Dorothy Jean Weaver, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, VA - Copyright 2001.

We could never have guessed, when we on the Matthew Section Steering Committee first proposed this topic back in 1999, just what a world we would actually be living in when the theme "Matthew and Violence" would come up for discussion. None of us could have foreseen then the way in which "Violence" would, on September 11, 2001, suddenly catapult its way from all those other constantly dangerous places around the globe right into the heart of our own "safe" world here in North America. In my estimation there could be no more relevant theme that we might be considering in this Matthew Section here today than the theme of "Matthew and Violence."

I want to thank the four presenters—Marianne Blickenstaff, Barbara Reid, Robert Beck, and Shelly Matthews—for their stimulating, insightful, and intriguingly distinctive assessments of the motif of "violence" in the Gospel of Matthew. Blickenstaff offers an assessment of one narrow slice of the "violent" thematic of the Gospel of Matthew, that related to the metaphors of "bridegroom" and "wedding feast." Reid offers a more or less "encyclopedic" overview of the "violence" thematic throughout the Gospel of Matthew. Beck moves beyond the individual representations of "violence" in the Gospel to look at the overarching narrative shape of the Gospel itself. Mathews moves beyond the thematic of "violence" per se to ask about the correlation between this "violent" language and the real-world historical context into which this language was spoken. In the brief time that I have for response I will lift out a handful of questions that emerge from my reading of these papers and offer some overall reflections. I will obviously not be able to respond to each paper in its entirety.

Blickenstaff: "The Bloody Bridegroom: Violence in the Matthean Family." I find the conclusions to Blickenstaff’s study of violence in the wedding parables of Matthew’s Gospel strongly convincing: "Like the prophets, Matthew warns that there is a nebulous boundary between joy and sorrow in the liminal stage between waiting for the eschatological banquet and its fulfillment, between promise and final consummation, between being "out" and being "in." In this liminal stage, the members of the fictive family come to understand that their place at the banquet is not guaranteed, and that even their adoption into the Bridegroom’s family does not assure an escape from violence in the final judgment" (p. 8).

But there are several exegetical decisions which Blickenstaff makes on the way to her overall conclusions which I do not find as convincing. Most of these points have nothing to do with the central question of violence in focus in this session. On page 2 she indicates that the sayings about fasting in 9:14-17 are "sandwiched" between 9:2-8, the story of the paralytic who is addressed as teknon, and 9:18-26, the story of the woman who is addressed as thygater. And she concludes from this that the "sons of the bridal chamber" are therefore to be defined as those whose "sins are forgiven" and whose "faith has saved them." And she goes on to speculate on the significance of the perceived tension between the male-oriented designation "sons of the bridal chamber" and the presence of "daughters" among these "sons" or "children."

In fact, however, the front half of the "sandwich," if there is such, is not 9:2-8, the story of the paralytic but rather 9:9-13, the story of Matthew and his tax collector friends. Nor is it clear to me that there is any "sandwiching" going on at all in this block of text, but simply a series of incidents reported in sequential fashion. There seems to be no need for any further referent with regard to Jesus’ use of the phrase "sons of the bridal chamber" (v. 15) than the immediately preceding reference to "your disciples" (v. 14), those who "do not fast" as do the Pharisees and the disciples of John. In its immediate literary context Jesus’ reference to the "sons of the bridal chamber" is thus a not-so-hidden allusion to his own disciples, who will mourn when he is no longer with them. While there is no contradiction here, it is not Matthew’s apparent concern at this point to link either "forgiveness of sins" or "saving faith" to the concept of the "sons of the bridal chamber." And in the thoroughly patriarchal world in which Matthew lives and breathes, his use of the term "sons of the bridal chamber" simply represents standard phraseology for "those who belong to the bridegroom." I do not see Matthew making any statements one way or the other about sexuality and discipleship.

A second question has to do with Blickenstaff’s conclusion that the statement of Jesus’ disciples in 19:10 ("If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.") in fact represents the viewpoint of Jesus or "the Bridegroom" himself (p. 4). In fact the Matthean text appears to indicate precisely the opposite, by introducing Jesus’ words with the adversative connector, "but" (19:11). While I am not prepared to enter into a lengthy discussion about this text and the larger issues of divorce, remarriage, and celibacy on which it touches, it is clear to me that from the narrative strategy of Matthew’s text the question of the disciples is, as ever, a wrong-headed question which Jesus effectively challenges in his response to it.

While Jesus does indeed set out the option of celibacy as a lifestyle, he offers this as a teaching only for "those to whom it is given" (19:11) which appears to be synonymous in its force with "those who can accept it" (19:12), an evident subset, and most likely a small one, of the disciple group as a whole. The clear implication of this text, as I see it, is that marriage remains the dominant form of relationship between males and females. I do not, therefore, follow Blickenstaff to her conclusion that "sexual contact is precluded throughout the gospel" (p. 4). If such were the case, it would in fact be necessary for Matthew to edit out his intriguing but otherwise gratuitous little statement in 1:25 that Joseph "had no marital relations with [Mary] until she had borne a son."

A third question, which does bear on the question of violence, has to do with the title of Blickenstaff’s paper, "The Bloody Bridegroom." While this might indeed be an appropriate title for a paper on the "Bridegroom" motif in the Book of Revelation, where the "Rider on the White Horse" is in fact "clothed in a robe dipped in blood" (19:13), I waited in vain to discover how or where Matthew portrays any single "Bridegroom" as "bloody" or as himself the agent of divine judgment. This question might be viewed as strictly semantic. But in light of the sharp distinctions identified by Reid between the Matthean portrayals of human response to violence and the divine judgment meted out at the end of the age, the question may in fact be substantial.

The central point of Blickenstaff’s presentation as I understand it, however, stands unchallenged, namely that "Bridegroom" and "wedding feast" function as eschatological ciphers within Matthean thinking, ciphers which can point as well to the "separation and violence" (p. 6) of the final judgment as they can to the "joyful wedding banquet" (p. 6) of the messianic age. The irony of this celebrative language being co-opted by Matthew to serve the purpose of portraying judgment and violence offers significant fruit for ongoing reflection.

Reid: "Violent Endings in Matthew’s Parables and an End to Violence." Reid does a beautiful, more or less "encyclopedic" job of laying out the evidence of the "violence" motif to be found throughout the Gospel of Matthew. In section I of her paper she portrays "Jesus and His Disciples as Victims of Violence" and follows this in section II with the portrayal of "Responses to Violence." This layout of evidence provides in essence the nonviolent "point" to which the endings of a number of Matthean parables are the violent "counterpoint." In Section III Reid lays out the evidence from eight Matthean parables which portray violent images of divine judgment and punishment and asks in effect, "What has happened to the God of love and nonviolence whom we encounter in the Sermon on the Mount?"

Reid offers five potential solutions to "this tension in the Matthean narrative" (p. 4). It is to these potential solutions that I wish to respond.

A. "Skewed Matthean Redaction" (p. 4). The proposal here is that Matthew himself did not understand the full import of the Sermon on the Mount and therefore mistakenly imported "the prevailing myths about violence" (p. 4) into the larger framework of the narrative and projected them onto God. The problem with this proposal has to do with its inadequate assessment of the larger framework of Matthew’s narrative. This narrative does not merely present us with "Jesus the talking head" who speaks words of "nonviolence" in the Sermon on the Mount on the one hand and offers us "violent" parabolic portrayals of a God who judges and punishes on the other. This narrative shows us the life story of Jesus—his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection—a life story which portrays Jesus in a nonviolent interface with violence from beginning to end. And it is this Jesus, who not only speaks of nonviolence but whose very life exhibits a radical commitment to such nonviolence, who is the central focus of Matthew’s entire narrative. And, to add further weight to this observation, it is Matthew, alone of all the Gospel Writers, who identifies Jesus as "God with us" (1:23). Accordingly, what we see in Matthew’s Gospel of the Jesus who practices radical nonviolence is, by the same token, what we can know about God as well.

To say this clearly does not remove the already visible tension between the nonviolent sayings of the Sermon on the Mount and the violent endings to the parables of Jesus. In fact it only increases that tension. But as we have seen from the narrative thrust of the text, the answer to that tension clearly does not lie in Matthew’s misunderstanding of the Sermon on the Mount.

B. "Misinterpeting Jesus as Nonviolent" (pp. 4-5). This proposal suggests that we, rather than Matthew, have misunderstood the Sermon on the Mount, that the violent depictions of God represent Jesus’ authentic viewpoint, and that we have inaccurately and anachronistically interpreted the Sermon on the Mount in nonviolent ways that we have learned from such leaders as Ghandi and Martin Luther King. The first difficulty with this proposal, however, as Reid points out, is that it makes nonsense not only of the Sermon on the Mount and its supposed "good news" but also of the entire fabric of the story of Jesus. The additional difficulty with this proposal is that it makes effective nonsense of the experiences of such people as Ghandi and Martin Luther King, since it makes of them "prophets without a word from the Lord." While I am no scholar of either of these proponents of nonviolence, it is surely a matter of written and verbal record and of public awareness that they gleaned their notions of nonviolence precisely from the words of Jesus. Thus it would in my estimation be an historical confusion of the most flagrant variety for us to suggest that Ghandi and Martin Luther King, leaders of the twentieth century, invented the concept of "nonviolence," a concept which we then mistakenly projected backwards onto the figure of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.

The tension still remains. But it cannot be resolved by making nonsense of the Sermon on the Mount and the narrative fabric of Matthew’s Gospel. Nor can it be resolved by turning historical cause and effect on its head.

C. "Misinterpreting Violent Males as God" (p. 5). This proposal suggests that the powerful males in the parables with violent endings were never intended to represent God. Rather, as Reid says, "these parables unmask [the] violence [of these powerful males] so as to lead the hearer to conclude that action must be taken to undo the unjust systems they perpetuate" (p. 5). The difficulty with this proposal, however, as Reid notes, is that it flies in the face of Matthew’s evident interpretation of these same parables. Not only do we have Jesus’ interpretations of the parable of the weeds and the wheat (13:24-30) and the parable of the unforgiving servant (18:35) to serve as a hermeneutical key to the interpretation of the rest. But we likewise have the words of the parables themselves to show us how Matthew evaluates the characters within the parables: "Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master" (25:21, 23). One could hardly accuse Matthew of being this reckless and prodigal with strongly positive language, if he indeed intended for it to be understood in a negative fashion. And we have in addition the hermeneutical key provided by the literary context of these stories within Matthew’s narrative. The story of the wicked tenants, for example, is one which Jesus’ opponents understand to be spoken "about them" (22:45) at a time just prior to the events of Jesus’ own suffering and death. Accordingly it is clear that from Matthew’s perspective the vineyard owner is indeed to be identified as God and the owner’s "son" and "heir" who is "thrown out of the vineyard and killed" (21:38) as Jesus himself.

The tension still remains. But it cannot be resolved by making nonsense of Matthew’s own clues to the literary interpretation of the parables with violent endings.

D. "Human Response to Human Violence vs. Divine Judgment at the End Times" (pp. 5-6). This proposal suggests that there is a fundamental divide between the matter of human response to human violence and the divine judgment to be meted out at the end of time. In Reid’s words, "It may be that for Matthew the teaching about nonviolent confrontation of evil and evildoers is not pertinent to scenes of end-time judgment. . . . The violent endings in the parables . . . depict what happens when the time for conversion is past and the moment of final reckoning has arrived. They portray the dire consequences of not becoming a disciple or not ‘bearing fruit’ at the proper time (21:43)" (pp. 5-6).

Here finally is a proposal which makes sense rather than nonsense of the Matthean text in its present literary form. In fact Matthew’s Gospel is entirely consistent in its portrayal of "nonviolence" as the response not only of Jesus but also laid out by Jesus for his disciples to the violence that both he and they encounter in the world around them. And Matthew’s Gospel is equally consistent in associating the violent parables of Jesus by their structure, language, and literary context with the eschatological judgment to be meted out by God at the end of the age.

Eschatological judgment belongs without question to the theology of Matthew and, in Matthew’s view, it remains the sole prerogative of God. This is in fact the very theology which Matthew has inherited from his Jewish upbringing and from his Jewish scriptures (thus the this-worldly judgment meted out by the God of the prophets and the eschatological judgment meted out by the God of Dan 7:9-14).

The difficulties which Reid identifies with this proposal are twofold but closely related. And they are both immediately relevant to the world in which we now live. One the one hand Reid warns that "disciples can be tempted to apply this end-time dichotomizing of evildoers and righteous ones in the present." The urgency and applicability of this warning should be immediately evident to those of us who now listen daily and nightly to our newscasters as they depict for us the actions of the "enemy" and to our heads of state as they define this "enemy" as categorically "evil."

On the other hand Reid notes that there is still an ongoing tension "between these [violent] parabolic endings and the divine image presented in Matt 5:44-48 and with that of the resurrected Jesus following his execution." And she warns that if one views God as punishing evildoers violently, "then humans in positions of power may read the gospel as giving divine approbation to their meting out violent punishment, and even execution, to those judged as evildoers" (p. 6). The virtual universality of this strategy for reading the gospel within Western and so-called "Christian" societies over the past two millennia is a matter of historical record. The current "war against terrorism" which employs language such as that of "eradicating evil" is only the present and immediate illustration of this wider pattern within human societies.

E. "The Consequences of Choosing Violent Retaliation over Forgiveness" (p. 6). This final proposal suggests that God does not actively mete out violent judgment to evildoers but that the very act of doing evil is one which creates self-perpetuating cycles of violence to which evildoers themselves then inexorably fall prey. Reid points to Jesus’ saying that "all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (26:52) as witness to this perspective on the meaning of the violence found in the parable endings in Matthew.

This is clearly the most appealing option for understanding the violent parables of the Gospel of Matthew, since it places ultimate responsibility for the violent judgment reflected in the parables of Matthew’s Gospel onto the "evildoers" themselves and not onto the God who "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (5:45). And whether or not it reflects Matthew’s understanding of the nature of final judgment, it is undeniably true. We would have to keep our eyes firmly closed day by day in the world we live in not to witness the existential truth of the concept that "violence begets violence." That Matthew understands this concept to be fully functional on the human level is in fact reflected in the "sword" saying cited above. Whether Matthew extrapolates from the human level to the level of divine judgment is a matter for further reflection. His language and his narrative rhetoric do not appear to bear this out overall.

What is clear, however, is that Matthew works with a sharply-defined concept of the direct correlation between human action and divine response and vice versa. It is because the king has "had mercy" on his slave and "forgiven" his debt (18:27, 32-33) that the slave is then expected to "have mercy" on his fellow slave (18:32-33). And conversely it is because the slave has not "had mercy" on his fellow slave and "forgiven" that one’s debt (18:30, 33) that the king then pronounces judgment on the slave himself (18:34, cf. 35). Human forgiveness of other humans is dependent on prior forgiveness by God (18:32-33); and conversely human forgiveness by God is dependent on human forgiveness of others (6:12, 15; 18:35).

Beck: "Nonviolent Conflict Resolution in the Doubled Plot of Matthew." In terms of the scope of his strategy Beck moves us one step beyond the analysis of individual sayings of the Matthean Jesus to an examination of the overarching plot of the Gospel of Matthew. He does this by drawing a fascinating and highly instructive comparison of the "expulsion and return" formula found in classic mythology and the five Matthean formula citations which focus on place names. Of the six chiastically structured elements in the "expulsion and return" formula (usurpation, flight, home in exile, discovery/announcement of identity, victorious return, and restoration of the dynasty), it is, strikingly, the last one, the one which calls for revenge and retribution, which is missing from Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus, the returning king, does not carry out such revenge, but instead dies at the hands of his enemies. Yet Jesus’ stance in refusing to exact revenge is in fact affirmed by God through the resurrection of Jesus, the discovery of the empty tomb, and the words of the angel. Accordingly, as Beck notes, "this story, despite appearances, is not a failed story" (p. 3). Beck concludes that if, as is frequently noted, the formula citations create a "divine script for Jesus’ life story," then this "script" is in fact "better conceived as the sketch of a common cultural narrative, dramatized in the gospel in order to be rejected—a rejection divinely warranted" (p. 4).

Beck’s contribution to our present discussion of the topic of "Matthew and Violence" is significant. Beck’s study confirms from a strikingly distinct perspective the fundamental conclusions arrived at through Reid’s study of the words of Jesus, thus providing multiple attestation for the nonviolent stance of the Matthean Jesus. And it does this by making a broad appeal to the overarching narrative shape of Matthew’s Gospel, an appeal which then provides the hermeneutical framework within which to interpret the individual elements of Matthew’s narrative. This broad appeal to the narrative shape of the Gospel, and the conclusions to be drawn from it, are especially crucial for our present discussion in light of the apparent "ambiguities" or "tensions" of the Matthean text with regard to questions of "violence."

My primary question for Beck, which may lie on the level of the semantic, has to do with his indication that Matthew has adopted a "common cultural narrative" only in order to "reject" it. If Matthew has indeed adopted this "common cultural narrative" and used it in his own account as prominently and strategically as Beck indicates, would it not be more appropriate to suggest that Matthew has done so in order to "redefine" this narrative rather than to "reject" it. The "expulsion and return" formula is still present in the Matthean narrative, but with a significant "redefinition" of its conclusion. Such a "redefinition" would be entirely in line with other similar "redefinitions" found within Matthew’s narrative, for example of the Messianic formula found in the Matthean birth narrative and of the concepts of "power" and "powerlessness" as reflected in the Matthean portrayals of political leaders.

Matthews: "Violence in Matthew: The Question of Text and Reality." In her study Matthews lays out the Matthean evidence, prominent throughout the Gospel, which is widely viewed as pointing toward the persecution of the Matthean community by their non-messianic Jewish co-religionists. She then assesses this evidence to determine that there are significant theological, literary, and potentially even psychological causes which may give rise to this pronounced focus on the persecution of the Matthean community. And she sets forth the problem as follows (p. 7): "And yet, in spite of the heavy weight of the theological, literary, and—if we find Perkin’s thesis compelling—even psychological need for Matthew to portray his community as daily facing persecution and even death, most biblical scholars assume that at root there lies an originary historical phenomenon beyond the crucifixion of Jesus" (emphasis mine).

After doing a brief tour of the relevant literature (Hare, Luz, Stanton, Gundry, Harrington, Sanders, Simms) to identify a process which she views as something "akin to fundamentalist proof-texting" (p. 7), she then concludes: "[I]t seems to me that if one is going to argue for the historicity of such persecution, this needs to be done with more care, and with greater methodological sophistication. As I have argued in this paper, at the very minimum, we need to acknowledge how great the theological, literary, and psychological reasons were for Matthew to portray his community as being perpetually persecuted, and then to ask the question, are these sufficient to explain the pervasiveness of persecution in Matthew, or must there have been a historical ‘root cause,’ beyond the death of Jesus himself" (emphasis mine).

The fundamental question which I would direct to Matthews and offer for our further consideration is whether there is not in fact a logical connector between "historical ‘root cause’" and the theological, literary, and psychological causation to which Matthews points. Why should it be necessary to rule out "historical ‘root cause’" in order to acknowledge that other factors also play a role in the presence of the persecution theme in the Gospel of Matthew? What indeed gives rise to these other causes?

My line of argumentation with regard to the relationship between (in this case) the Matthean text and historical reality moves out from the primary assumption that Matthew has written this narrative for the faith community which he pastors. Starting from that assumption and with the full awareness that Matthew has edited the Jesus traditions he has received in very distinctive fashion, my question then becomes, "Why has Matthew shaped the Jesus traditions and told the Jesus story precisely as he has?" What pastoral concerns is Matthew responding to as he tells the story of Jesus to his church? Only if I am forced to assume that Matthew is writing to some undefined, "generic" readership can I avoid the conclusion that the shape and form of Matthew’s narrative is integrally linked in some fashion to the real-life circumstances of Matthew’s congregation. Stated conversely, "How would the real readers of Matthew’s Gospel, the real members of Matthew’s church, have received and understood the highly prominent "persecution" thematic of the narrative if there were in fact no essential correspondence with the circumstances of their own real world?" To ask these questions is not yet to resolve the issue of what those real-life circumstances were for the Matthean church. But it is to posit some sort of linkage between the story of the storyteller and the real world of those for whom he tells the story.

The methodological analogy here to the question of "who killed Jesus?" is a helpful one, in light of the significant amount of attention focused on that question. But even here it appears to me that the Gospel evidence overall confirms the linkage between "historical ‘root cause’" and narrative representation, since all four Gospels without any hesitation portray Jesus not only as the defendant in a Roman trial but also as the victim of a Roman crucifixion, in the very face of their own obvious theological interests in blaming "the Jews."

Matthews’ call for more extensive work with extra-biblical materials is entirely appropriate. And her closing question is a poignant one: "What happens to our reconstructions of historical interchange among Christian and non Christian Jews, if we begin, not with Matthew 23, or Matthew 10, but with [the] story of strict observers of the law, burdened with grief at the death of James? (pp. 13-14). We will never be able to undo the Matthean images entirely; but we will clearly have a broader and more nuanced portrait in front of us. Surely that is a goal worth reaching for.