to the whole life of Jesus makes it impossible to ignore Matthew’s understanding of the politics that God has been enacting through his people Israel. Matthew believes that God, through Israel, has been about the redemption of all that is and that that redemption entails the creation of a people called to be holy. Accordingly, Matthew seeks to show how the story of this man Jesus requires that we see how the story of Israel is open to the inclusion of the Gentiles. This is why the first verse of Matthew’s Gospel announces nothing less than his intention to tell the story of the genesis of a new age begun in this man Jesus, the Messiah long expected, “the son of David, the son of Abraham”

Matthew’s Genealogy
The genealogy that Matthew provides from Abraham to Jesus is but a commentary on the extraordinary claim that with Jesus we have a new beginning.  The genealogy is divided into three series, the first two consisting of fourteen generations and the last of thirteen generations The last group has only thirteen generations because the church that Jesus calls into existence constitutes the fourteenth generation It is not clear why Matthew may have thought fourteen to be significant, but what is crucial is the story of Israel that Matthew tells through the genealogy.

The first generational history is meant to tell the story of Israel’s triumph as a nation, for it ends with King David, who clearly represents for Matthew the climax of Israel’s history. David, the mighty king, the lover of justice, ruled Israel in fulfillment of the law given to Moses (Psalm 99) However, the history that Matthew tells in the genealogy is also one of loss, because the next series climaxes with the Babylonian captivity an exile that still haunts Israel’s life even after the return to Palestine Matthew, like the writers of the Old Testament, does not try to hide Israel’s failure to trust God or God’s judgment on Israel’s unfaithfulness through exile That Israel continues to tell the stories of her failure is a witness to the community’s conviction — a conviction learned through the hard discipline of prophetic lives and one that affirms the story it has to tell — to the God who makes her very existence intelligible Matthew becomes part of that witness, testifying to God’s continued faithfulness to Israel through the coming of Jesus.

Accordingly the last genealogical series is about the restoration of Israel through the birth of Jesus. To be Israel’s Messiah means that Jesus does not simply represent Israel, but that he is the renewing of the law, he is the promise of the land, and he is the temple. Jesus is the long-awaited king. He is the restoration of all that makes Israel the promised people. Through Joseph’s adoption, Jesus stands in the line of David, becoming for Israel its king unlike the kings of this world. Jesus is the climax of Matthew’s genealogical story of Israel’s past, at once representing Israel’s story while profoundly transforming the very categories of its existence.

The Four Women In Matthew’s Genealogy
Matthew’s genealogy also includes the names of four women: Tamar (Genesis. 38), Rahab (Joshua 2), Ruth, and Bathsheba wife of Uriah (2 Samuel. 11-12; 1 Kings. 1). That Matthew names these women is unusual because the genealogies of Israel (e.g., those in Genesis 5; 10; 11) are lists consisting of only males. That Matthew names these women, therefore, cannot be insignificant. Some suggest that they represent women who engaged in sexually doubtful activity; thus preparing the reader for the irregularity of Jesus’ conception. Such a reading, however, does not seem to do justice to Ruth’s relationship with Boaz. It seems more likely, given the role that Gentiles will play throughout his gospel, that Matthew names these women, who are in different ways outsiders to Israel, to indicate how God has used them to sustain the promise people. These women are not clearly from the people of Israel, yet they serve God’s providential care of Israel by quite literally making the Davidic line possible. Confronted with untenable situations that seem to preclude their full inclusion, these women use their wits to force the men of Israel to claim them as members of God’s promise. They prefigure the Canaanite woman who calls to Jesus to cure her daughter tormented by a demon (Matthew. 15:21-28). Jesus at first refuses to answer her, responding that he was sent only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she kneels before him, confessing, as we confess in the prayer of humble access, that she is ready like the dogs, an Israelite description of Gentiles, to eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. Jesus commends her faith and heals her daughter.

These women (and it is not accidental that they are women) represent the undeniable reality that God’s promise to Israel has spread to the Gentiles. Matthew’s gospel is the ongoing commentary on this reality and the tension it represents for understanding Jesus’ mission Matthew does not try to resolve the tension created by the brute fact that Jesus is acknowledged by those who are not Israel. And we, from our position two thousand years later, cannot assume that we know how to resolve the tension created by the promise of Israel including the Gentiles. All we know, because Matthew makes it a point to show us, is that Gentiles recognize Jesus. Therefore, it is crucial that we not seek solutions that would make it impossible for us to read Matthew’s gospel with a faith like that of the Canaanite woman. Like her, we must recognize that Jesus has the power to restore us to life even if it means we receive God’s gifts as crumbs from the table.

Jesus’ Family Of Murderers, Cheats, Cowards, Adulterers And Liars (Hey, He’s One of Us!)
In his wonderful sermon “The Genealogy of Christ,” Herbert McCabe suggests that in his genealogy Matthew was reminding us that Jesus was tied to the squalid reality of human life often exemplified in our sexual behavior as well as our politics. McCabe runs through the list of characters that make up the genealogy noting they are anything but an admirable group of folk.

The unscrupulous but entertaining Jacob won his position in the line that leads to Christ by lying and cheating his blind father; David, the ruthless and highly successful bandit, unites the tribes of Israel through intrigue and murder, Rehoboam son of Solomon loses most of David’s gains through arrogance and greedy Ahaziah son of Ahab continued his father’s ways as a sadistic mass murderer. McCabe notes that things get only relatively better with the exile partly because the line of kings ends or at least we do not know their names. Matthew’s genealogy; therefore, is a stark indication that God’s plan is not always accomplished through pious people, but through “passionate and thoroughly disreputable people” According to McCabe, the moral is almost too obvious to belabor Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of middle-class respectability; but rather he “belonged to a family of murders, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars — he belonged to us and came to help us, no wonder he came to a bad end, and gave us some hope.”

The Importance Of Mary’s Conception Through The Spirit
Matthew’s genealogy is thus made possible by the resurrected Jesus’ charge to the disciples to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28 19-20) The gospel has gone to the Gentiles, but this does not mean that the special character of the people of Israel is denied, for God’s promise of salvation to Israel through the law — as the women named in the genealogy indicate — was never restricted to Israel.

The story of Jesus’ birth makes clear the extraordinary story that Matthew has to tell of God’s action on our behalf Mary, engaged to Joseph, is pregnant with a child “from the Holy Spirit.” This is to ordinary conception, but rather this is God acting on our behalf by becoming fully one of us. We stand, therefore, before what the church will learn to describe as the mystery of the incarnation. The timeless one is here conceived in time through the work of the Holy Spirit, that is, the third person of the Trinity.

 It is often said that the Holy Spirit is an afterthought in modern theology; but the Spirit is certainly present in Matthew’s gospel from the beginning (Rogers 2005, 117). For Matthew, the work of the Spirit is to point to the humanity of Christ. Thus at the baptism of Jesus the heavens open, and “he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him” (Matthew 3:16). It is the same work of the Spirit that we seek when we pray, ‘And we most humbly beseech thee, O merciful Father, to hear us, and with thy Word and Holy Spirit, to bless and sanctify these gifts of bread and wine, that they may be for us the Body and Blood of thy dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ” (Book of Common Prayer 1979, 342).

That the Holy Spirit is necessary for our recognition of Jesus as the Son of God is not surprising, given our presumption that it is surely not possible for God to be one of us. Our temptation is to believe that if God is God then God must be the biggest thing around. Accordingly we describe God with an unending list of superlatives: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. God is all powerful, all knowing, and everywhere present, but these descriptions make it difficult for some to understand how God can be conceived by the Spirit in Mary: Yet that is to presume we know what it means for God to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent prior to God being found in Mary’s womb.

Admittedly this challenges our presumption that we can assume we can know what God must be prior to knowing Jesus, but such presumption is just another word for sin. By Mary’s conception through the Spirit, our prideful assumption that we are capable of knowing God on our own terms is challenged. As Jesus will later claim, a claim inherent in his conception: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27).

The Virgin Birth
Too often those who worry about whether we are required to believe in the virgin birth do so assuming they are being asked to believe something for which there is no evidence. But Matthew is telling the story of the God who refuses to abandon us — and even becomes one of us that we might be redeemed. Virgin births are not surprising given that this is the God who has created us without us, but (as Augustine observes) who will not save us without us. What the Father does through the Spirit to conceive Mary’s child is not something different than what God does through creation. God does not need to intervene in creation, because God has never been absent from creation. Creation is not “back there,” but is God’s ongoing love of all he has willed and continues to will to exist. What should startle us, what should stun us, is not that Mary is a virgin, but that God refuses to abandon us.

Karl Barth On The Humanity Of God
“God’s high freedom in Jesus Christ is His freedom for love. The divine capacity which operates and exhibits itself in that superiority and subordination is manifestly also God’s capacity to bend downwards, to attach Himself to another and this other to Himself, to be together with him. This takes place in that irreversible sequence, but in it is completely real. In that sequence there arises and continues in Jesus Christ the highest communion of God with man.

God’s deity is thus no prison in which He can exist only in and for Himself. It is rather His freedom to be in and for Himself but also with and for us, to assert but also to sacrifice Himself, to be wholly exalted but also completely humble, not only almighty but also almighty mercy not only Lord but also servant, not only judge but also Himself the judged, not only man’s eternal king but also his brother in time. And all that without in the slightest forfeiting His deity! All that, rather, in the highest proof and proclamation of His deity! He who does and manifestly can do all that, He and no other is the living God. So constituted is His deity, the deity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Jesus Christ it is in this way operative and recognizable. If He is the Word of Truth, then the truth of God is exactly this and nothing else.”

Mistaking The Virgin Birth
God’s actuality means that any attempt to explain, to render the virgin birth explicable in naturalistic terms, is a mistake. Just as we cannot explain creation we cannot and should not try to explain how Jesus can at once be fully God and fully man. Nicaea and Chalcedon do not explain the Trinity and incarnation, but rather they teach us how to speak of the mystery of God without explanation.

Accordingly Nicaea and Chalcedon reproduce the character of the gospels, that is, the only way to speak of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ is to tell the story, the story of Mary’s being found with child though she and Joseph had not “known one another.”

That is why Matthew does not try to prepare us for the story of Mary by providing a transition from the genealogies to the story of Mary’s pregnancy.  Rather, he tells us in a straightforward, if not blunt, manner that “the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.” Again we see that Matthew does not assume that it is his task to make God’s work intelligible to us, but rather his task is to show us how we can live in light of Jesus’ conception and birth.

The Holy Family
“Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,” we rightly affirm at every Eucharist. But these affirmations should not tempt us to forget that “Christ was born.” The second person of the Trinity was conceived and born needing the care of a mother. To be human is to be vulnerable, but to be a baby is to be vulnerable in a manner we spend a lifetime denying. Indeed Jesus was a baby refusing to forego the vulnerability that would climax in his crucifixion. And as such, Jesus was entrusted to the care of Mary and Joseph. They could not save him from the crucifixion, but they were indispensable agents to making his life possible. We rightly celebrate, therefore, the Holy Family.

Matthew’s story of Mary’s pregnancy lacks the charm and detail of Luke’s account, but that may well be its value. One of the great enemies of the gospel is sentimentality, and the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth have proven to be ready material for maudlin sentiment. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ conception and birth is unapologetically realistic. Joseph, not Mary, is the main actor. John Chrysostom praises Joseph as a man of exceptional self-restraint since he must have been free of that most tyrannical passion, jealousy. Unwilling to cause Mary distress, to expose her to public disgrace, he planned to dismiss her discreetly. Joseph, therefore, refused to act according to the law, but rather chose to act in a manner that Jesus himself would later exemplify by his attitude toward known sinners (Matthew. 9:10-13). Yet Joseph still required a revelation so that he would know the character of Mary’s pregnancy. He is also given the honor to name Jesus as the new Joshua capable of rescuing his people from their sins. The Joshua of old had been given the task of conquering the Promised Land, but this Joshua is sent to save his people from their sins, making it possible for them to live as the people of the promise. Joseph did as he was instructed, taking Mary for his wife and naming his son Jesus.

Without Mary’s Virginity The Story Cannot Be Told
Moreover, Matthew tells us all this was done so that the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 would be fulfilled. This is the first time that Matthew uses the formula “all this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord,” but he will use the formula often to show how Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. It is tempting to suggest that Matthew is forcing his material to conform to a prior template, but that is to assume Mary was not in fact a virgin when in fact she must have been. We now rightly know how to read Isaiah 7:14 because Mary is the young woman and she is a virgin.

Mary had to be a virgin, because Jesus is the Son of God. There is no way to prove Mary’s virginity other than to observe that without Mary’s virginity the story cannot be told. Mary’s virginity is simply required by the way the story runs. The one to whom she gave birth is none other than Emmanuel, “God with us,” and such a one can have no other father than the Father who is the first person of the Trinity. It is important that Isaiah 7:14 be fulfilled, but that a virgin should give birth to the Son is crucial for our understanding of the character of the Father.

Mary Is Also Our Abraham
We do not have “Here am I” in Matthew as we do with Luke’s Mary, but that does not in any way lessen Mary’s significance. Without Mary’s obedience, without Mary’s willingness to receive the Holy Spirit, our salvation would be in doubt. Raniero Cantalamessa, therefore, quite rightly entitles his 1992 book Mary: Mirror of the Church. With some justification Mary is often identified as the second Eve, but Mary is also our Abraham. Just as Abraham obeyed God’s call for him to leave his familiar land to journey to a foreign destination, so Mary through her willingness to become the very Mother of God is the beginning of the church. She is the firstborn of the new creation faithfully responding to the Son who calls into being a new people. Just as Abraham is the father of Israel, so Mary is the mother of the church.

Our Relation With The People Of Israel
All of this means that when Christians lose the significance of Mary in the economy of salvation we also risk losing our relation with the people of Israel. Jesus is born of a Jewish mother. His flesh is Jewish flesh. To be sure Jewish flesh is human, but Christians dare not forget that the flesh that is “very man” is particularly the flesh of Mary. Matthew will not let us forget that the one born of Mary is he who has come to free Israel from its sins. Jesus is very God and very man, but that formula does not mean we can ever forget that the God he is, and the man he is, is the same God that has promised to always be faithful to the people of Israel