Michael Knowles: the Church and its Scriptures 7

The Church and its Scriptures Michael Knowles

A Catholic Response 2

Matthew 5.17-48. Matthew’s gospel, like each of the other gospels, by determination of the Church, which is the Body of Christ, with the power to bind and to loose, is a statement of its faith. As a piece of writing it might be anything but straightforward from whatever academic discipline one might want to treat of it but it stands first and foremost, and essentially, as a statement of our faith. Historians, linguists, students of comparative religion and others extract, dissect and analyse every strand of hair it is composed of and they provide the most useful of services. The gospels were not however written from any such viewpoint. They were written as statements of the faith of the Christian community, which is our faith. We are instructed in that faith by the Church’s statement of its faith in the gospels and by how it understands them.

The author of Matthew’s gospel in these verses instructs us in our relationship to the Old Testament. He shows us how to deal with it. He tells us in the clearest terms possible that the Law and the prophets must be observed but must also be fulfilled. He tells us, absolutely crucially, that instruction in the Law has passed from the doctors of the Law to Christ. The formula ‘But I say to you’ -egw de legw umiv -is put six times into the mouth of Christ. The Bible is full of formulas and this one, repeated six times within a very short space is among the most important. Because it is the statement of the Church, which is Christ’s Body, it is the statement of Christ himself. Nothing less. Instruction in the Law has passed from Judaism to Christianity -a hard statement maybe in our ecumenical times but that is the faith of the Church. The Law is what Christ through his Church now says it is.

Christ takes up six themes: the issue of a person with a grievance against another, temptation, divorce, the swearing of an oath, revenge and ill-treatment, and love of neighbour and attitude towards one’s enemy. It is most significant how Matthew introduces each theme. Each is introduced with yet another formula: ‘You have learned that the people of old/our forefathers (arkaiois) were told’ with the variation: ‘You have learned that they were told’. In the corresponding Old Testament texts the formula is significantly different. It is: “The Lord spoke to Moses” Lev. 24.1 for Matt.5.21; “God spoke and these were his words” Ex. 20.1 for Matt. 5..27; “These are the statutes and laws that you shall be careful to observe” Deut. 12.1 (or more immediately, and loosely, ibid. 24.1) for Matt. 21.31; “Then Moses spoke to the heads of the tribes of the Israelites and said” Num. 30.1 (and other texts) for Matt. 21 33; “The Lord spoke to Moses and said” Lev. 24. 19 for Matt. 21.39. For the “Love your neighbour, hate your enemy” Matt.21.43 I cannot find a relevant text anywhere in the OT. However. Deut. 7.10 “those who defy him (God) and show their hatred for him he repays with destruction; he will not be slow to requite any who so hate him” contains the message Christ is concerned to repudiate. Its formula of introduction is “These are the commandments, statutes and laws which the Lord your God commanded me to teach you” (ibid.6.1).

Matthew of course knew the Old Testament formulas very well. He wrote for Jewish Christians who knew their origins. He was well versed in Jewish methods of interpretation. In dealing with each of the six themes, in which he very deliberately and with a most definite purpose contrasts Christianity with Judaism, he did not change the formula by chance. It is not by chance that he reduces “The Lord said” and “Moses spoke” to a mere “They were told” with no reference at all to the OT authority and solemnity of their authorship. It cannot be by chance or oversight that he downplays it by substituting “They were told” and “You have learned”. The very focussed literary and theological structure of his gospel tells us that Matthew weighed his every word with care. What he put in, what he left out, how he expressed himself and how he changed formulas was purposive through and through. I doubt anyone will argue with that.

This authoritative statement of the faith of the Church, which is known as the Gospel according (kata) to Matthew, in this way therefore puts a very definite question mark against any claim of a divine authorship of the six sets of Old Testament instructions which Christ refers us to to distinguish Christianity from Judaism. Two of the six are different in an important way from the rest. Those two are contained in Mt. 5. 38 and 43. I would suggest that what Christ says regarding the other four does not so much repudiate them as develop their message. Matt 5.38 & 43, however, amount to repudiation. Matthew knew this of course. He knew what was involved. By changing the formula and by repudiating what the Old Testament teaches, therefore, he is knowingly denying their divine authorship, plain contrary to what the Old Testament asserts. This, coming from the author of the most ‘Jewish’ of the gospels, is most significant.

There is nothing haphazard about this gospel. In its theology, method and literary form it is a most careful construct. It is an authoritative statement of the Christian faith. Intrinsic to that faith, our faith, is that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New. The ‘heavenly Father’ of Jesus (18.18) is the God of creation (19.3-9). Jesus is ‘God with us’ (1.23). The God of Jesus, who is God with us, ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, the God of the living and not of the dead” (22.32) does not contradict himself. Matthew would not have been familiar with later philosophical notions of God’s timelessness but the content is exactly the same. The God of the Old Testament (DiaQhkh)is the God of the New Testament in that it is the one same God who made both covenants

The Church, the Body of Christ, has looked at the Old Testament with a very steady eye. It has identified crucial areas of disagreement in morality between itself and the message of the Old Testament. It has not just repudiated what the books of the Old Testament has taught in those areas but has concluded that, despite the claims of the books of the Old Testament, they are not what God teaches. In other words the Church in its statement of faith in Matthew chapter 5 has pronounced judgement on the books of the Old Testament. It has stated that God’s revelation is not in a book but in itself, the Body of Christ, as the vessel of the Spirit of Truth. This is precisely what Christ himself did. He said, and the words ring out: Egw de legw umin. ’But I say to you’. He set his authority in the bluntest terms against that of the books of the Old Testament. He is the Word of God. No book is. No words in a book are. “I and the Father are one”. His Body is the Church. “As the Father has sent me, so I also send you”. The Church has the power to bind and to loose.

The Church can therefore pronounce judgement upon the books of the Old Testament just as Christ its Head did. The Church can authoritatively pronounce therefore that as Christ repudiated the Old Testament instruction of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth as not of God, so the Church, in exactly the same vein, effectively within the same realm of morality, can repudiate every instruction of the Old Testament where God is represented as authorising the killing of the innocent, as not of God. So, where the Book of Deuteronomy states; “When, as you advance, the Lord your God exterminates the nations whose country you are entering to occupy, you shall take their place and settle in their land” (12.29), it is misrepresenting God, and misrepresenting him very gravely indeed. There is no divine authority for the killing of the innocent, for the annexation of the land of other people, for genocide and for slaughter, for the murder of three thousand Philistines enjoying a day out in the sunshine in a stadium, brutal though their idea of enjoyment may well have been. There can be no religious justifications for killing the innocent. That is not religion. That is anything but. What that is is man’s inhumanity to man. It proceeds from a most basic misunderstanding of what religion is. Religion is not about the glorification of God. God is what he is, no matter what we say or do or think. Going around shouting out ‘God is great’ as the principal religious declaration is a terrible misreading of what God is about. It’s intellectually childish to think God is interested in us glorifying him. To think God created the world to achieve some sort of glory is sad. Such a notion is making a god into our own image. It is ascribing to God what we want for ourselves. It is substituting our inadequate, damaged, crippled and corrupted human way of thinking for religion. It’s fleeing down the labyrinthine ways of our own minds. The incarnation and the crucifixion should have put an end to all that nonsense once and for all but of course they didn’t. What religion is about is knowing God and responding to his goodness. Religion as God himself knows it is about a relationship. ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’ is religion. The Songs of Songs is the canticle of religion.

“‘Rise, clasp My hand and come!’

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He whom thou seekest!’”[1]

Egw de legw umin. The significance of this formula which the Gospel employs cannot be overstated. It is the Church stating that in Christ it stands in judgement over ‘what has been written’. As we can see from those verses of the Sermon on the Mount, the Church in his name has the authority to change the very formula by which an Old Testament instruction had been written in order to state that the instruction was not from God even where the text declared it was; and had the authority to repudiate any such instruction where it conflicted with its faith.

This was precisely what Peter himself did later after the departure of the visible Christ when on Whit Sunday the Spirit of Truth came in Christ’s name upon the Church. Then, contrary to one of the most basic tenets of Judaism, declared time and again in the Old Testament texts, he pronounced that the Jews had ceased to be the Chosen People. “I now see that God has no favourites but that in every nation (en panti efnei) a man who is god-fearing and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10.34). Precisely as Paul himself declared: “Through faith you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. Baptised into union with him you have put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus (pantes gar umeis eis este en Cristw Ihsou)”. Gal. 3.28. “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek because the same Lord is Lord of all” (Rom.10.12) God’s healing grace is for all mankind (Tit. 2.11).[2]

This authority exercised by the apostolic and the early church remains. “I will be with you all days, even to the end of the world” Matt.28.20. “The Spirit of Truth that issues from the Father….will guide you in all truth” Jn,15.26 & 16.13. The guardian of revelation is no text but this in-dwelling of the Spirit of God in the Church, the body of Christ, guiding, explaining, interpreting, enabling the Church decade by decade, culture by culture, century by century, issue by issue, confronting human prejudice after human prejudice, to understand what the ‘truth’ is. Christ in the Sermon on the Mount informed us of two basic truths: that for the Scriptures to be the Word of God does not mean they contain no factual or moral errors or prejudices; and that the Church, filled with the Spirit of Truth that issues from the Father, has Christ’s authority to exercise judgement upon them.