Session Notes

Opening Question

what’s the nature of the authority that Matthew’s Jesus is claiming to embody? Does it represent a continuance of that dialectic, God continuing to learn from all of these failed attempts, moving from anger to jealousy to rage to impassioned pleas, to trickery and tests, to the inscription upon the heart? Does this feel like a next step in that? Or is it something closer to the Tao’s teaching from behind? Or is this fundamentally a new sort of dynamic that’s entered?

We opened with a question that had been building across several sessions. After tracing God’s long, often spectacular struggle to inscribe the covenant upon Israel’s hearts — the plagues, the commandments, the prophets, the threats, the tests, the recurring failures — and after reading the Tao’s image of authority as something that operates invisibly, from behind, so that people say they did it themselves, we arrived at Matthew’s Jesus, who speaks, the crowds notice, as one having authority and not as the scribes. So the question was: what’s the nature of the authority that Matthew’s Jesus is claiming to embody? Does it represent a continuance of that dialectic, God continuing to learn from all of these failed attempts, moving from anger to jealousy to rage to impassioned pleas, to trickery and tests, to the inscription upon the heart? Does this feel like a next step in that? Or is it something closer to the Tao’s teaching from behind? Or is this fundamentally a new sort of dynamic that’s entered? We were really curious what the nature of authority looks like here.

The group returned again and again to the fishermen. Jesus walks up to them, says follow me, I will make you fishers of men, and they just go. Matthew barely pauses on this. And yet the moment felt, to us, like it was doing a lot of structural work. Something had to have happened in those men that allowed them to recognize something. There is a hinge there, and that hinge is faith. What emerged across the session was this: the people who came to Jesus demanding proof were precisely the ones for whom the proof would never come, never could come. And the people who simply arrived, open, already somehow inclined, with their need already held out in front of them — they were the ones who received. The Canaanite woman, not even Jewish, told flatly that Jesus was not sent for her people, responded with one of the most disarming lines in the entire gospel. Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. And Jesus turned completely around. O woman, great is your faith. We sat with that for a while. Faith and desire, working together. Some sort of ask, seek, knock. Not demand, not proof-seeking, but a kind of total openness to whatever might come, even the refuse and the crumbles.

This brought us to what felt like one of the central tensions in Matthew’s telling: Jesus is writing, as it were, for a Jewish audience deeply steeped in a tradition of interpreting and re-interpreting the law, of finding the technically permissible path through the rules, of the rabbinical dream of debating Torah all day with the boys. This lawyering of the divine — and we saw it throughout Genesis and Exodus, Jacob testing his brothers, the Israelites finding workarounds, Pharisees tithing mint and dill while ignoring mercy — seems like the very substrate Jesus is working against. What Matthew seems to be pointing out is that the “well, technically” approach doesn’t just miss the point, it forecloses the point entirely. And so Jesus, when he’s challenged on the terrain of legal debate, reaches into what one of us called a “poetry logic weapon” — he turns the question back, leaves his interrogators with a question mark, answers their question with a question they can’t safely answer. He saved others, he cannot save himself. The mockers at the crucifixion say this as a taunt, but there’s something inadvertently true in it. We spent time turning it over: what kind of authority mandates that you cannot save yourself? What kind of power flows through a person rather than being stored by them? He is, we started to feel, something more like a channel than an authority in any conventional sense. A vine that bears fruit but is not the source.

The parable of the weeds arrived in the conversation literally and personally. Someone described pulling what appeared to be weeds from a backyard garden, only to realize too late that they were sunchokes planted the previous year. Don’t rip out the weeds, lest you damage the crops — they would have done well to remember this. The room found this more instructive than funny. These parables are structured to catch you mid-action. They arrive in your garden. The group noticed that many of the ailments Jesus heals have a figurative quality: blindness, the inability to walk, leprosy (which, we learned, is neurological — you lose the ability to feel pain, you injure yourself without knowing it, it is, someone observed, a blindness of touch). Something about openness of sense, of receptivity, of having the perceptual and spiritual channel unobstructed.

The question of why poverty and marginalization make people more available to faith kept circling back. A reading was offered that sounds almost Machiavellian: if you wanted to keep a population quiet and prevent them from destabilizing your authority, you might simply convince them that material poverty is spiritually virtuous. The group took this seriously. And yet we couldn’t quite settle for it. An anecdote came up about a woman encountered in France who claimed to be able to see colors through a blindfold — a pinhole, she said, grow the pinhole. She found this instantly easy with children, slow and difficult with adults. What if the poor and the sick and the disenfranchised are simply less defended, less armored by the scaffolding of certainty, more available for the pinhole? Not that poverty is good, but that it might produce an epistemic condition that faith can work through. Like a child.

We landed, eventually, on what felt like G.K. Chesterton’s gift to the session. The ordinary man has always been sane because he has always been a mystic. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has cared more for truth than for consistency. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious, whereas the mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The blur, someone offered, is what’s really there. Fiction touches it better than nonfiction. Yoav’s sunchokes touched it. Poetry touches it. The parable of the talents, near the end of the session, touched it in a different key: each of us has been given something, in different measure, and our job is to make more of it, to put it into the world at risk, to not bury it under the tree while we wait for the master to return. The slave who buries his talent is miserly about existence itself. He is not ready for the experience of life. Faith allows risk. To whom much has been given, much will be required — and the giving, it turns out, is the living.

We were nearing the end when the naming question opened up again. God could not be named. But Jesus can be named. Yeshua, Joshua, Emmanuel, God with us. Maybe that’s part of the crystallization happening in Matthew: all of the Old Testament’s poetic gestures toward the unnameable finding, for the first time, something that can be held in a name. Not explained — science can explain itself, as Dewey put it, but art can only express itself — but named, and therefore expressed. You can kill a man, but you can’t kill his word. The covenant, at last, has been written somewhere the scribes can’t litigate it.