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A brief commentary on St. Matthew’s Passion

as we prepare to be apart for Holy Week and Easter this year.

We are reading the Gospel according to St. Matthew this year as we have every third year for forty years, which is how long we have used the Common Lectionary. But this year is not like any other year. The crisis we are living through compels us to find guidance through uncharted territory. Naturally, we look to Holy Scripture, and especially to that Gospel that is our companion for the year for help. Does St. Matthew speak to our situation today? I believe it does.

On Thursday, Matthew (26:17-75) tells us, Jesus shared a Passover meal with the twelve, sang a hymn with them, and led them out to the Mount of Olives. That night they were ambushed by one of their own, traumatized by Jesus’ arrest, and scattered.

This year we know something of the experience of being ambushed and traumatized. The global pandemic has found and scattered us. This year we have come to know something of spending the night in dreadful silence and isolation, wondering what will happen next to the people we love.

On Friday, in the space left by the marked absence of the twelve, Matthew (27:1-61) invites us to see people we may have overlooked as we made our way through the Gospel: people like Simon of Cyrene who was compelled to carry Jesus’ cross, the many women who followed Jesus from Galilee and who gathered around him at his dying, and a rich man with apparent political connections, Joseph of Arimethea, who arranged for his burial.

On Saturday, Matthew (27:62-66) narrates an action authorized and enforced by the government to seal and guard the tomb.

This year we miss seeing people we count on seeing, especially those pastors and deacons and congregations most familiar to us, our co-workers, the wait staff at a favorite restaurant. We may perhaps have come to see our families in a new way because of the change created by social distancing. We know what it is like to have official directives deny us access to places we find very important, not only our congregations, but also the places where we used to work. This year we can relate personally to these specific details found in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus as Matthew narrates it.

How deeply we long to be together this year on Easter Sunday, with the gathered community, in the presence of our Lord Jesus as he comes to us in the absolution of our sins, in the preaching of the Word, in the sharing of the peace, in the celebration of the Eucharist. And yet, if we press Matthew’s story further, we find that in his telling, the community of Jesus’ disciples did not have the opportunity to rejoice over his resurrection together with him on Sunday morning, just as we anticipate not being able to do so this year in our congregations.

Have you noticed this before in the text of St. Matthew? If not, read through chapter 28 closely with me now. I’ll just summarize here:

• 28:1 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb.

• 28:2-4 An angelic earthquake opens the tomb and renders the guards’ function ineffective.

• 28:5-7 The angel charges the women to tell the resurrection story.

• 28:8-10 Jesus greets the women on the way.

• 28:11-15 Religious leaders work to “spin the story”.

• 28:16-20 The disciples travel to Galilee where they see Jesus on the mountain to which he directed them.

Surprisingly, St. Matthew narrates an Easter Sunday without the assembly of disciples gathered in Jerusalem around Jesus in joy. Instead, Matthew’s Easter Sunday finds the eleven making their way to Galilee. This may be the most helpful word that this year’s Gospel provides to guide us through our crisis of isolation this year. For Matthew provides an alternative and yet completely Scriptural testimony to what Easter Sunday may mean for the Church this year.

How long does it take to get to Galilee? Today, by car, we could drive from Jerusalem to Nazareth in an hour and a half, or two with traffic. For Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee and the eleven, the journey would have taken a week or more to cover the 95 to 100 miles on foot.

I can imagine they packed and left as quickly as possible and fairly ran as they started the first leg of the journey. Were they not all eager to get out of Jerusalem as quickly as possible! And to see Jesus risen, as the women had testified! I can also imagine that even before that first day of travel had come to an end their anxious and joyful burst of energy had waned and they found themselves immensely tired. The next day’s walk began, I would suppose, with a more sustainable pace. Pressing forward, with anticipation. Certainly not dawdling, but neither outpacing their capacity to keep going, day after day.

Our Easter Sunday celebrations do not usually ponder the journey described only in passing in Matthew 28:16. But this year we will live that journey. We will continue forward, trying to sustain a steady pace while also holding eager hope alive in our hearts. We know that on this journey we will anticipate rather than realize the joy of gathering together in community around the presence of our risen Lord Jesus.

If this metaphor speaks to the journey we are on this year, what is our Galilee? What is our goal? Is it the end of our wait? That blessed day when the restrictions against gathering are lifted? The First Sunday Back?

Is Galilee sliding into my pew in my church or getting to stand in my pulpit again? Is Galilee seeing my friends in their customary places in church? Hearing my pastor lead worship for us? Or standing behind the altar so familiar to me, lifting the veil off the vested chalice? Is Galilee kneeling at the altar rail with my congregation, being close to others without fear, and having the Eucharistic bread placed into my hand and the Eucharistic cup lifted to my lips? Is Galilee finally making it back to church on Sunday morning?

It seemed not to be this for the eleven. On the mountain in Galilee, when they saw Jesus, they worshiped him, although with some measure of hesitancy or uncertainty.[1] Jesus came to them and charged them with going into all the world to make disciples, to baptize, to teach, and to remember. Matthew does not give us a picture of a community gathered in joy and safety in the presence of its Lord. Instead, Matthew relates how Jesus gave the eleven the Great Commission, making Galilee as much the beginning of a new journey for them as the blessing of rest at the end of the journey they had just completed.

To leave metaphor aside for a while and speak more directly, I am eagerly looking forward to being in church again, and I sincerely hope we can return to our joyful assemblies of grace by the end of April. This wait is hard. This fast from the Eucharist is very difficult. I am praying for our return to assembly to be soon.

But for now we are doing our best to remain patient and hopeful and creative through this time, not knowing how long it will take us to move past the coronavirus crisis and into something more normal again. Will it be weeks? Will it be months? We do not know.

In our uncertainty this year, the narrative that Matthew provides may be as deep a comfort as the more joyful narratives of Luke and John are in other years, for we do not expect this Easter to be gathered together in our congregations around the Eucharistic celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We expect still to be on the way, making forward progress the best we can, moving toward that place to which Jesus has directed us.

When we get there, we may find that Galilee is also for us what it was for the eleven, a new directive as much as a return home, a new pattern of life together that turns us outward into the world in mission as the first disciples were turned outward into the world by the Great Commission.

If this is so, if Galilee is not our return to normal but the beginning of a new chapter in the life of the Church, do we still press on toward it? We do. We most certainly do! For though we are still on the journey, even though our uncertainty regarding our present crisis remains, we have already received our Lord’s certain promise, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Jesus’ promise was true then, it is true now, and it will be true in the future to which he directs us.

I am glad to be

with you in Christ,

especially this year!

+ Kurt

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[1] I find this a helpful way to read the Greek word dðiðsðtðaðzðwð. This word is also used in Jesus question to Peter in Matthew 14:31, Why did you doubt? Peter s faith in stepping out of the boat and walking across theδισταζω. This word is also used in Jesus’ question to Peter in Matthew 14:31, “Why did you doubt?” Peter’s faith in stepping out of the boat and walking across the water to Jesus can hardly be called doubt, but something more like hesitancy or uncertainty or lack of resolve. Notice that in that story, too, the disciples worship Jesus, even though doubt was part of their collective experience.

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