Jesus Points To Matthew
A reading selection from Fr. Barron’s wonderful little book, Eucharist. For ten bucks how can you go wrong?
For Christians, the most important thing to note about Jesus is that he is not simply one more in a long line of prophets and teachers. He is not merely, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, or David, a good man who represents God. Rather, he consistently speaks and acts in the very person of God. In the words of N. T. Wright, Jesus is like a portrait of Yahweh, in all of its richness and complexity, sprung to life. When he claims interpretive authority over the Torah, when he forgives the sins of the paralyzed man, when he calls his disciples to love him above mother and father, indeed above their very lives, when lie cleanses the temple, Jesus says and does things that only Yahweh could legitimately say and do.
In its later creeds and dogmas, the church expressed this biblical conviction, speaking of Jesus as the incarnation of the Word of God, as “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” One of the principal desires of Yahweh was to reestablish the sacred meal, to restore the community and fellowship lost through sin. Thus it should be no surprise that Jesus would make the sacred meal central to his messianic work. Throughout his public ministry, Jesus gathered people around a table of fellowship. In the Palestine of his time, the table was a place where the divisions and stratifications of the society were particularly on display, but at Jesus’ table, all were welcome: saints and sinners, the just and the unjust, the healthy and the sick, men and women. This open table fellowship was not simply a challenge to the societal status quo, but also an expression of God’s deepest intentions vis-a-vis the human race, the realization of Isaiah’s eschatological dream. In fact, very often Jesus’ profoundest teachings took place at table, calling to mind Isaiah’s holy mountain where a festive meal would be spread out and where “instruction” would go forth.
Let us examine just a few instances of this meal fellowship in the New Testament, beginning in a perhaps surprising place, the story of Christmas. The account of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of Luke is not, as Raymond E. Brown reminded us, an innocent tale that we tell to children. Instead, all of the drama and edginess of the story of Jesus are adumbrated there. We are meant to notice a contrast between the figure mentioned at the outset of the narrative — Caesar Augustus — and the character who is at the center of the story. Caesar would have been the best-fed person in the ancient world, able at the snap of his fingers to have all of his sensual desires met. But the true king, the true emperor of the world, is horn in a cave outside of a forgotten town on the verge of Caesar’s domain. Too weak even to raise his head, he is wrapped in swaddling clothes and then “laid in a manger,” the place where the animals eat. What Luke is signaling here is that Jesus had come to be food for a hungry world. Whereas Caesar — in the manner of Eve and Adam — existed to be fed, Jesus existed to be fed upon. He was destined to be, not only the host at the sacred banquet, but (how like Babette here) the meal itself. And to Christ’s manger came the shepherds ;evocative of the poor and marginalized, the lost sheep of the house of Israel) and kings (evocative of the nations of the world), drawn there as though by a magnet. Thus commenced the realization of Isaiah’s vision.
A story that can be found in all three of the synoptic Gospels is that of the conversion of Levi (or Matthew) the tax collector. We hear that as Jesus was passing by, he spotted Matthew at his tax collector’s post. To be a tax collector in Jesus’ time — a Jew collaborating with the Roman occupying power in the oppression of one’s own people — was to be a contemptible figure, someone akin to a French collaborator during the Nazi period. Jesus gazed at this man and said, simply, “Follow me.” Did Jesus invite Matthew because the tax collector merited it? Was Jesus responding to a request from Matthew or some hidden longing in the sinner’s heart?
Certainly not. Grace, by definition, comes unbidden and without explanation. In Caravaggio’s magnificent painting of this scene, Matthew, dressed anachronistically in sixteenth-century finery, responds to Jesus’ summons by pointing incredulously to himself and wearing a quizzical expression, as if to say, “Me? You want me?” The hand of Christ in Caravaggio’s picture is adapted from the hand of God the Father in Michelangelo’s depiction of the creation of man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Just as creation is ex nihilo, so conversion is a new creation, a gracious remaking of a person from the nonbeing of his sin. Matthew, we are told, immediately got up and followed the Lord.
But where did he follow him? To a banquet! “While he was at table in his house … ” is the first thing we read after the declaration that Matthew followed him. Before he calls Matthew to do anything, before he sends him on mission, Jesus invites Matthew to recline in easy fellowship around a festive table. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis comments, The deepest meaning of Christian discipleship is not to work for Jesus but to be with Jesus.” The former tax-collector listens to the Word, laughs with him, breaks bread with him and in this finds his true identity. Adam was the friend of Yahweh before becoming, through his own fear and pride, Yahweh’s enemy. Now Jesus, Yahweh made flesh, seeks to reestablish this lost friendship with Adam’s descendants.
The Gospel then tells us that many other sinners and tax collectors, inspired, we presume, by Matthew’s example. “came and sat with Jesus and his disciples.” This is but one example of how Jesus embodies the Isaian vision of all the nations of the world streaming to unity around Mt. Zion. Christ himself is the meeting of divinity and humanity and hence he is the temple, the place of right worship. And thus it is around him that the nations will gather to he fed “juicy red meat and pure choice wine.” The same grace that summoned Matthew now, through Matthew, summons the rest, and a community of sinners-become-diners is formed.
Naturally, this coming-together stirs up the resentment of the Pharisees, who ask the disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” In our dysfunction, having lost contact with the God through whom all are one, we tend to order ourselves in exclusive and domineering ways, determining the insiders precisely in contradistinction to the outsiders. But this is just the kind of phony, self-destructive community that Jesus has come to interrupt. And so he responds to this criticism: “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do…. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” Here we find a theme that will be developed throughout the tradition, namely, the sacred meal as medicine for the sin-sick soul. In light of Jesus’ observation, we can see that the inclusion of sinners is the very heart and raison d’etre of the meal that he hosts.
The miracle of the feeding of the thousands with a few loaves and fishes must have haunted the imaginations of the early Christian communities, for accounts of it can be found in all four Gospels. These narratives are richly iconic presentations of the great theme of the sacred meal that we have been developing. In Luke’s version, crowds began to gather around Jesus when they heard that he had retired to Bethsaida. Moved with pity, Jesus taught them and cured their sick, but as the day was drawing to a close, the disciples worried about what this enormous crowd would eat. “The twelve approached him [Jesus] and said, `Dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the surrounding villages and farms and find lodging and provisions; for we are in a deserted place here.’ ” The twelve, symbolic of the gathered tribes of Israel, act here in contradiction to their own deepest identity, for they want to scatter those whom Jesus has drawn magnetically to himself.
So Jesus challenges them, “Give them some food yourselves.” But they protest: “Five loaves and two fish are all we have, unless we ourselves go and buy food for all these people.” Oblivious to their complaint, Jesus instructs them to gather the crowd in groups of fifty or so. Then, taking the loaves and fish, Jesus said a blessing over them, broke them, and then gave them to the disciples for distribution. Everyone in the crowd of five thousand ate until they were satisfied.
There is no better exemplification in the Scriptures of what I have been calling the loop of grace. God offers, as a sheer grace, the gift of being, but if we try to cling to that gift and make it our own (in the manner of Eve and Adam), we lose it. The constant command of the Bible is this: what you have received as a gift, give as a gift — and you will find the original gift multiplied and enhanced. God’s grace, precisely because it is grace, cannot be held on to; rather, it is had only in the measure that it remains grace, that is to say, a gift given away. God’s life, in a word, is had only on the fly. One realizes this truth when one enters willingly into the loop of grace, giving away that which one is receiving.
The hungry people who gather around Jesus in this scene are symbolic of the hungry human race, starving from the time of Adam and Eve for what will satisfy. In imitation of our first parents, we have tried to fill up the emptiness with wealth, pleasure, power, honor, the sheer love of domination, but none of it works, precisely because we have all been wired for God and God is nothing but love. It is only when we conform ourselves to the way of love, only when, in a high paradox, we contrive to empty out the ego, that we are filled. Thus the five loaves and two fish symbolize that which has been given to us, all that we have received as a grace from God. If we appropriate it, we lose it. But if we turn it over to Christ, then we will find it transfigured and multiplied, even unto the feeding of the world.
At the outset of the story, the disciples refused to serve the crowd, preferring to send them away to the neighboring towns to fend for themselves. At the climax of the narrative, the disciples become themselves the instruments of nourishment, setting the loaves and fishes before the people. Within the loop of grace, they discovered their mission and were, themselves, enhanced, transfigured. The little detail at the end of the story — that the leftovers filled twelve wicker baskets — has an eschatological overtone. We are meant to think, once more, of Isaiah’s holy mountain to which the twelve tribes of Israel and, through them, all the tribes of the world would be drawn.
All of these themes are summed up, drawn together, recapitulated (if I may use St. Irenaeus’s language) in the meal that Jesus hosted the night before his death. Luke tells us that, at the climactic moment of his life and ministry, Jesus “took his place at table with the apostles.” At this last supper, Jesus, in a culminating way, embodied Yahweh’s desire to sit in easy intimacy with his people, sharing his life with them. He said, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” As we saw, Yahweh established the Passover meal as a sign of his covenant with his holy people Israel. Thus Jesus, Yahweh made flesh, gathered his community around the Passover table. All of the familiar Passover motifs of liberation, redemption, unity, and festivity are at play here, but they are being redefined and reconfigured in relation to Jesus.
The Isaian vision of the sumptuous meal on God’s holy mountain is described as “eschatological,” implying that it has to do with God’s deepest and final desire for the world that he has made. At the commencement of the Last Supper, as he settled in with his disciples, Jesus explicitly evoked this eschatological dimension: “For I tell you, I shall not eat it again until there is fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” And when he took the first cup of Passover wine, he reiterated the theme: “For I tell you that from this time on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God conies.” It is most important to remember that this meal took place on the night before Jesus’ death, which is to say, at the moment when he was summing up his life and preparing for his own passover into the realm of the Father. Therefore, insisting that he will not eat or drink again until the kingdom arrives is tantamount to explaining that this meal has a final and unsurpassable symbolic significance, that it is his last word spoken, as it were, in the shadow of the eternal and thus redolent of the divine order. The room of the Last Supper is Isaiah’s holy mountain, and the meal that Jesus hosts is the supper of juicy red meat and pure choice wine. It is as though the longed-for future has appeared even now in time.
What stood at the heart of this event? Jesus took the unleavened bread of the Passover, the bread symbolic of Israel’s hasty flight from slavery to freedom, blessed it in accord with the traditional Passover prayer of blessing, broke, it and distributed it to his disciples saying, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.” And then, after they had eaten, he took a cup of wine — traditionally called the cup of blessing — and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you.”
Acting once more in the very person of Yahweh, Jesus fed his friends with his very substance, affecting the deepest kind of co-inherence among them because of the radicality of his own co-inherence with them. To say “body” and “blood,” in the non-dualist context of first-century Judaism, is to say “self,” and thus Jesus was inviting his disciples to feed on him and thereby to draw his life into theirs, conforming themselves to him in the most intimate and complete way possible. We must never keep the account of the fall far from our minds when we consider these events. If our trouble began with a bad meal (seizing at godliness on our own terms), then our salvation commences with a rightly structured meal (God offering us his life as a free gift). What was foreshadowed when Mary laid the Christ child in the manger came, at this meal, to full expression.
It is of great moment that, immediately after this extraordinary event — this constitution of the church around God’s gift of self — Jesus speaks of treachery: “And yet behold, the hand of the one who is to betray me is with me on the table.” In the biblical reading, God’s desires have been, from the beginning, opposed. Consistently, human beings have preferred the isolation and separation of sin to the festivity of the sacred meal. Theologians have called this anomalous tendency the mysterium iniquitatis (the mystery of evil), for there is no rational ground for it, no reason why it should exist. But there it stubbornly is, always shadowing the good, parasitic upon that which it tries to destroy. Therefore, we should not be too surprised that, as the sacred meal comes to its richest possible expression, evil accompanies it. Judas the betrayer expresses the mysterium iniquitatis with particular symbolic power, for he had spent years in intimacy with Jesus, taking in the Lord’s moves and thoughts at close quarters, sharing the table of fellowship with him, and yet he saw fit to turn Jesus over to his enemies and to interrupt the co-inherence of the Last Supper. Those of us who regularly gather around the table of intimacy with Christ and yet engage consistently in the works of darkness are meant to sec ourselves in the betrayer.
What follows is a scene that, were it not so tragic, would be funny. Having experienced at firsthand the intense act of love by which Jesus formed a new humanity around the eating of his body and the drinking of his blood, having sensed that the deepest meaning of this new life is self-sacrificing love, the disciples quarrel about titles and honors: “An argument broke out among them about which of them should be regarded as the greatest.” In the table fellowship that lie practiced throughout his ministry, Jesus, as we saw, consistently undermined the systems of domination and the social stratifications that marked the culture of his time.
His order (God’s kingdom) would be characterized by an equality and mutuality born of our shared relationship to the creator God, “who makes his sun to shine on the good and the bad alike.” Therefore, games of ambition and claims of social superiority are inimical to the community that finds its point of orientation around the table of Jesus’ body and blood. And this is why Jesus responded so promptly and unambiguously to the disciples’ childish preoccupations: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them and those in authority over them are addressed as Benefactors; but among you it will not be so. Rather, let the greatest among you be as the youngest and the leader as the servant.”
If, as Feuerbach said, we are what we eat, then those who eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood must constitute a new society, grounded in love, service, nonviolence, and nondomination. Reminding them of their crucial importance as the first members of the church, Jesus said, “I confer a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me. . and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” The order of love that obtains within God became flesh in Jesus and, through Jesus, was given to the community that he founded. That community in turn, the new Israel, would be, in accord with Isaiah’s prediction, the means by which the whole world would be gathered to God.
Here the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes comes to mind. Initially, as we saw, the disciples refused their mission to be the new Israel and feed the crowd, but then, in light of the miracle of grace, they became the distributors of grace. A very similar dynamic is on display in the account of the Last Supper. It is never enough simply to eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus; one must become a bearer of the power that one has received. The meal always conduces to the mission.
The Last Supper preceded and symbolically anticipated the terrible events of the following day, when Jesus’ body would indeed be given away and his blood poured out. In the next section of the book, I will speak much more of this sacrificial dimension of the Supper, but for now I would like to focus on what followed the dying of Jesus. If Jesus had died and simply remained in his grave, he would be remembered (if he was remembered at all) as a noble idealist, tragically crushed by the forces of history. Perhaps a few of his disciples would have carried on his program for a time, but eventually the Jesus movement, like so many others like it, would have run out of steam.
N. T. Wright, echoing the opinion of the church fathers, argued that the single most extraordinary fact of early Christianity is the perdurance of the Christian church as a messianic movement. There could have been, in the first century, no surer sign that someone was not the Messiah than his death at the hands of the enemies of Israel, for one of the central marks of Messiahship was precisely victory over those enemies. That Peter, James, John, Paul, Thomas, and the rest could announce throughout the Mediterranean world that Jesus was in fact the long-awaited Israelite Messiah and that they could go to their deaths defending this claim are the surest indications that something monumentally significant happened to Jesus after his death. That something was the resurrection. Though too many modern theologians have tried to explain the resurrection away as a wish-fulfilling fantasy, a vague symbol, or a literary invention, the New Testament writers could not be clearer: the crucified Jesus, who had died and been buried, appeared alive again to his disciples.
The risen Christ was — as all of the accounts attest — strange. On the one hand, he was the same Jesus with whom they had eaten and drunk and to whom they had listened, but on the other hand, he was different, in fact so changed that frequently they didn’t immediately recognize him or acknowledge him. It was as though he stood on the borderline between two worlds, still existing in this dimension of space and time, but also transcending it, participating in a higher, better world. Through certain hints in the Old ‘testament, some first-century Jews had begun to cultivate the conviction that at the end of time God would bring the righteous dead back to life and restore them to a transfigured earth. In the risen Jesus, the first Christians saw this hope being realized. In Paul’s language, Christ was “the first fruits” of those who had fallen asleep, that is to say, the initial instance of the general resurrection of the dead. In him, they saw the dawn of the promised restoration. And thus they began to see that the sacred banquet was not simply an expression of full-flourishing in this world, not simply about justice, peace, and nonviolence here below, but also the anticipation of an elevated, transfigure , perfected world where God’s will would be completely done and his kingdom completely come.
One of the most beautiful evocations of this heavenly meal is found in the twenty-first chapter of John’s Gospel. The author of John’s Gospel was a literary genius, and his work is marked by subtle and intricate symbolism. Therefore, we must proceed carefully as we examine this story. He tells us that the risen Christ appeared to his disciples by the Sea of Tiberias in Galilee. Throughout the Gospels, beautiful Galilee, Jesus’ home country, is symbolic of the land of resurrection and new life. After the Paschal events in Jerusalem, the disciples of Jesus had returned there and taken up, it appears, their old livelihood, for John tells us that seven of them, under the leadership of Peter, were in a boat heading out to fish.
But we must attend to the mystical depth of the narrative. When he appeared to them after his resurrection, Jesus, according to John, breathed on these disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” and “as the rather has sent me, so I send you.” Therefore, we should appreciate this fishing expedition as a symbol of the church (the barque of Peter), across space and time, at its apostolic task of seeking souls. At the break of dawn, they spied a mysterious figure on the distant shore, who shouted out to them, “Children, have you caught anything to eat?” When they answered in the negative, he instructed them to cast the net over the right side of the ship. When they did so, they brought in a huge catch of fish. The life and work of the church, John seems to be telling us, will be a lengthy, twilight struggle, a hard toil that will often seem to bear little or no fruit.
But after the long night, the dawn of a new life and a new order will break, the transfigured world inaugurated by Jesus. The catch of fish that he makes possible is the totality of people that Christ will gather to himself; it is the new Israel, the eschatological church. We know this through a subtle bit of symbolism. When the fish are dragged ashore, John bothers to tell us their exact number, 153, a figure commonly taken in the ancient world to signify the total number of species of fish in the sea.
After the miraculous haul, the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” traditionally identified as the author of the Gospel, shouted, “It is the Lord.” St. John, the one who rested on the hreast of the Lord at the Last Supper and who had the greatest intuitive feel for Jesus’ intentions, represents here the mystical dimension of the church. Up and down the centuries, there have been poets, preachers, teachers, liturgists, mystics, and saints who have an instinct for who Jesus is and what he desires. They are the ones who, typically, see the working of the Lord first, who recognize his purposes even before the leadership of the church does. John’s cry in this story anticipates their intuitions and discoveries.
What the mystics and poets are ultimately sensing is the eschatological purpose of the church, the shore toward which the barque of the church is sailing. When Peter hears that it is the Lord, he throws on clothes. What seems like an incidental detail is symbolically rich. After their sin, Eve and Adam made clothes for themselves, for they were ashamed. So Peter, who had three times denied Jesus, felt similarly ashamed to appear naked before the Lord. He therefore represents, in this symbolic narrative, all those sinners across the centuries who will, in their shame and penitence, seek forgiveness from Christ. As the disciples come ashore, they see that Jesus is doing something altogether in character: he is hosting a meal for them. “They saw a charcoal fire with fish on it and bread…. Jesus said to them, `Come, have breakfast.’ ” Symbolically, they have arrived at the end of time and the end of their earthly mission, and they are, at the dawn of a new age, ushered into the definitive banquet of which the meals from Eden through the Last Supper were but anticipations. Disciples, mystics, saints, and forgiven sinners are welcome at this breakfast inaugurating the new and elevated manner of being that God had wanted to give us from the time of the Garden of Eden.
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Heather King writes on THE TRAGEDY IN TUCSON, OUR “FILTHY ROTTEN SYSTEM,” AND THE DIARIES OF OF DOROTHY DAY.
