by John Updike
Matthew takes up the task of giving these events a cosmic context, by knitting them tight to the sacred texts of the Jewish people collected in what is now called the Old Testament. Matthew is viewed by tradition as the most specifically Jewish of the Gospel writers: Eusebius in his fourth-century Historica Ecclesiastica quotes Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis around 130, as saying that “Matthew compiled the oracles (or ‘sayings’) in the Hebrew language, but everyone translated them as he was able,” and Eusebius cites Irenaeus as claiming that “Matthew published a gospel in writing also, among the Hebrews in their own language.” The contemporary Biblical scholars who edited the Anchor Bible edition of Matthew, W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann, propose that the disciple Matthew, a former tax-collector identified elsewhere as Levi, in fact was Matthew the Levite, who as a Levite would have been “a Pharisee, educated, and from an orthodox … background.” The author of the Gospel of Matthew, whatever his actual name, was, they believe, “a conservative-minded Jew” especially interested in the Law and aware of “Messianic titles (the Prophet, the Righteous One) already archaic in the time of Jesus.” Without wishing to present Jesus as the new Moses, Matthew shows a “consuming interest in the spiritual history of Israel as a chosen people” and “in carefully preserving sayings of Jesus which re-establish the true principles of the Mosaic Law.”
Certainly Matthew can be wearisomely legalistic, beginning with the badly stretched genealogy from David to Jesus that opens his Gospel. Ten times—and each time dampening credibility rather than, as in the original cultural context, creating it—he claims that something occurred in order to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophets: the virgin birth, Bethlehem as the birth site, Herod’s massacre of children under the age of two, the flight of Joseph and Mary with their infant son to Egypt, their eventual settling in Nazareth, Galilee as the site of Jesus’s ministry, his healing of the sick, his modesty, his speaking in parables, his curious choice of both a donkey and a colt to enter Jerusalem upon, and Judas’s acceptance of thirty pieces of silver all take their significance from having been foreshadowed by texts in Isaiah or Jeremiah. For the sake of a verse of the Psalms, “They gave me gall for food, and for thirst they gave me vinegar to drink” (Psalm 69:21), Matthew altered Mark’s “They offered him wine mingled with myrrh” to “mingled with gall.” It would appear that Jesus himself came to see his life in terms of Israel’s hopes of a Messiah. In Mark 14:27, he quotes Zechariah, “I shall strike the shepherd and his sheep shall be scattered,” to give the dignity of foreordainment to his disciples’ coming abandonment of him. But it is hard not to feel that words are being put in Christ’s mouth when Matthew has him, in 26:53–54, say to a disciple who has drawn a sword, “Do you suppose that I could not call upon my Father and that he would not in a moment have a greater force than fifty thousand Angels at my side? But then, how could the Scriptures be fulfilled which say, it shall be thus?” And a few verses farther on, Matthew’s Jesus rebukes the crowd that has gathered at his arrest, “I see that you have come out with swords and sticks to capture me as though I were a brigand. Day after day I sat in the Temple, teaching, and you did not arrest me. But all this has happened so that what the Prophets wrote may be fulfilled.” This appeal to the prophets has a parallel in Mark (14:49) and in Luke, but in Luke assumes a quite different quality: “When I was with you in the Temple day after day, you did not raise a hand against me. But this is your hour. Night takes command” (22:53). In John, which names Peter as the disciple who took the sword and cut off the right ear of the high priest’s servant, there is no parallel.
A legal passion peculiar to Matthew insists that “while heaven and earth remain, the Law shall not be docked of one letter or one comma† till its purpose is achieved” (5:18). Jesus assures his auditors, “Do not imagine that I came to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I came, not to annul them, but to bring them to perfection” (5:17). The parallel passage in Luke has no such assurance, nor does it contain Matthew’s strictures on oath-taking or his stress upon inwardness and secrecy in performing acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving: “But when you practise charity, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your charity may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will render you your due” (6:3–4). And only Matthew’s list of beatitudes ends with “Happy those that have been persecuted for righteousness; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”; the young church was already suffering persecution, and hence Matthew speaks through Jesus to the imperiled faithful of 80 A.D. The threat of hell seems especially vivid in Matthew, and ready to hand, to brandish as a menace: in two separate places (5:29–30; 18:8–9) he repeats the ferocious admonishment found in Mark 9:43–48:
If your hand leads you into evil, cut it off: it is better for you to come into Life maimed than, with both hands, to depart into hell, into the fire that cannot be put out. And if your foot leads you into evil, cut it off: it is better for you to come into Life crippled than, with both feet, to be cast into hell. And if your eye leads you into evil, pluck it out: it is better for you to come into the Kingdom of God with one eye than, with two, to be cast into hell, where their worm does not die and the fire is never quenched.
These are among the hardest of the not unnumerous hard sayings of Jesus, and Matthew brings them to the fore; his presentation delights in a moral perfectionism. “You then must be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect” (5:48). The Kingdom of Heaven is very precarious of entrance, a matter of jots and tittles of the ancient Law: “The man who abolishes one of these little rules and teaches people to forget it shall count for little in the Kingdom of Heaven” (5:19).
What is this Kingdom of Heaven? At times it seems to be a revolutionized earth, an earth brought under the rule of God; at others a realm of an otherworldly afterlife, the opposite of hell and outer darkness. And yet again it seems a new state of inner being, a state of moral perfection that is not so much the ticket to the Kingdom but the Kingdom itself. In Luke, Jesus tells his disciples, “Watch as you may, you will not see it come. People will not be saying ‘Here it is!’ or ‘There!’ And the reason why is this—this Kingdom of God is within you” (17:20–21). The most extended statement concerning the Kingdom, and the longest compilation of Christ’s instruction, comes in Matthew, Chapters 5 through 7, and it is this so-called Sermon on the Mount, or Great Instruction, that would be the sorest loss if Matthew’s Gospel, in that precarious welter of first-century Christian testimony, had vanished along with Q and Matthew’s supposed version in Hebrew. Luke’s shorter version of the Sermon, delivered not on a mountain but on a plain, in 6:17–49, is less than half as long, and strikes a merry note peculiar to itself: “Happy, you that weep now; for you shall laugh.” Matthew does not mention laughing, but his extended collection of the sayings of Jesus holds many touches of that sublime gallantry, that cosmic carefreeness which emanates from the Son of Man:
Count yourselves happy when the time comes for people to revile you and maltreat you and utter every kind of calumny against you on account of me.
Let your light so shine upon the world that it may see the beauty of your life and give glory to your Father in Heaven.
If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left towards him also. If anyone sees fit to sue you for your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If anyone impresses you to go a mile, go along with him for two.
Love your enemies and pray to those that persecute you, so that you may become children of your Father in Heaven, who causes his sun to rise on the wicked and the good, and rains on the just and the unjust alike.
Do not amass for yourselves treasure on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and thieves break in and steal.
Learn from the lilies of the fields and how they grow. They do not work, they do not spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was robed like one of these.
Do not judge, lest you be judged.
Do not give holy things to dogs, nor scatter yo
ur pearls in front of swine, or they may trample them underfoot, and turn and tear you to pieces.
Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened to you. For everyone that asks receives; every seeker finds; and to everyone that knocks the door is opened.
These commands do not form a prescription for life in this world. The auditors are described as “filled with amazement at his teaching; for he taught them like one with authority and not like the Doctors who usually taught them.” The concept of amazement recurs in this part of Matthew. In the next chapter, the disciples are, in Rieu’s translation, “amazed” at Jesus’s stilling the wind and sea, and Jesus is “amazed” at the faith of the centurion who comes to Jesus to heal his paralyzed son.
Two worlds are colliding; amazement prevails. Jesus’s healing and preaching go together in the Gospel accounts, and his preaching is healing of a sort, for it banishes worldly anxiety; it overthrows the common-sense and materially verifiable rules that, like the money-changers in the Temple, dominate the world with their practicality. Jesus declares an inversion of the world’s order, whereby the first shall be last and the last first, the meek shall inherit the earth, the hungry and thirsty shall be satisfied, and the poor in spirit shall possess the Kingdom of Heaven. This Kingdom is the hope and pain of Christianity; it is attained against the grain, through the denial of instinctive and social wisdom and through faith in the unseen. Using natural metaphors as effortlessly as an author quoting his own works, Jesus disclaims nature and its rules of survival. Nature’s way, obvious and broad, leads to death; this other way is narrow and difficult: “Come in by the narrow gate, for the way to destruction is a broad and open road which is trodden by many; whereas the way to life is by a narrow gate and a difficult road, and few are those that find it” (7:13–14).
Life is not what we think and feel it is. True life (sometimes capitalized “Life” in the Rieu translation, as in the quotation from Mark above) is something different from the life of the body: “He that wins his life will lose it, and he that loses his life for my sake shall win it” (10:39). Christ’s preaching threatens men, the virtuous even more than the wicked, with a radical transformation of value whereby the rich and pious are damned and harlots and tax-collectors are rather more acceptable. The poor, ignorant, and childish are more acceptable yet: Jesus thanks God “for hiding these things from wise and clever men and revealing them to simple folk” (11:25). Even ordinary altruism is challenged, and decent frugality, in the incident of the woman who poured precious ointment over Jesus, to the amazement and indignation of the apostles. They object, “That might have fetched a good price, and so been given to the poor.” The blithe, deathless answer is given: “You have the poor among you always; but me you have not always” (26:11). Over against human perspective stands God’s perspective, from which even sparrows sold two for a farthing have value. Just so, each human soul, including those of women and slaves and gentiles, has value. From our perspective, the path of righteousness is narrow; but the strait gate leads to infinite consolation: “Put on my yoke and learn from me, who am gentle and humble in heart—and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light” (11:28–30). Fulfillment of the old Law turns out to be close to lawlessness: circumcision, dietary restrictions, strict observance of the Sabbath, familial piety, Pharisaical scruples are all swept away by the new dispensation. Said John the Baptist: “He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing-floor and gather the grain into his barn” (3:11–12). Said Jesus: “The blind see once more; the lame walk; lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; dead men are brought back to life, and beggars are proclaiming the Good News. Happy the man who finds no fault in me” (11:5–6).
Christ’s easy yoke drew dozens and then thousands and millions into Christianity, which for the first three centuries of its existence was professed in the Roman Empire under penalty of death. Neither in terms of Judaic scripture and religious practice nor in the context of other world religions was the transformation of value Jesus introduced totally new, but it felt new to those who embraced it, in the aftermath of his brief ministry and alleged resurrection. He is the new wine, and of all the Gospel writers Matthew takes the most trouble to decant him from the old skin. The Judaic God had walked in the Garden with Adam, joked with the Devil, bullied Job, and wrestled with Jacob: still, it was a scandalous act to send His Son to earth to suffer a humiliating and agonizing death. The concept profoundly offended the Greeks with their playful, beautiful, invulnerable pantheon and the Jews with their traditional expectations of a regal Messiah. Yet it answered, as it were, to the facts, to something deep within men. God crucified formed a bridge between our human perception of a cruelly imperfect and indifferent world and our human need for God, our human sense that God is present. For nearly twenty centuries now, generations have found comfort and guidance in the paradoxical hero of the Gospels, the man of peace who brings a sword, the Messiah who fails and shouts his despair aloud, the perfect man who seems to drift, who seems in most of his actions to be merely reacting to others, as they beg him to heal them, or challenge him to declare himself the King of the Jews (“The words are yours,” he replies), or ask him, as does his Father in heaven, to undergo crucifixion.
In the Lutheran Sunday school I attended as a child, a large reproduction of a popular painting in a milky Germanic Victorian style showed a robed Jesus praying in Gethsemane, his hands folded on a conveniently tablelike rock, his lightly bearded face turned upward with a melancholy radiance as he asked, presumably, for this cup to pass from him, and listened to the heavenly refusal. I was a mediocre Sunday-school student, who generally failed to win the little perfect-attendance pin in May. But I was impressed by the saying that to lust after a woman in your heart is as bad as actual adultery and deserving of self-mutilation, because it posited a world, co-existent with that of trees and automobiles and living people around me, in which a motion of the mind, of the soul, was an actual deed, as important as a physical act. And I took in the concept that God watches the sparrow’s fall—that our world is everywhere, at all times, in every detail, watched by God, like a fourth dimension. Some of the parables—the one in which the prodigal son received favorable treatment, or those in which foolish virgins or ill-paid vineyard workers are left to wail in outer darkness—puzzled and repelled me, in their sketches of the dreadful freedom that reigns behind God’s dispensations, but the parable of the talents bore a clear lesson for me: Live your life. Live it as if there is a blessing on it. Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground. I could picture so clearly the hole that the timorous servant would dig in the dirt, and even imagine how cozily cool and damp it would feel to his hand as he placed his talent in it.
Like millions of other little citizens of Christendom I was infected with the dangerous idea that there is a double standard, this world’s and another, and that the other is higher, and all true life flows from it. Vitality, perhaps, is the overriding virtue in the Bible; the New Testament, for all its legalisms, obscurities, repetitions, and dark patches, renews the vitality of the Old. From certain verbal prominences, burnished by ages of quotation like kissed toes on bronze statues of saints, and from certain refracting facets of the tumbled testamental matter a light shuddered forth which corresponded, in my consciousness as a child, to the vibrant, uncourted moments of sheer happiness that I occasionally experienced. I still have them, these visitations of joy and gratitude, and still associate them with the Good News. “Know too,” Matthew’s Gospel ends, “that I am with you every day to the end of time.”
Many Bens
1. The Founding Father
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA, in advertising their sixteen-hundred-page volume of Benjamin Franklin’s writings, calls him “the most delightful Founding Father.” We do not expect, and it is not certain that we desire, a founding father to be delightful. Sober cool white marble is what w
e have made of these men, and Houdon’s bust of Franklin is almost unrecognizable; we miss the spectacles, and the twinkle behind them. The other founders looked at him a bit askance. Of Franklin as he seemed at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, one of the delegates from Georgia, William Pierce, wrote, “Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age.… But what claim he has to the politician, posterity must determine. It is certain that he does not shine much in public council; he is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary man, and tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard.… He is eighty-two and possesses an activity of mind equal to a youth of twenty-five years of age.” An observer from the other end of the newly united states, Manasseh Cutler of Massachusetts, visited Franklin at his Philadelphia home and found “a short, fat, trunched old man in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate and short white locks, sitting without his hat under the tree.” Franklin was the oldest man in attendance, as he had been at the second Continental Congress, a dozen years before. There the dynamic orator John Adams had observed him “from day to day sitting in silence, a great part of the time fast asleep in his chair.” At both epochal gatherings in Philadelphia the local sage, for so much of his life an ornament and a servant of the colonial establishment, and for most of the last thirty years a resident abroad, did not fit into the new aristocracy of lawyers and military men, Massachusetts merchants and Virginia planters who had led the young nation into revolution and independence.
