Then some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.”
****
I have been avoiding writing these last two reflections. Despite having given this verse a lot of reflection, and having discussed it with a few friends, I have yet to come to a place where this exchange makes any sense. I actually started this series on my blog because I thought by writing it out, by forcing myself to make something tangible of the muddle that was in my head, I could at least come to a place where the story was meaningful, even if I had to acknowledge that meaning as, for the moment, shallow.
Part of the reason this passage has been so difficult is because it seems as if Matthew is cramming so much into this exchange: forgiveness, healing, authority, blasphemy. These topics are manageable enough in their own right, in isolation, but having a text that weaves them together this tightly just seems to confuse things, to confuse categories. For how does healing prove the authority to forgive sins and thus refute an accusation of blasphemy that likely missed the mark in the first place!?
Maybe following the story piece by piece will help to make sense of it, let the story tell itself. Maybe the confusion results from having read the story too quickly too many times, having collapsed it in and over on itself, instead of following after it...
After Jesus’ proclamation that the paralytic’s sins are forgiven, some scribes appear and make the accusation, amongst themselves, of blasphemy. Scribes and pharisees often show up in the gospels as narrative foils; they appear not only to clarify what has just happened, but allow that action to come to fulfillment. This not only functions on a small scale in their side-stage conspiracies and accusations, but also, in a certain sense, on a large scale, moving the whole of the gospels, and thus, the whole of Jesus’ life, towards crucifixion.
But this does not mean they are shallow or empty foils, for they are not exactly strangers or random passersby. These are the religious authorities, the ones well-versed in Scripture, those who have given their lives to understanding Torah and practicing righteousness. Whatever may be said for them (in what they strive for and what they have accomplished), or against them (in their apparent blindness to Jesus as the true end and fulfillment of these), I think it would be safe to say the scribes and pharisees reveal and represent us, especially in our own religiosity.
I timidly include that last “especially” clause, because I think we may lose something vital if we write-off the scribes and pharisees as merely the manifestations of a religion gone shallow and legalistic. These are people. If we read them as mere plot devices then we lose their humanity, and we are no longer reading of our brothers and sisters, but of moral imperatives and generalizations. (Could this be related to the reductionism of language to logic, where the specificities are stripped away to get to the ‘essence’ of the sentence, the “Xa”? Could this be related to how to we talk about issues in the church like homosexuality when we talk about it solely as a doctrinal concept and forget that we are talking about people, and therefore that we must talk to and with those people?)
And so, if we regard the scribes as mere plot devices here, they can no longer be us. They can be “tendencies” or “faults,” sure, but they are no longer strong enough or alive enough to truly confront us with ourselves. We may acknowledge the tendencies or faults they represent in our actions, but those “problems” never radically challenge our person, who we say we are. As mere foils, their blindness or callousness is not tied up with their identity, with their life. And so we do not count their words as ours, for how could we even share a language with such abstractions? (And if we do this to the scribes and the pharisees, is there not also the very real possibility that we do this to Jesus?)
It would seem then that we could look at the scribe’s reaction with two ends in mind: 1) to find ourselves in them, that is, in their words, and 2) to understand how their reaction explains and/or moves this act to its completion. And while I would love to skip ahead to the latter (mostly because I do not understand their reaction), I’m not sure an answer would be full - or human - enough without the former. Nor do I think Jesus’ response would cut deep enough if we leave him confronting mere plot devices and “tendencies” rather than human beings. So I will focus on the first end in this post, and close out this series with the latter in the next.
So why call blasphemy?
The initial and common response, that Jesus is blaspheming because he is forgiving sins, is complicated by the fact that he does not expressly identify himself in the act of forgiveness. At first read, it even seems difficult to call it an “act” of forgiveness at all, because Jesus does not say “I forgive you,” but rather, “your sins are forgiven.” Their is no subject acting, no one doing the forgiving, there is the object (“your sins”) and a description (“are forgiven”).
Now we could grant the scribes the conclusions reached in the previous post, that in his pronouncement, Jesus is claiming for himself that divine presence which makes manifest the reality of the Kingdom, and thus, the reality of forgiveness; that Jesus’ pronouncement of forgiveness is the claim to be the God in whose presence forgiveness is found. And while this claim to divinity, if false, would surely be grounds for an accusation of blasphemy, I do not think this is what is going on.
If we are trying to find our feet with the scribes, trying to understand how their words could be found in our mouths as well, then if we grant them this insight as grounds for their reaction we must grant ourselves that same insight and then move from there to see how or why we would respond with that same accusation of blasphemy. The admittedly vague and lofty theological insight would have to be the starting point.
This seems failed from the beginning, not only because I am not quite sure of the validity or of my own conclusion, but because coming to this text as Christians, we approach the text already confessing that Jesus’ claim to divinity is not blasphemy but truth. And anyways, it is from a common humanity and way of life that we hope to understand the scribe’s accusation, not from a common theological claim (though we do, obviously, share a theology with them that is grounds for our way of life).
While I said before that I thought to claim the scribe’s charge of blasphemy in reaction to Jesus’ act of forgiveness was problematic, I did not say it was wrong. And while I also said that I just needed to follow the story as it is told to understand it, I do not know how to make sense of the scribes' charge without the insights provided by Jesus’ response. I don’t think this move is all too problematic, seeing that we affirm that Jesus’ words help us to better know ourselves, since Jesus is closer to us than we are to ourselves. So why not allow Jesus’ response to the scribes to provide that same act of exhuming and illuminating the selves from which these words come?
The point of Jesus response that I want to focus on here, in order to understand the scribes' charge of blasphemy, is the phrase, “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...” (v.6a). In conjunction with this phrase, it may help to remind ourselves of the crowd’s reaction to the sermon on the mount: “the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes” (Mat. 7:28b-29).
So, what is Matthew doing here by twice bringing Jesus’ “authority” into conflict with the scribes? A little Greek might help. In both these passages from Matthew, the word for authority is “exousia,” which is made up of “ex” (out of) and “ousia” (essence or being). So exousia means doing something out of, or from, one’s being. The verb often gets translated “authority,” but to better see its meaning in English, it may help to write it, “author-ity.” Jesus authors his own words, his words and acts come from himself, his being, which is the self he has been given by, and which is of, the Father.
It is no coincidence then that both times Matthew speaks of Jesus’ author-ity, he brings this into contrast with the scribes, who were only to explain and expound on what had already been authored in scripture. In Matthew 7, it is not said that Jesus taught with a different authority, but simply with authority, which is not how the scribes taught. The point is not that Jesus’ presentation is so self-assured and dogmatic in contrast to the teaching of the scribes, if anything the case was likely the other way around, the probability of which should guard us against such a reading.
The point is that Jesus authors his own words (which, in his being God incarnate, are the same words of the God of the Hebrew scriptures). Jesus need not cite the holy books to declare the reality of forgiveness because he is the embodiment and fulfillment of that book as the Word of God. Jesus is both the Author and that which is eternally authored.
And the scribes, as through a mirror darkly, see some flickering of that claim in Jesus’ words. They catch some glimpse that Jesus’ pronouncement of forgiveness bespeaks a deeper authority. But in their (and our) assumption that we fully understand ourselves and go through life attempting to understand the mysterious other, they displace the problem.
It is my suspicion then, that the scribe’s accusation of blasphemy results from hearing Jesus’ words as the usurpation of the authority that they themselves have wrongly assumed. It is not that Jesus is expressly claiming authority, it is that he is implicitly re-claiming that authority.
The ear that hears Jesus’ pronouncement of forgiveness as “blasphemy” is the keen and distorting ear of those who, in the back of their minds, know they sit not rightly on the throne. Or it is the sensitive and frustrated ear of those who, sleepy and comfortable in their day dreams of respectability and prestige, wish to quiet the reality that speaks differently.
So the scribes call “blasphemy,” quietly and amongst themselves, because Jesus’ (implicit and rightful) claim to author-ity reminds them of their own. This is why the scribe’s have a particular insight into what is going on here, for they see their own claiming of authority in Jesus. And thus, they see their own guilt in Jesus. This is the displacement: they see their history playing itself out before them and the indictment which they cannot levy against themselves because it is too heavy, too heinous, is now directed outward, against the one who rightly claims the throne, against the true Author-ity.
Why do they make this accusation quietly, amongst themselves? Could it be otherwise? Could they really verbalize the claim that, in its voicing, might show them guilty as well? Maybe this is to their credit, for maybe it shows that at some level they know that a public accusation would only reveal themselves, that it would be to cry murder with blood on one’s own hands. Or maybe it is just cowardice. Maybe it is just easier to condemn the sinner in private without fear of correction. Jesus has only begun his ministry, and the scribes (and the Pharisees) have not yet built up the indignation and brazenness it takes to hide oneself (from the eyes of others, and even, and especially, from one’s own eyes).
Perhaps this is where we can find ourselves with the scribes. Perhaps here, in the need to protect the selves we have aggrandized, and in the need to displace the guilt of our usurpation, of claiming author-ity, we can understand their whispered accusation.
How we hear Jesus’ words, as forgiveness or as accusation, may depend on the kind of person we bring to Jesus: one broken and vulnerable, dependent on others, or one that claims the author-ity to write our own story, and even the stories of others. Perhaps it is always an admixture. Perhaps we need to be told we are "thinking evil" by Jesus in order to acknowledge the brokenness that allows Jesus' words of forgiveness to work their miracles, to be open to the authoring hand of God.
So then...how does the story end?
No comments:
Post a Comment