Repenting your sins is all well and good; I can’t get behind the naked threats in Matthew 3, though. Take Matthew 3:12, “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Even if you accept that the chaff in question really have done evil, how does that justify burning them with unquenchable fire? It reminds me of the “lock them up and throw away the key” philosophy that the United States has followed for the last three decades.
Matthew 4 is more to my taste: I particularly like the bit where the devil says to Jesus that God will look after him if he does something stupid, and Jesus’s response is “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (from Matthew 4:7). Even if you believe that you’re the chosen one, that’s no excuse to press your luck, or to abuse that privilege! On its own, I’m not so thrilled with “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (from Matthew 4:10), but in the context of having the Devil asking you to worship him and be rewarded with vast riches and power, it’s a pretty good response. And then there’s Jesus’s going around and healing people right and left; it’s certainly hard to find that as anything other than wholly admirable!
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Just to add a bit from the mythic point of view, my own view of the gospels has been pretty thoroughly shaped by NT Wright’s remarkable (unfinished, unfortunately) series “The New Testament and the People of God.” Wright argues–incredibly persuasively, to my mind–that Jesus placed himself, and was seen by those around him, as a Jewish messianic prophet, in line with several other examples in the preceding century, and also in line with a great deal of Jewish writing of the late Second Temple period, including what we call the Dead Sea Scrolls and the book of Daniel.
With that framework in mind, both the prophecies of Mt 2 and the temptation narrative of Mt 3 look to me like episodes fundamentally shaped by the later Passion narrative (which some argue was all there was of the gospels at their earliest stage) and by the destruction of the Temple in 70CE, which the early Christian community saw as the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy. From that perspective, what we have here aren’t moral lessons, but a narrative of what God is planning, for purposes of his own, in order to bring the kingdom.
On the other hand, the ministry, with the healings and the feedings, is the narrative of the good things that happen when God is in among us, and a foretaste of what will happen when the kingdom comes for good.
12/20/2010 @ 11:01 am
That’s really useful. I have a bunch of these posts queued up (I’m up to Matthew 15 as I write this comment), and you’ll see me get increasingly bothered by the sorts of thing I was complaining about in Matthew 3:12. In fact, I also start wondering about the ministry: not that healing and feeding aren’t good, but that other tools are more effective.
So thinking about these as a prophetic narrative rather than moral pronouncements gives a different point of view on them: if that’s the way things are going to be, then that’s the way things are going to be, and I shouldn’t get mad at the messenger. (Like you said in your comment on the previous post: “prophecy doesn’t operate deterministically but rather descriptively”.)
Though it does bring other issues to the fore: that makes me okay with Jesus, but even more unhappy with God. Like I said in yesterday’s post, I think it’s reasonable to think of God as morally incommensurable with us; but if you don’t go down that route, then it suggests uncomfortable parallels, such as God the abusive father.
And then there’s the question of how this informs modern Christians’ behavior. Viewing this as prophecy that they believe to be accurate helps me be sympathetic to fundamentalist Christian strains: they’re doing what they think is best for me, in a situation where they believe the stakes are amazingly high. It doesn’t mean that I like their actions, however, and I I’m fairly sure that they’re not in general seeing these statements as amoral in the way that you describe here. But maybe it would help tease out some distinctions between types and sources of morality, that could increase the productiveness of conversations?
And, as so frequently happens to me these days, it also suggests that I really need to reread Jane Jacobs’ _Systems of Survival_ sooner rather than later, because if my memory is correct, it bears directly on this question of different types and sources of morality.
12/20/2010 @ 12:38 pm
I find it very hard not be unhappy about God–or at least God as conceived by any Western monotheism prior to about 1800. Wright’s reading is definitely not compatible with fundamentalist readings, and I think you’re exactly right that for fundamentalists these prophecies express a particular “reality” about God’s imposition of a universal Christian ethos on His creation.
For me, morality is always variable, and entirely conditioned by culture. The value of the Gospels for me these days is in 1) understanding the way the early Christians understood God’s purposes and 2) recovering the sense of the affordances of radical rejection of the power-structure’s (read “State” if you like Marxist terminology) construction of morality (along with the rest of culture)
12/20/2010 @ 2:35 pm
[…] to me to be at tension with the “Thou shalt
not tempt the Lord thy God” bit that we saw earlier in
Matthew 4:7; and, if I’m remembering a Radiolab episode
properly, I think that actually […]
12/22/2010 @ 8:02 am
I like that you point out how that wheat/chaff bit doesn’t seem to mesh with the idea of a kind and loving God. It doesn’t even offer hope of redemption, which is what the Gospel is all about.
I could try and paint the Pharisees and Sadducees in a light that makes this seem more fair and appropriate, but it would still only be a way of saying that they were the keepers and enforcers of the power struggle, and if they had a vice, it amounted mostly to pride in their zeal for holiness. That’s hardly the description for some unpardonable ultra-sin.
12/29/2010 @ 11:09 am
[…] evil; Jesus is working in support of that. Or at least, that’s how I initially read it; as Roger pointed out, prophecy isn’t necessary inherently moral, it can be simply descriptive, and warnings of […]
1/5/2011 @ 8:03 am