Second Sunday after Pentecost; 11 June 2023; Proper 5A (RCL); Genesis 12:1-9; Psalm 33:1-12; Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.
The lectionary makes kind of a mish-mash out of the reading from Matthew’s Gospel. We leave out the bit about the disciples of John the Baptist questioning Jesus about fasting. In the story just before where we pick up, Jesus has forgiven the sins of the paralytic, and thus set off opposition to his ministry. The three stories (including the dinner party with tax collectors and sinners) are the first stories in Matthew where Jesus encounters opposition. It would have made sense to read all three of them together, and to have held the story of the raising of the young girl for another day.
It is also interesting to notice how Matthew changes his Markan source. In Mark, Jesus calls Levi, the tax collector. It’s not clear why Matthew changes the to Matthew (remembering that the ascription of this Gospel to Matthew happens many years after its composition — much more likely that the scribe who made the ascription chose this name, than that the author wrote himself into the story).
And the NRSV makes an egregious mistranslation by adding the words “of the synagoge” to the identification of the rule who asks Jesus to raise his daughter. In Mark, it is Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, whose daughter is near death. In Matthew, it is an unnamed ruler — and the Greek leaves it at that. This is presumably a civic official, not a synagogue official — the NRSV supplies those words from Mark’s Gospel, which Matthew is intentionally altering.
In Matthew’s account, the girl is already dead, rather than at the point of death. The supplicant is not a Jewish official. We’re not told the girl is 12 years old (significant in Mark because the woman in the story has had a hemorrhage of 12 years — Mark is asking us to make the connection between the woman and the girl — Matthew is not). Nor does Jesus give the bystanders the instruction, “Give her something to eat.”
For Mark, the implication of the story is that exclusion from table-fellowship is a kind of death, and menstruation excluded one from that fellowship (and the fact that the woman touches Jesus’ cloak would have rendered him temporarily unclean, and as he takes the girls hand, it would have rendered her unclean as well). Restoration to table fellowship was restoration to life. Matthew flattens Mark’s story, and shifts the focus of the story to Jesus’ power over life and death, rather than the social aspects of table fellowship.
It is interesting that the reading from Romans also focuses on life from death. Abraham, as good as dead, and Sarah, barren though she is, become the progenitors of many nations by the power of God, who gives life to the dead and brings into existence things that do not exist. Paul’s argument here is typological: Abraham is the type of Jesus, and Jesus recapitulates Abraham’s story. Paul will use this type of argument throughout the letter. Jesus recapitulates every aspect of torah, the story and instruction embedded in Israel’s history (freedom from slavery (to sin), etc.).
Since that whole story is a kind of etiology of the Jews (as Paul labels the people), Jesus’ story is an etiology of a new people, in this case all of the nations Abraham is father of. In Paul’s understanding of the story, this was God’s plan from the beginning (the mystery hidden from the ages) and now revealed in Jesus Christ. Since Jesus recapitulates the whole history of God’s people, in him all of the promises made to the people find their fulfillment, and a new people is called into existence.
The story of Abram leaving his homeland also resonates with the sense of a call to newness of life. To live a new life, something must be left behind. To venture to new territory requires courage and leaving an old (way of) life behind. Paul certainly calls this to mind with his use of the Abraham story.