Matthew 26 - Before the rooster crows

A watercolour by friend Brian.

Matthew 26 is a very long chapter and launches the crucial passion week; its narrative will be repeated world wide as churches observe the death and resurrection sequence. Matthew's gospel is exceedingly brief here as usual and discussions among the principals are reduced to a few sentences; the “preliminary trial” before the Sanhedrin could have taken five minutes if Matthew had actually been present and had been appointed court reporter. The long night in Gethsemane is reduced to three, single sentence prayers and the observation that try as they might, as serious as the situation was, the disciples couldn't stay awake.

We sometimes make the point that four gospels are necessary because each writing was undertaken with a different focus, a different set of emphases in mind. So I ask myself, “What was Matthew particularly wanting the early church to know and remember for certain about the last days of Jesus' life?”

Quite obviously, Matthew does nothing to hide—and everything to reveal—the weakness and treachery of the disciples, of whom he was one. At the last supper, Judas' plan to betray Jesus to the elders is predicted; in Gethsenane, there is not one person who can keep the night watch with Jesus, and after his arrest, Matthew makes certain that the fleeing of Jesus' followers into the woods and their hiding out is not forgotten. Lastly, Peter's denial is framed in large strokes and hung on the wall as a permanent reminder of the perfidy and the weakness of even the stronger of the apostles.

Matthew wants us to know that Jesus was—despite all they'd been through together, all the hours spent listening to his teaching, watching his healing and blessing of the people—abandoned in his hour of need by those closest and dearest to him.

Our drama group in Thompson performed Jesus Christ, Superstar in Thompson in the early 80s, I believe it was. I was Annas, high priest partner of Caiaphas, and my fellow actors called me “Anus,” in jest so I got a taste of what Jesus must have felt before that notorious tribunal of false witness and animosity. (Not really; we were all good friends). 

One can rationalize Judas' betrayal of Jesus in a number of ways, the glitter of 30 pieces of silver being the most obvious and least satisfactory. In his wonderfully tortured song in the play, Judas laments the disappointment in what the movement has become and what it now obviously will become, and the audience might well feel through Judas' lament the tortured wavering of faith and confidence that is, in a way, the lot of the everyman.

Peter's denial, Judas' betrayal, the sleeping disciples, the perfidious Caiaphas don't serve well historically, but they do well as symbolic reminders; think of them as busts we could display on our mantelpieces (next to Beethoven's?) to remind us of the tortuous pathway of faith, the pitfalls and the disappointments, the temptation to chuck it all when it doesn't seem to deliver what was promised.

I can only assume that our doing so was what Matthew intended.

And then there's the anointing with expensive perfume in Bethany. The disciples were shocked; at the very least they didn't get the powerful symbolism in the act. Most of us are familiar with the idea that the cost of a gift has some relationship to the depth of feeling between the giver and the receiver, but the anointing doesn't really have a tangible significance in my world as it did in theirs.

What I do notice, though, is the underlying assumption that it's men who are the “people” in Matthew's world and the women are . . . something less, at any rate. This understanding of “the men of the church” has persisted in many places; where I lived, the equality of women with men regarding church polity and leadership didn't really begin to happen until the 1960s. That delay, to me, illustrates the problem of reading scripture without acknowledging that it was written in a context and that its message has always been—and has had to be—adapted to new contexts. The lives of Jesus, the disciples, began with cultural assumptions about the relative positions of women and men; had all of this occurred today, that assumption would not have been there, would not have coloured either their actions or their portrayal of, for instance, the anointing at Bethany.

Leonardo da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper raises interesting questions. If Judas is to dip his bread into the bowl at the same time as Jesus, and if Jesus was reclining at table, da Vinci's imaginative arrangement of elements is not possible. But then, it was probably not meant to be since art and depiction are not necessarily the same thing.

More importantly, Jesus' breaking of the bread and sharing it as if it were his body, passing the cup around as if it were his blood initiated a church sacrament persisting in various forms to this day. Where some have read, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” we generally tend to read: “This wine stands for the sacrifice made on our behalf; let the drinking of it remind us of this.” 

Traditionally, the sharing of communion wine and bread has been an occasion for reviewing our current standing on the second great commandment: “love your neighbour as yourself.” The connection is not obvious in Matthew, but other writers make the point more vigorously, and early Anabaptism very much emphasized the forgiving, confessing, communal spirit of communion:

“Moral integrity, and unity and peace among the members were prerequisites for the observance of the Lord's Supper. For this reason it was always strongly emphasized that all differences and offenses should be removed between members before the Lord's Supper. This resulted in the practice among the Mennonites of Switzerland, South Germany, and Holland, of setting aside the Sunday before the observance of the Lord's Supper to cleanse the congregation as far as necessary and possible from all misunderstandings, and to clear all cases of necessary church discipline of individual members. If this was impossible some congregations would nor observe the Lord's Supper, or individuals not "at peace" with fellow men and God would stay away. In Holland this meeting was called enigheid houden. Mannhardt reports that the Danzig Mennonites up to the 19th century were invited by the Ansager or Umbitter (a sort of deacon) to come to the Lord's Supper and that the ministers inquired whether there was anything among the members of the congregation that needed to be cleared to have peace. In an Old Flemish congregation of the Netherlands in 1753 two brethren were asked to take off their wigs for the communion service." (http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Communion)

Turns out, at chapters end, that the real crime Jesus commits is to declare himself the Messiah. The nature of the Jewish longing for a Messiah—a deliverer—is embedded in its own history and culture where Moses, for instance, becomes a Messianic figure leading the people to freedom from slavery in Egypt. Jesus does not cut a similar figure, a figure of one who would lead the people out from under Roman enslavement; how could he possibly get away with describing himself in such a light?

Peter is crying at chapter's end, not at Jesus' arrest, according to Matthew, but because of his own weakness in failing to stand by him. Whether or not Peter's denial  played any part in the ensuing trial and conviction is moot; this is about declaring or denying one's faith in the public square and what those actions mean in the end. Matthew doesn't explain the meaning beyond the declaration of the morning rooster and Peter's disappointment in his own weakness.